Intermission: 'Coil'; level by level

Game here: Coil

Coil is advertised as "an experimental flash game with no instruction or clear direction", and players are told to "Please keep an open mind while playing".

It's an interesting sort of game. It has no sense of direction whatsoever and no instructions, which is a little annoying, but it's reasonably simple.

Level one starts you off as a sperm and you have to move the mouse left and right to make it swim. Your looking for an egg.

Second level is difficult, but essentially you need to make it so all the coloured blobs are in seperate clusters and then let them drift together.

In between each level, you get a small piece of the story, which is fascinating to read by itself.

I hope you brought a book though, because the load times are biblical. I've been writing this whole thing ever since completing level two and I've spent 5 minutes doing it.

There's nothing to say how you get past the story screen, or anything telling you to proceed.
Clicking rapidly doesn't work, although- wait, lemme try that.

The third level just loaded. Outstanding.

So, the thrid level your controling this thing. I presume it has an embryo inside it.
Again, no instruction. You move left to right by rapidly circling the little embryo with the mouse, making him sort of spin.

There are these little bastards that make your life hell by pushing you up. There are a small group of them every 'level' (your aim here is to reach the bottom) and they are hard to break out of.
Still, enventually you'll pass.

Level four has you using a thin tentacle thing to draw food into the very small thing your trying to keep alive, however the players motivations for doing so are unexplained.

You don't even need to play that level, just wait for a minute or so for it to do the work for you, becuase the food will sometimes spawn directly over where you need to bring it via tentacle.

Level five is wierd. No instruction means you have no bloody idea what your supposed to do. I figured out that I could make the various parts of the body or organs or whatever we're dealing with here do stuff by using the mouse, but that's all I could be certain of. Never fear though, because after a prolounged period of time it just moved on as if I had finished the level. I'm not sure what I did. Seriously.

Level six. Apparently I'm flying.
Flying up I suppose. The no instructions thing is starting to piss me off - there's not even a hint as to what we're doing. Level one and two were sort of explanitory, but the rest of them.

I finished level six by bumping into one of the other flying bulbs and letting it spray tiny arrows from itself so eventually it made them both change slightly.

I figured out that rapidly clicking the mouse does indeed make the damn thing move on when your stuck on the story screen. Not that they tell you that.

Level seven is similar to six, but at night. You make him float up by holding him steady with the mouse, a task which isn't exactly easy.
Especially since you don't know what your supposed to be doing or how.

Then that's it. It's all over. With another two story screens, the game ends and it catapults you to the starting screen.

What did I just play? No, seriously, what the hell did I just play? What was the point of it? If you just going to say "screw it" half-way through making the game and not give the player a proper ending, which he or she deserves because you made him or her sit through your stupid, badly designed game. I wouldn't be so harsh if you made the slightest attempt to give the player something, anything, but you didn't.

In summary, Coil is confusing and unsatisfying. The story doesn't make up for it, and niether does the art.
Worst of all, it ends too early. It's missing at least three levels, at most five or six.

Although, I'm forced to say you should play it just because it's so unique. As I may have said before, I've never seen a game like it, and probably never will again.
It's worth checking out, but only once.