Day 11: Today's Pick — An Indie Video Game About an Empty Parking Lot

Lot 16 is a $7 game on Steam by a developer named Chee, who I have to assume sleeps a lot, because the game feels like the work of someone who knows what rest is.

You walk around an empty parking lot at dusk. You can pick up small objects (a receipt, a key, a bottle cap), examine them, and put them back down. You can sit on a curb and watch the streetlights come on. The whole game is about 90 minutes long. There are no enemies. There are no quests. There is no inventory. There is just a parking lot, a soundtrack, and you.

I want to be clear that this game made me cry, but not for any reason I can adequately explain.

What you actually do

• Walk around. The lot is small — maybe 30 spaces, plus a curb, plus a small grass strip with a chain-link fence.
• Pick up things. You'll find about 40 small items over the course of the game. Each has a single sentence of text.
• Listen. The wind, the distant traffic, the buzz of a sodium lamp warming up.
• Sit. There's a button to sit, and when you press it, your character sits down and the camera shifts to a slow ambient pan.

That's it. That's the game.

What it isn't

It isn't a horror game. (I know what you're thinking — "empty parking lot at dusk" sounds like the setup for a horror game, and it isn't.) It isn't a puzzle game. It isn't a walking simulator with hidden lore. It isn't trying to be anything except what it is.

What it is

A meditation. A small considered place where someone built a thing by hand and left room for you to be in it.

The soundtrack

Three tracks, all by Chee. Ambient piano with field recordings. The first track is the one that plays while you're walking. The second plays when you sit. The third plays when the streetlights come on for the first time. The third one is the one that broke me.

Performance

PC native, also great on Steam Deck (battery-friendly, runs cool). Mac via Crossover works fine. No mobile port and the developer has said there won't be one.

The case for a tiny game

I think a lot about games as products. They have run lengths. They have hooks. They have hours-of-content metrics and engagement curves. Almost every game review you read is implicitly answering the question, "is this worth your time and money?"

This game cost me $7 and 90 minutes. I am going to spend more than that on coffee tomorrow. The argument for it is that it is good in a way that is rare and worth experiencing — like a short film, or a one-page essay, or a carefully chosen song.

Buy it. Play it once. Don't replay it.

Tomorrow: a tea I could not stop drinking from a small farm in Sri Lanka.