It is described as "a game about making this game", in which you play as the developer trying to make the game and running into all sorts of bizarre phenomena as you do so. To go any further invites the risk of spoilers, so interested readers may be better served by getting the game first and reading the page later. Though, while a typical Deconstruction Game is outright freeware, stikir is very cheap, but still has an asking price.
Compare to Adobe Flash game There Is No Game.
Tropes present in this game:
- Advancing Boss of Doom: In one section, you need to outrun a rain of missiles behind you.
- Inverted in a later section: an insta-kill wall appears on your left, but it's immobile. Instead, a bunch of obstacles start moving in from the right, with the goal of pushing you inside, and you must platform between them until you outlast the section.
- Affably Evil: At one point, the player character decides that to get water for a coffee machine, he needs to extract them from a clouds. Then, the only choice to fall down. When you fall, you are then asked if you can move to the right. Once you do, a cloud shows up to the left, thanks you, grows a toothy mouth, and swallows you. Then, though, said cloud just gets skewered in the next section, and the player character is freed, and gets his water.
- Arbitrary Gun Power: As soon as your character gets a gun, the first thing you, the creator, notice is that "it has a short range", as the shots pop out of existence while travelling about halfway through the screen at most.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: In one episode, you are near a campfire at night. Then, an enormous mosquito far larger than your actual character shows up.
- Black Bead Eyes: Five of the seven available main character models from Indecision have them. The other two have too few pixels in a face for there to be any eyes.
- Blatant Lies: After you finish playing a game of Pong with a basketball against a seemingly-female character while riding on a green elk, both you and the elk fall off the screen: however, you land alone, and discover there's only a giant fish there, which replies with "No." to "Did you see my friend?" Then, it burps, and ejects a basketball, but still denies eating your friend. At that point, you are given a gun once again, and have no choice but to shoot it.
- Book Ends: stikir begins with the player controlling a spaceship and shooting at the words "I want to make a game in 6 months." After you finally get your coffee ready, you get to sit down at the computer and make the game. Doing so immediately transports you back to the same spaceship and "I want to make a game in 6 months." Then, credits roll over the same platforming section as at the start of the game.
- Bottomless Magazines: The player's gun might be weak and horribly short-ranged, but at least it'll never run out of ammo.
- Much later on, you get a bazooka with equally infinite ammo. However, it's needed to bring down a dragon who is only hurt when the rockets hit it in the head.
- But Thou Must!: You are given a choice of seven character models, but only one can actually be selected, and the rest will offer you a funny line and send you back to the selection screen.
- Chandler's Law: Played with: after the attempt to make a racing game ends with the player character/creator going out of bounds, not much happens at first, as the player is just flying through the endless black void, following a quest arrow and occasionally seeing the creator's internal monologue. Then, suddenly the player character gets a gun.
- Collision Damage: The glitch squares in one section kill your character on contact.
- Crosshair Aware: A blinking red triangle with an exclamation mark on it appears whenever the giant arm stump is about to drop down from during the corresponding battle, making it relatively easy to dodge. Then, though, a missile launcher from an earlier section shows up on the right, with no such warning before it fires.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Getting hit by anything barely sets the player back at all.
- Deliberately Monochrome: As soon as you finish picking the correct player character (in color) the game turns to pure black and white. It soon gets various bits of spot color here and there, though.
- Eye Scream: The fish is defeated by shooting it in the eye, several times.
- Flash of Pain: Nearly everything successfully hit by your attacks, whatever they may be at that stage, briefly flashes white.
- Interactive Narrator: First, the player character is supposedly also the creator of the game, narrating the story of its development process. However, there's also a hand that shows up sometimes to drop certain items or make other changes needed to progress through the narrative.
- Said hand isn't so safe either; after the player character gets killed by a huge mosquito (a direct outcome of the hand dropping a bullseye target; player is forced to pick it up, at which point the mosquito turns them into a pincushion), they are dropped into the "digital afterlife" with the giant circle and fish (killed by the player) and green elk (eaten by the fish). The hand tries to do something again, but then the fish bites it off, leaving only a bone poking out of the stump. Then, that bone stump hits another character hard in the back of the head, seemingly killing him (though he gets better in the next section) and turns into the next boss.
- Invisible Block: At one point during the mid-game search for water, you encounter the giant purple head (alive after getting bashed in the back of the head by the arm stump, but with a bandage, and forced to crawl on the ground) and, with all the typical empathy, ask it if it can help you find water. After it replies with "No.", both said no and your request remain floating in mid-air, and act as solid platforms. Once you get up the second one, you then need to feel your way through the path of blocks that only become visible once you land on them.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: When, after a series of misadventures, your character starts working on the game for a second time, he decides he needs coffee, but there's no water in the coffee machine. Searching for it requires an adventure outside with a sword.
- New Work, Recycled Graphics: Invoked; the second thing the player sees (after "I want to release this game in 6 months") is "I will use the same character from my last game. Drawing is time consuming." Afterwards, the player is given a choice of one of the seven player models from Indecision. However, only one can actually be picked, and the rest will be knocked back.
- Gameplay Roulette: The game is mostly a platformer (but even then, it flips through all kinds of loosely connected sections with different rules involved), but regularly features other elements like a Racing Game, schmup levels, or a spin on Pong or Pipe Mania!!.
- GIS Syndrome: Invoked when selecting a player character sprite; clicking on the first, most detailed one, tells you it's a stock image, and thus won't work.
- One Hitpoint Wonder: Your character doesn't get an HP bar or the like, so if something hits him at a point where he can die, it'll instantly send him back to checkpoint. Luckily, these are very close to each other.
- Random Events Plot: The premise of supposedly making the very game you are now playing acts as the thinnest of threads tying all the insanity together.
- Shout-Out: Amongst other things; clicking on one of the character sprites that you cannot choose will produce a message "Still waiting for Fez 2".
- Spread Shot: The red circle begins firing an 8-directional spread of projectiles once you damage it enough.
- Stylistic Suck: Present throughout the work, but most apparent when the player character (and supposedly the game's creator) finds his computer after a short platforming section (which is modified by his own commands halfway through) and then briefly decides to make a Racing Game. The level morphs into a typical twisting auto race track, and the engine and tire sounds start playing...but the game is still using the same black-and-white sprite of a boy you just selected earlier, so it looks absolutely ridiculous. The player/creator is eventually forced to move out of bounds, and is then just flying through the black void like Superman, only following a quest arrow.
- Unexpected Shmup Level: The game is advertised as a more-or-less a platformer, yet the very first thing the player does is piloting a spaceship at shooting at the words "I want to release this game in 6 months" that keep on popping up.
- It gets another one later on, when the player character gets skewered on a fountain pen and reforged into one, and then flies through a Horizontal Scrolling Shooter level.
