The Word Is Not The Thing: A Book About The Game

Imagine a video game where you go into the deep recesses of your mind. This is a book about that game.

The Word Is Not The Thing is a video game where you go after the feeling behind the word fear. Set in a minimalistic black and white world, you destroy words and uncover feelings deep inside you. 

You've lost your child and your wife has grown distant. She's lost in pain. People only talk about themselves. They're lost in their own escapes from pain. Over 3 days, the sky grows darker, the rain intensifies, and the words you come across increase in emotional intensity. 

After having fun destroying words, you come up against the final boss, which is a web of words in which you're caught trying to escape from the same pain as everyone else. In uncovering the final word, you'll either escape with another word, or if something clicked inside your head while playing the game, you'll understand that the word is never the thing.

This book contains over 350 screenshots taken from the game and also includes the development blog, initial sketches and other various insights that came up during development. 

There are still a lot of words and interactions that do not make it into this book. For that, I hope you have the chance to play the actual game. 

Check out the game at http://mavenmob.com/theword

Available on Itch.io, Steam, iOS, Android.

The paperback version is also available through Amazon. You can get it here: http://amzn.to/thewordisnotthething