Ennuigi

Ennuigi
Luigi ruminating in the game.
Publisher(s)	Lexaloffle Games
Designer(s)	Josh Millard
Release	2015
Genre(s)	Art game Browser game Fangame
Mode(s)	Single player

Ennuigi (or Ennuigi 1.0) is an art,browser and fangame created using Pico-8. that combines Super Mario Bros. and boredom. Ennuigi is a portmanteau of the French word "" and the name of Mario's fraternal twin brother Luigi. The game was designed by Josh Millard.

"This is a shot at a collection of ideas I had a few years ago, about looking critically at the universe of Super Mario Bros. in light of the total lack of explicit narrative in the original game in particular. Who are these strange men? What motivates them? By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place? What do they feel about where they are and what they’re doing?

And so, this is one lens through which to look at all that, with Luigi, the second brother, the also-ran, as a complicit onlooker, wandering now through some fractured, rotting liminal place in this strange world, reflecting on it all in scattered fragments."

The story of Ennuigi centers on Luigi's inability to come to terms with the lack of narrative in the original game. In a Reddit thread, Millard commented "I [...] think it's a pretty weird implied narrative once you step back and look at it, and enjoyed funneling some thoughts about all that into a recharacterization of Luigi as a guy who's as legitimately confused and distressed by his strange life as you'd expect a person to be once removed from the bubble of cartoony context of the franchise."

"Left" and "right" control "walk around," while "up" for "ruminate" and "down" for "smoke." The player cannot "jump" as, according to the game, "Jumping is not consistent with ennui!"Ennuigi is procedurally generated. It is available to play on the Pico-8 Forums.

Reviewers described Luigi's character in Ennuigi as "chain smoking," "depressed," "laconic," "perpetually miserable," and "an angsty teenager who just finished writing a book report about Albert Camus' The Stranger." A reviewer said "it’s like Luigi read too much Derrida" while another adds "Sartre and Nietzsche too to that assessment."IndieGames.com's Joel Couture called Luigi "a man commenting on a lifetime of strange things and events beyond his control."