While morbid curiosity made me part with £1.99 to see what an ASMR game would play and feel like, my curiosity comes from a happy place. I am an avid ASMR viewer, with a particular enjoyment for medical, massage, unintentional, esoteric and soft spoken videos being my usual jam. Random sounds or whispers don’t relax me as background noise for sleep but oddly satisfying videos do make me want to scoop things up and shove my face in the screen.
With that out the way, ASMR Slicing is more an interactive toy than a game in many ways. Each level is a kinetic sand thing that needs to be sliced up. The things range from rubber ducks to cakes to buildings and monuments to squeezing oozes out of tiny tubes. The variety is good although having the kinetic sand sparkle in glittery rainbow when you slice something does make things lose their definition quite quickly. Levels have a variety of goals such as cut the thing into five pieces or close to equal thirds. A few ask you to slice food to land on plates on a conveyor belt underneath. Some ask you to slice a certain amount of weight off the object. All of these come with dotted line guides so you can’t go too far wrong and lose often. The player is guard railed to get every opportunity for success in almost all the levels to the point where the game just pauses until you do the right thing.
The more egregious issue with ASMR Slicing is that all those goal orientated levels make up only half the game. The other half only asks you to slice objects at random. No goal. No purpose. It is a wildly stilted experience. I think this is because the game thinks its kinetic sand slicing sound effect is meant to trigger your tingles or dopamine but after a few chops you realise the same effects are used over and over. This is essentially an onion ring peel and slice graphic effect being used over and over again on different objects. There is undeniably some novelty in chopping up a rubber duck or a marble maze but its very low hanging fruit that gets old very fast.
I’d like to see more ASMR games, indeed a few new ones are on the way such as ASMR Food Experience. Maybe its more fun when ASMR is passive – we shall see over time as the genre is explored. ASMR Slicing is a curio that some may find a short burst of satisfaction from but unfortunately it wasn’t trigger that I personally was looking for.
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