The Confusion, Clarity, and Everyday Sadness of And Roger

By Garrett Martin | August 5, 2025 | 5:30pm

Video Games Features and roger

The Confusion, Clarity, and Everyday Sadness of And Roger

It’s hard to talk about And Roger without undermining what makes it worth talking about. From a distance this short, playable glimpse into a relationship seems like a fairly straightforward visual novel. Even when you play it it initially feels like a surreal riff on Florence, the great slice-of-life game from 2018 that used the touchscreen of a smart phone to tell its story in a unique, interactive way (and which is hard to play today after its lead designer was later revealed to be emotionally and verbally abusive to his studio’s staff). And Roger doesn’t tell a linear story, though, and gradually that disjointedness reveals what the game is truly about. When you catch on you might be devastated, especially if you’re already prone to mourn the passage of time and how old everybody and everything has gotten.

I’m not going to spoil that for you. Here’s some basic context, though. Your character meets a man named Roger. They fall in love, get married, grow old. You glide through their decades together by pushing and sliding buttons around the screen, simulating mundane everyday activities like brushing teeth or making dinner. It’s all depicted in an impressionistic style, flat figures drawn with smooth lines, and cool watercolors splashed over a one-color backdrop. It’s stark but warm, it’s vague but sharp, it contrasts and contradicts and shifts and changes throughout.

Also changing: the time—or at least your perception of it. You see flashes of your character’s childhood, the beginning of her romance with Roger, the two still together decades later. These moments bleed into one another, unsteadily rewinding and fast forwarding through your character’s life. She’ll be young and talking to her dad (the only other character in the story), and then suddenly it’s years later and Roger is now there. The number of ways you can push, pull, or prod at those white on-screen buttons is almost staggering—especially when your perception of them and time itself is constantly changing, and when they refuse to behave the way you expect them to.

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And Roger

The result is confusion. Discombobulation. And Roger intentionally fosters a distinct lack of clarity. Even when it’s clear what it’s saying, the game never comes out and actually says it. It’s slippery and elusive and that makes its emotional impact all the more powerful; although it can be cloying and manipulative at specific moments, echoing the shorthand signifiers of blossoming romance, And Roger tries to retain a degree of subtlety in delivering its primary message. Some things are hard to talk about, maybe shouldn’t be talked about outside of very specific situations, the game seems to realize.

I don’t have much personal experience with what And Roger is ultimately about. My parents are not young, though. They’ve both faced serious health crises in the last year. I see them as often as I can and it’s not nearly enough and I feel guilty about that every single day. Meanwhile I’m somehow old myself now, and I guess my wife is too if you’re only looking at the numbers (seriously, she somehow looks 15 years younger than she is). We’ve been together for a couple of decades and I don’t see that changing at any point—just the two of us, no children, but occasionally some animals who sadly never stick around long enough. What will our relationship be like when we’re my parents’ age? What is their relationship like when I’m not around? How do they take care of each other—how will we take care of each other? It’s impossible to play And Roger and not dwell on your personal relationships like this. It’s basically laser-focused on those things that make me most emotional today, and that no doubt are a constant source of sadness and worry for everybody—the sorrow of time and ever-increasing weight of memory and how, despite the pain they cause, one of the the worst things that can happen to us is the inevitable moment when either runs out.

And Roger is not technically the name of the game. There’s a blank before the “and.” Most outlets like this one don’t include the blank because it’s confusing and distracting. And Roger is all about confusion and distraction. And yet, despite that, its emotional power remains as clear, direct, and unequivocal as any game I’ve ever played before. Maybe that’ll be true for you, too.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.