The end of the year rules for one reason: You get a hall pass to catch up on terrific games you missed throughout the year. I recently played through a game that was so powerful, the credits left me stunned at having missed its release earlier this year, and I’m not alone in letting it pass me by. Though it gained some media attention, not enough critics reviewed the game for it to currently clock a score on Metacritic. (The platform requires four scored reviews before aggregating a score.) And it has fewer than 750 Steam reviews. (Worth noting: 95% of them are positive.)
It also costs five bucks and can be finished in a single sitting.
And again: unlike anything else released this year.
And Roger, released July 23 for Nintendo Switch and Windows PC, is billed as a visual novel, but is so much more. You play as a young girl who wakes up confused, unclear of what time it is, uncertain if she finished her homework, only sure that she needs to get ready for the school day. The gameplay, such as it is, involves clicking buttons in the right order or adjusting sliders to the correct level to complete various daily tasks.
You try to brush your teeth. There are four buttons on the screen. You use them to pick up toothpaste, a toothbrush, and apply the former to the latter. You hit them in the wrong order. Try again. Try to only pick up one toothbrush this time.
You go downstairs to wake up your dad. You recognize him for a moment — but only for a moment. All of a sudden, he’s wearing a hat. Dad never wears a hat! His face blurs and disappears off the screen, and the situation becomes dire: You are alone with a strange man.
You try to call someone. 911. That makes the most sense. But the buttons don’t neatly match the buttons on the phone. By the time you call the right number, the strange man walks over and hangs up the call.
If you’d like to just roll with the recommendation, stop reading now. Personally? I’m of the mind the marketing summary doesn’t do And Roger justice, revealing its “twist” has little bearing on the narrative’s full impact, and obfuscating it only hinders what makes the game so special.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for And Roger follow.]
And Roger quickly makes it apparent that you’re playing as an elderly woman with dementia, a cognitive condition that causes memory loss and is often a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. The man in the house isn’t a “strange man”; he’s clearly someone meaningful in this woman’s life who she no longer recognizes.
He’s struggling to take care of her, and to maintain his patience — with himself, with the woman he’s caring for, with the situation the two of them have been thrust into. Throughout And Roger, you see the various little ways he cares and copes. He writes a recipe down in large, simple text. He picks up a mess in the restroom. He collapses on the sofa, exhausted. He prays. He cries. His presence is a stark reminder that dementia’s impact is rarely limited to just the patient.
Through its puzzles, And Roger shows the challenges of living with dementia. The buttons you’re meant to press jostle around the screen, making it difficult to remember which ones to hit in which order. Sliders start operating on invisible lines, meaning there’s literally no clear way to solve them. These things should be simple. They’re frustratingly difficult.
In this, And Roger is brilliantly subversive. By turning regular gaming actions into flummoxing challenges, the game mirrors, to some degree, what it could be like to live with dementia. Along the way, as you continue to solve puzzles, you start to unravel the connection between the woman and the man. You start to get to know the woman as well — her charms and quirks. She’s a terrific cook, really makes a mean stew. She loves baked goods — ohhhh, especially a good baguette! Public speaking makes her nervous. Marigold might be her favorite color, but she’s partial to periwinkle and fuschia too.
Then as soon as she remembers, she forgets.
Memory loss is regularly deployed in games, but usually as a trope. You wake up dazed and confused at the start of a role-playing game or first-person shooter, suffering from a case of amnesia that conveniently makes you forget where and who you are. Thus enters an excuse for characters to pester you with exposition — and for you to slowly regain your abilities as you level up. Magically, once you fully fill out your skill tree or acquire the strongest weapon, you also just so happen to get your memories back. And then you use them to save the day. Congrats! You have badass-ed your way out of amnesia.
Of course, reality is not so kind, as And Roger explores. Dementia affects more than 50 million people a year, according to figures from the nonprofit Alzheimer’s Disease International — and that’s the conservative estimate. There is no cure. Once diagnosed, treatment plans focus on symptom management and regulation. But even those aren’t so simple. Dementia patients tend to suffer from a lengthy string of associated health complications, ranging from hypertension and heart disease to loss of appetite, which sounds innocuous until you hear about the extreme cases where some patients will stop eating altogether.
Our understanding of the disease is limited by our education about it. Medical researchers have officially been studying it for more than a century, but it’s clear there’s so much more to discover; just last year, doctors at the University of Kentucky began the first clinical trial for a form of dementia that’s only recently entered the medical lexicon. No matter how you slice it, continued research is contingent on education. So for those in favor of a cure, no amount of dementia messaging is too much dementia messaging — even if that messaging comes through a twee (complimentary) video game.
Every year or two, a little game comes along and punches way above its weight by Trojan Horsing a powerful message through an artfully designed package. In 2018, Gris offered a four-hour meditation on the struggles of escaping a colorless, depressive fog, laying bare the demons of chronic depression. 2021’s Unpacking did the same for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and how abusive relationships can exacerbate conditions that could otherwise be manageable with proper care. Gone Home tackled PTSD in 2013; That Dragon, Cancer did the same for cancer in 2016. Years later, when considering which games made the biggest impact in a given year, it’s not the tentpoles or the AAAs. It’s the small games with tons of heart.
And Roger is that game for 2025. It’s unforgettable.
And Roger is out now on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.