THE GODDESS TOLD ME: Steal That Loaf of Bread

"I never asked you to steal. I asked you to pick me up."

You died waiting for a train. The goddess Kona — 粉, flour — reincarnated you as

a five-millimetre worker ant in somebody's kitchen, with one errand:

that loaf of bread is hers, and she wants all of it.

Not a slice. All of it. Crumb by crumb, through a nine-millimetre crack.

One unit is five millimetres. Yours.

The scale isn't decoration — the whole kitchen is built to your size. Four

metres by three is a plain. The table is a mountain a hundred and fifty times

your body. The groove between two floor tiles is a trench that fits you and

nothing bigger, which makes it the best hiding place in the world.

• A puddle doesn't get you wet, it traps you. At your size surfacetension is an elastic wall, and you have to struggle out of it.

• A tea towel hanging off the table edge is an eighty-centimetre climb.

• The recess under the kitchen units is a covered corridor: you can cross theentire room through it without anything above ever seeing you.

The Human isn't an enemy. He's the weather.

He isn't hunting you — he lives here. He has breakfast, does the washing up,

sits down at the table. You hear him coming before you see him: the floor

shakes, the camera trembles, the music changes. And what kills you isn't "being

spotted", it's the slipper or the thumb.

Cover is calculated for real, with a ray straight up: under the table, under the

cupboard, under the napkin or down in a grout line, you don't exist.

The cat is worse, because the cat has no plan.

From carrying to commanding

You tear off a crumb, climb down from the table, cross the kitchen and drop it at

the nest shrine. The pile really grows, crumb by crumb. Loaded, you move slower —

that's where the tension of the trip home lives.

One crumb per trip would be thirty hours. Three things make it a game:

• Capacity, from 2 crumbs per trip to 140.

• The pheromone trail. You mark the route from nest to loaf, and when thechain finally links the two, the trail catches and your sisters startwalking it on their own. You stop being the ant who carries and become the antwho decides where.

• Black Tide. Past a certain level you're not stealing the loaf any more.You're dismantling it.

And the kitchen ends up yours

Crumbs can be planted, too. Ramps to clear a step, bridges over the grout lines,

a tower to reach the table without depending on the towel. What you build stays

built — and the route you invent is the route four hundred sisters will follow.

The colony has names

• Your sisters aren't particles. They have names and numbers, and when one dieshauling, you know which one she was. The graveyard is a place you can walkto and read the headstones.

• The Queen dies halfway through. You crown one of three daughters, and the oneyou choose sets the colony's stats for the rest of the game.

• One day the Human buys a second loaf and hides it. Kona only wants the firstone. Telling them apart — and finding the right one, which moves every day — isthe job.

Twenty-three chapters that change the world

They don't fire on a timer or a percentage. They fire every so many crumbs

delivered, exactly when you drop the load and your eyes are on the counter.

And each one does something: the chapter that introduces the cat actually lets

the cat out. The bread-bin chapter actually covers the loaf. The purge brings

the Human down on his knees at the skirting board with a can of insecticide.

The progress bar at the top isn't counting to a round number. It's counting to

the next chapter. When it fills, something happens in the story.

Five characters speak. Eight hundred and thirty-two words in total, none of them

filler.

Also

• Photo mode. The world freezes, the interface disappears and the cameracomes off the leash. A game played at floor level, where a spoon is a monument,owes you a camera.

• Three complete languages: English, Spanish and Japanese, switchablemid-game with one key. The Japanese isn't translated from the Spanish — it's thestory's native language.

• Two to three hours for a first run.

The bread was the tutorial.

When the last crumb falls, the game takes the controls away from you.

And then the fridge opens.