KIDS simply describes itself as "a game of crowds" on its Steam page but it's being sneaky there because KIDS isn't a game at all. It's a weird non-game, and I'm refusing to call it an art piece or an experience either, that seems to be designed purely to inflict boredom on whoevers playing it. The Itch page is a little more honest with its content referring to it as an "interactive animation" which is certainly more accurate. It's the kind of thing that you might see playing in a dusty corner of an unpopular art exhibition where people might saunter by, click the mouse on the kiosk once or twice, go "what the fuck is this crap?" and then move on.
The program involves a bunch of humanoid figures running around, falling into holes and being pushed either up or down the screen by a sphincter along with a few more things but those are the big ones. The "game" part of this whole thing is that you have to either click or run your mouse along the humanoid figures in order to make the little animations happen. It runs through these scenes are few times and then it ends. There's nothing really to get about this title, you just watch the little animation play out for 30 minutes and then leave unsatisfied and wondering why you bothered.
I'm not completely against the idea of weird art games with very little "game" in them like this one. An example of one I think is good is The Stanley Parable which isn't much of a game by itself but its still making a funny point about games thats interesting to play through. I know a lot of people use the term "walking simulator" as a derogatory genre tag for interactive fiction with an almost 100% focus on story and visuals but I don't vibe with the idea of that being a bad thing on base principles. Kids on the other hand is the worst of the worst in this genre because its visuals are dogwater and its not absolutely nothing to say about anything.
My first thought when playing was that it was trying to make some kind of point about the harms of blindly following the status quo but as the animation went on and it proceeded to repeat itself numerous times that interpretation melted away and instead I was left with "oh its just low rate shit made by an asshole tricking idiots out of 3.39 GPB" The kind of game that a pseudo intellectual will tell you is some kind of profound experience but will then struggle to tell you anything about it when pressed.
If you have played KIDS and you somehow got something out of it other than boredom and frustration I would love to hear from you either in a comment on in my stream chat or something. I'm fully convinced that there is no way to enjoy this thing unless you're about 15 years old and you think vague blobs that represent children falling into a black hole is saying something valuable about society or something. I hate this thing, I want my time back and I want my nearly 0 dollars for buying it as part of a huge bundle back. My knowledge of its existance makes my standard of living noticably worse
