Welcome to Elk Critic Reviews

This is a series of stories that creates a game about telling stories, and indeed portrays the act of being a game about telling stories. Its ending is something I’ve never seen any game do before, and yet feels so perfectly in keeping with everything that comes before it. This is a fantastic achievement.

Welcome to Elk feels like a play turned into a video game. A shocking, but also heartwarming adventure, we recommend to everyone who’s interested in a story-based experience.

Welcome to Elk is an important game in that it makes the unimportant worthy of remembering, giving them the same gravitas any celebrity automatically receives. We tell the bad stories because we’re left holding baggage of an unknown weight, but we need to tell the good stories as well — to shine a light against the otherwise dark moments that seemingly act as traumatic bookmarks in life.

The game’s biggest draw is the fact that it is based on true events. The developers changed the names of some places and people but all the stories you get to experience – some funny, some sad, others dramatic, or scary – really happened to someone.

I think Welcome to Elk is one of those games where the less you know about it going in, the better. That might seem an odd thing to write after a few hundred words trying to describe it, but it’s also so unique and unusual that whatever expectations you might have, they’re almost certainly not going to prepare you for what’s inside. And in a game so fundamentally about stories—not just telling stories that would otherwise risk being forgotten, but exploring the way stories are told and the lives they take on in the process—that willingness to reject expectations goes a long way.

Quotation forthcoming.

Short on challenge but full of moments that can make you laugh or cry, Welcome to Elk is an intense and memorable narrative experience about a group of people dealing with the hardships of life.

A fascinating experiment in narrative techniques, even if there's some tonal whiplash along the way.