Video Game Menu: The Game turns fiddling with settings into the whole point
Most games treat their options screens as a necessary chore before the real experience begins. Video Game Menu: The Game flips that idea on its head by making the menu itself the entire game, doing away with any traditional mechanics, levels or challenges altogether.
The game’s Steam page leans fully into the joke, asking players: “Are you tired of video games constantly pestering you with pointless things like challenges, levels or gameplay? Have you ever dreamed about just pleasantly clicking through menu after menu? Then seek no further. You have come to the right place. In Video Game Menu: The Game, none of these distractions will ever bother you again.”
True to that promise, the actual gameplay involves navigating a series of menu screens and pressing buttons simply to see what effect they have. Alongside familiar settings such as graphics quality, v-sync, FPS targets and brightness, there are stranger options too, including screen rotation controls, a slider for how “bloated” the game feels, and a switch that appears to simulate taking off a pair of glasses by blurring the display.
Things escalate further from there. A “cursorphobic buttons” option makes on-screen buttons flee from the player’s cursor, deliberately making them harder to click. An airplane mode setting overlays an image of a cockpit across the whole screen, while another option causes text and buttons to shrink the moment the cursor gets near them.
Beneath the layers of menus, there appear to be small minigames hidden within the experience, seemingly functioning as a kind of testing ground for whatever chaotic combination of settings the player has assembled. The overall effect reads as a gentle parody of how convoluted, and occasionally pointless, video game options screens can become.
According to the coverage, this is very much a novelty title rather than something designed to occupy players for hours at a time, but it is being pitched as a quick, amusing diversion for anyone after a lighter gaming experience.
Video Game Menu: The Game is available now on Steam.