This is a short and cinematic game where you dive into a pro swimmer's childhood memories. The vibe is magical realism. The gameplay consists of being a magic cursor which can select objects and move them around. You interact with things by doing mechanical motions in order to advance through a series of scenes.

It's like someone made a movie, but between each scene they added friction. I actually enjoyed this friction more than I was expecting to. Some of the ways you interact with stuff is pretty amusing and satisfying. There were a lot of of small moments of random joy in something I was expecting to just be tedious. It's interesting how much this toy-like interactivity actually adds to the experience.

I was having 2 experiences: watching a series of creatively presented scenes obsessed with non-verbal story telling, and going through the motions of interacting with things. The latter prevented me from getting so bored that I stopped appreciating the former. To be clear, this was a danger because the story was pretty boring and uninteresting.

I can respect the intent of the story, but the real strength of the game is the diverse presentation of it's scenes. Some of the ways the trivial interactivity is implemented is neat. I repeatedly noticed an interesting bit of cinematography or scene construction and exclaimed "that's clever".

I love all the ocean & water imagery. Water is pretty technically difficult, especially for a small team indie game like this. Massive respect for all the shader and technical art work that was done here.

I'll preface this by saying that if you're the child of a single parent, or a single parent yourself, this game might have far more impact on you than it did me.

That being said, I can't really recommend this... experience. I have very little bad to say about it, but almost nothing good to say about it either. It's a decent if not basic story about a girl reflecting on her relationship with her mother, but it's not exactly in-depth or anything. The story is broken into basic interactive segments, like clicking on lights to play an animation showing where the relationship is at in the given time. There's not really any merit to this being an interactive experience rather than just like, a short YouTube video. For example, at one point the girl and her mother take a train ride, and the gameplay for the segment is inserting the coins into the machine, hitting the ticket buttons, dragging the tickets over to stamp them, then putting them in the slot. That's it. There's no real benefit to that being interactive beyond the simple entertainment of being able to fling the coins around the screen.

The story is not particularly interesting either, as it kind of just is a very simple life story. I can even sum up the story in a single sentence if I tried. The biggest compliment I can give this game is that it's told very well visually even if there's little to no point in it being interactive. If you're interested in seeing this story, go watch a YouTube playthrough that's over in like 45 minutes, then play it yourself if you think the experience is worth giving your money towards. Otherwise, there's no point.