To be a copy of a copy.

I'd like to apologize to Mothered, a game that I discounted as being shovelware garbage due solely to me confusing it as an entry in the Remothered series. Mothered has nothing to do with Remothered. They are very distinct games, namely in the fact that Mothered is good and Remothered sucks ass. I'm going to stop typing out these titles now before they lose all meaning. This work, contrary to what I was mistaking it as being a part of, is a well-written and stylish look at parental neglect and the definition of the self. While it certainly stumbles a bit as a game — a lot of tension-free wandering around and clicking everything to see what will advance the plot in the latter half — what is here works, and works well.

I suppose the only way to pull apart this story is by sharing some personal anecdotes. Growing up, I never felt particularly wanted by my parents. This is, broadly speaking, because I wasn't; they weren't ready for the responsibility of taking care of themselves, let alone a child, and they wound up retreating into some bad habits to cope with the loss of the little freedom they had. My mother parentified me, making it my sole responsibility to act as her therapist, saddling me with the responsibility of deciding what she should do about her problems at an age where I didn't have a clue about the world outside of elementary school; my father drank, and smoked, and snorted what he could find, and then he would turn a release valve and let off all of his built-up rage with yelling, and beatings, and by breaking whatever was in his path. I learned quickly that the best thing to be in this situation was useful, and the next best thing after that was to be quiet. Liana, the player character of Mothered, seems to have internalized this same lesson. Her mother remarks with genuine horror at one moment near the finale that Liana won't stop coming after them unless she has an objective. Liana needs busywork. Liana needs to be useful. Liana needs something to keep her quiet. I begin to notice some similarities.

It’s clear from the outset that something is very wrong, though what exactly that something is takes a while before you’re able to start deciphering it. There’s a grand linchpin of the plot that’s hinted to throughout the runtime of the game — error logs being printed to a console, strange commands that come in a voice that doesn’t belong to any character, ambiguity in places where there shouldn’t be any — but I ultimately don’t feel as though the ultimate revelation is the important bit. What Liana is matters less than what Liana isn’t, which is loved. The game, of course, agrees with me in this; the true ending of the game comes to the same conclusion where all is (mostly) made well. Where a sour taste is left in my mouth is in the sense that it’s up to Liana to become deserving of love rather than have it given to her unconditionally, based in no small part due to her family refusing to accept what she is. Then again, nobody ever said horror was supposed to be fair. Sometimes the scariest thing is not to be believed. I still have nightmares rooted in the fear of people not believing me, of thinking that I’m hysterical, all while some lurching evil grows closer with every passing moment.

That would suggest that this game is really only scary in a narrative sense, which would be incorrect. While I like to fashion myself as a big tough man who doesn't scare easily, there are a select few horror games that tend to make me curl up. This is one of those. While the daytime sections are very open, with these beautiful rays of orange light glittering though the autumn leaves, the same cannot be said for when it gets dark. Everything gets more wrong the more the sun sets. Your brother, tucked away so deep in his bedroom that you can’t ever see him, will start to tell you how your mother has been lying to you. Your mother will stand stark still at the far end of a pitch-black hallway, waiting for you in complete silence. You’ll try to sleep and get a warning that you can’t sleep with someone else in the room, and it’s not until you go to turn on the light that you find your mother shrouded in darkness, almost as though she was hoping you wouldn’t notice her there. Sometimes mother's animations are smooth, other times they're jittery, other times they don't happen at all. There are places that you're forbidden from going under threat (at least, implied threat) of death. Your father lies about talking on the phone with you to his co-workers, pretending that you're his wife rather than his daughter. This house is not a home. More importantly, it isn't your home.

The greatest twist underlying all of this is, in actuality, the fact that this all ties into a series of games that Enigma Studio are putting out. It's not just an anthology, either; all of these titles are connected and part of a greater ARG that links all of them together, with info being locked behind entirely different games and requiring certain registry files to access a secret portion of Haunted PS1's Demo Disk: Spectral Mall. I don't especially care about any of this, and the good news is that it doesn't detract from the base game of Mothered in the slightest. The pseudo-sequel, Mothered: Home, does require heavy investment in the broader idea of the Enigma Machine universe, so I wouldn't recommend getting into it unless you're one of either desperate for more of this or curious to dig your fingers into an ARG. It's ignorable, though, and ignoring it is what I'm going to continue doing.

My gripes are minimal. I do think that spots like the barn and the end of the road tend to be placed a bit too far away relative to how fast your character's maximum run speed is. The slow character speed works great for building up tension when you're inside the house, but when you're in a big, open field during the daytime and there's nothing going on, it serves only as a pace killer. People have complained about the apple collecting section enough for me to know there isn't much juice left in the discussion, but it does take too long and the apples are too hard to spot. None of this is terrible, but in a game that's so tightly paced everywhere else, these little missteps stick out all the more obviously.

Aside from that, this is a strong showing. I'm not certain if I'll dig too much deeper into the creator's related games — I don't really think that what's being advertised in those is going to be what I came to this for — but I'm very glad to have played this all the same. As a standalone project, this is impressive. It's in the Palestinian Relief Bundle if you've already bought that, and it'll be going for about another week from the date of posting if you haven't.

Be with mother.

I was not ready at all for this game, and I'm glad to see a lot of people on here had a similar experience.

Looking at the screenshots it seemed fairly interesting, and it had a cool style. But what I ended up getting was so, so much more substantive and deeper. It honestly floored me.

To start, this is an example of a game with an obvious low budget that actually takes full advantage of it. The cheap and low quality back grounds, the stiff animations, it actually all contributed to creating a really unsettling location and backdrop. I was legit nervous and uncomfortable the entire experience. And mind you, this was all done with zero jumpscares.

The story is just so tragic but also twisted. I didn't expect it to go in the direction it did, but it was welcome and added to the experience.

This is a real hidden gem everyone should give a chance.

YOU CANNOT SLEEP WHILE SOMEONE IS IN YOUR ROOM.