As long as I live, I will never stop being intrigued by games that are willing to get down in the dirt to make their story known. This directive comes in two flavors: storytelling and story medium. Some, like Actual Sunlight, will tear at the fabric of your being to express something deeply sad but also uniquely human. Others, like Art Sqool, will make an incredible mess of visuals and perspectives to warp what you consider a video game to be. In the case of Gas Station Story, an indie joint from new developer Enzi, it’s a little of column A and B as you dive into a dystopian tale of technology gone wrong, the loneliness of existence and the hell that is the corporate machine. The fact that it’s made for the Game Boy Color is the delicious whipped topping that gets my full attention.

Just wait till you hear about the mopping minigame!

The future is a spectacular but grim spectacle, after centuries of progress by both humanity and other races that have mastered space travel. Galaxies and star systems are now connected by convenient transportation, and beings both organic and artificial commingle in all strata of life. There is dissent and corruption, as well as an oppressive regime that is being loudly protested by violent and nonviolent means alike. All of this is a backdrop to you, the protagonist, who runs a gas station somewhere out on a desert planet in a very lonely neck of the universe. Your life is simple: get up, work, go back home. But an update to your store’s POS suddenly creates something interesting, and the last thing any of us want when the world is on fire is for anything to become “interesting.”

Gas Station Story is an oddball blend of activities. A majority of the game will be spent with simulation activities that involve interacting with customers and ringing them out for sundries and gas. You may or may not have a chance to ask them additional questions to learn more about their world and their lives, and, like all workers in customer service, you may regret how you engage with them. Additionally, you will get dropped into some mini games that seem to come from nowhere, ranging from those directly connected with your gas station job to those that arise from the update and the consequences of installing new software before checking with your boss/IT guy.

The sign of a truly awful POS is that you can’t even tell this has been corrupted by a virus.

As a game primarily made for the Game Boy Color, there are some caveats to Gas Station Story. While the Steam release will have some QOL options that the Game Boy does not, you get the full “experience” from the handheld version. This means some mild frustration when operating the Q Boy (name of the POS), both intentional and unintentional. The update does make the interface go haywire, and that’s all well and good. But you also need to move a mouse cursor around to select goods or increase gas amounts, and that can be tedious, particularly when purchases begin to get exorbitantly expensive. This is only further challenged when there are interruptions between engagement and actual sale, so you end up needing to sheepishly keep asking the customer how much they wanted and where.

In that same vein, some of the mini games have moments of drag due to the limitations of the hardware. A couple of times, you’ll end up doing an adventure that harkens back to pre-Game Boy era design (think Atari 5200) and the pixels can cause some confusion about where exactly you can interact. For example, you’ll be asked to push boxes onto switches more than once, and the precision of where you are, the box is and the walls are isn’t always crystal clear, resulting in getting stuck and needing to jog back to a reset switch to start again. These are minor complaints, but they do exist and players should be aware before diving into something that is, on purpose, a bit more archaic and esoteric in execution.

This is just the first one. That character will pick up about eight beers.

But those hurdles do nothing to interrupt the enjoyment that I had with Gas Station Story. The story itself is so compelling and engrossing in spite of a very mundane ideology. The setup and the involvement your character has – trying to work a regular job while the world goes to hell around them – is fantastic and so evocative of Clerks. You learn a lot about the mindset of the character and their connection with Sam, the only other employee, as well as about the protagonist’s previous works and their life in general. You see microcosm relationships with regulars bloom through routine, and get to white knuckle through a day of miscreants, blowhards and unsettling maniacs who come in for cigarettes, soda and to just freak the absolute shit out of you. 

Even without context, this is a bizarre moment.

The gameplay is only further tempered by the nature of the art direction. Enzi has made the conscious decision to combine recognizable Game Boy sprites with actual portraits taken with the Game Boy Camera, one of the most underrated peripherals for a video game ever. By using the Game Boy Camera to photograph and digitize the expressions and costuming of the denizens of this world, Enzi has, effectively, crafted an immersive motif of grit and fragmentation that matches so much of what’s happening in the game itself. The corruption of the Q Boy is mirrored in the rough edges around the living beings inhabiting the gas station. The bleak color palette captures the stark contrast of the desert world with the sprawling metropolis that sits just at the edge of existence.

Even the moments outside of the camera photos are beautifully crafted, and the soundscape helps to aid that as well. Though the Game Boy’s audio chip isn’t as robust as other handhelds (particularly not the subsequent synthesization from the Advance), it has a distinct audio fidelity that evokes some excellent emotion and sensation when combined with the right visuals. The opening track has so much creeping dread when combined with the brief but caustic history lesson, and the almost mournful track that accompanies the smoke breaks at the gas station pull me into a melancholy place. While the usual soundtrack of the gas station tends to be more chipper and poppy, the overall chiptune quality makes this an aural experience as well as a visual one.

Bonus points for capturing the real feeling of being in a Cumberland Farms at 2 AM.

Gas Station Story is a one of a kind tale that can only be told the way it’s been crafted: for the Game Boy, with the Game Boy Camera, in a world that’s terrifying and fantastical. You are not alone in this future, but you are also not the hero, the villain or the magical foil. You are a worker, experiencing your own little slice of hell, and trying to get to the next day in spite of everything. You have dreams, ambitions, and hopes, and none of them may come true, but they are yours, irrevocably. Perhaps you’ll find meaning and reasons to escape, or perhaps you’ll go home too tired to watch the TV show you recorded from the previous night. It’s the right level of existentialism combined with absurdist characters, raw confessions and some truly ridiculous mini games. It is, in short, a brilliant work of art.

If you’re at all interested in trying Gas Station Story for yourself, the Kickstarter page is, offering both Game Boy compiled copies as well as Steam keys (with the Steam version being a bit more robust in terms of interactions and mouse control). The campaign may be extended for a bit longer, but you should still hurry: you don’t want to miss this game anymore than you want to miss the last rocket off the damn planet.

Gas Station Story is available June 23rd on PC and Game Boy Color via rom.

Reviewed on Powkiddy V90, GB 300 and Game Boy.

A copy of Gas Station Story was provided by the publisher.