Defect

Sparse linear pixel art sidescroller, you walk to the right and encounter a handful of ambiguous environmental forms and characters who say elliptical things about lofty topics like family relations or war or death. General atmosphere of futility (the soldier who has forgotten which side he is fighting for). Reminds me of Passage, not necessarily favorably but not bad either.

Didn't get it at all on first playthrough, but later saw it was based on a particular fragment from H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book: "Here we have fetter'd and manacled Time, who wou'd otherwise slay the Gods." Actually, the text I liked from the previous game was from the same source, which I didn't realize earlier.

With that quote in mind I guess the obvious interpretation is that the player character is Time, and so walking to the right is more-or-less the same mechanic/metaphor from Passage. A lot of the dialogue becomes straightforwardly sensible in this interpretation though there's a few lines that escape easy explanation (what's the stuff about his mother at the beginning?) Not to say that a simple metaphorical substitution is necessary or good, but without that the thing as a whole feels pretty loose and disconnected, just scattered deep-sounding platitudes. Which is not too far removed from some of the later increpare games that I prefer, maybe just that those tend to be denser, more filled out with connective tissue visually and interactively; there's less pressure on the text to play a structural role and those cryptic lines can be more casually textural.

There's a marginally interesting thing that happens if you turn around and start going left, which sort of threatens the simplistic interpretation above (why even have the ability to move left if the passage of time is supposed to be unstoppable), but feels incidental and doesn't really change my understanding of the game overall.

I like the pixel color washes in the background and a couple of the mysterious forms you pass by are great too.