Intrusive thoughts are an everyday reality for humans as a whole. We constantly criticize ourselves, tell ourselves awful things about everything we are, and overall just give ourselves an awful time. It's a socially induced behavior to be so self-critical, at least for me - after all, I wouldn't ever want to be prideful. That would be, to my brain, the worst thing I ever could be.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk seems to understand this on its surface. Throughout the game, you have the option to insult the main character and tell her horrible things about her that aren't true as a form of self-hatred. Reminding her of the strange way she walks, or berating her for her fear of the letter o. It's a pretty potent portrayal of how we sabotage ourselves, how through each of our actions we are constantly trying to undermine our own goals.

Or it would be, if it weren't for the fact that the game also tries to make itself about metatext, for some reason. The game spends a lot of its time emphasizing the relationship that you have with the main character in the game to the point that she speaks to you directly. It refers to itself as a visual novel. This relationship with metatext, though, just devalues the rest of it. We're not intrusive thoughts. We're a weird player who has the option to just be cruel for no reason, which bleeds into the other major issue here. That being, how this game handles these choices.

Intrusive thoughts are not easy to deal with. Your brain repeats them over and over throughout the day and it's a constant fight if you don't want them to win out over you. In this game, though, it's not difficult at all. All you have to do is keep choosing the nice options. There's no reason to ever choose the rude ones, they're just... there. It's as if the game is saying that you just choose to be happy. That it's just a video game-y choice that's incredibly simple to make. Why are your thoughts insulting you? Just pick the nice ones. Then it'll be easy to buy the milk.

This game is a mess, but not in an endearing way. Much like many of its contemporaries, it invokes metatext in a way that adds nothing. It's an odd performance.

Should I even write a review? Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk will take you, at best 20 minutes to complete, meaning anything I say will inherently emit spoilers.

As someone who isn’t a big fan of VNs, I found myself strangely drawn-into the world crafted by Nikita Kryukov, and it’s really saying something when a short indie title does a better job tackling mental health issues than some of the bigger games I’ve played.

The mucky claret art style works towards the game’s psychedelic nature, though I wish some images were less blurry (the in-game explanations coming across as much like excuses as legitimate rationale). Likewise, I would’ve appreciated a little more SFX despite the writers, again, technically providing a reason for the reliance on music. That said, the tunes Kryukov has assembled here befit his moody product quite well.

There’s honestly not much more I can, or rather should, say - at a $1.00 asking price, you’ll get your surreal experience for sure.

For want of not completely exposing my messy mental health escapades on a public review site / sort-of game blogging microcosm, I'll leave my review at me feeling some personal attachment to the story of this game. I suppose playing out the toxic and positive aspects of the inner voice, the proverbial "voice in your head", does something to personify the inherent discomfort and fear of having some indistinct audience to your life.

Of course, I'm not that player, and as much as I want to embrace the story the game wants to tell, there's really no... reason, to treat the protagonist with anything other than care. Maybe that's part of the message: Of the intrinsic disorder of negative thoughts , the uncontrollable nature of intrusive thoughts. Wish it was done through deeper prose, relying less on trite scares ingrained into the visual novel landscape.

I relate, but it doesn't really... say anything, that isn't already deeply well known to those who suffer from mental issues, or the wider landscape of "people with a normal amount of empathy". Wish there was more to it!

Without divulging too much about my own mental health, I can at least safely say that Milk inside a bag... is eerily relatable and arresting for me. Metatext aside, I think it adequately achieves what it sets out to do for a very specific subset of people who in turn have processed their own traumas in a very specific way. I don't feel comfortable rating it because it's so personal and so affecting for me. I understand the sense some might get that this glorifies mental illness in some regard, and I even agree in part, but I think some of that is going to be inevitable when trying to transmit a piece of yourself for wider consumption. These things necessarily need to be gussied up due to the limits of language and the lived human experience. My red is not the same as your red. Maybe I wouldn't be as fond of it if I couldn't relate, it's impossible to say.

I was going to trauma dump but that's not fair to myself or to anyone else. The fact of the matter is I don't have to explain why this resonated with me. I am grateful this is (mostly) not my life anymore, but it certainly was my lived experience.

A day of my life in a day of my life in a day...

I fuck with the visuals, the aesthetics, the vibes, the twisted horror of this world that feels impossible to truly engage or interact with. Vague in presentation, other beings feeling so alien and disconnected, doing your best to stay focused on whatcha need to get done. I liked how the intrusive thoughts were interspersed with the nicer options, not blocked off to show you how the MC is doing her best to hold on with these meds that just aren't working that well for her. Working just well enough to function and get things done but not enough to stop the pain of the awful shitty thoughts at least being there. You have to see them even if you don't want to/don't pick them. Empty vacant holes within the self you constantly are stepping over to keep functioning.

Simplistic tasks made seemingly herculean by anxieties driven via trauma and continued loops driven by conditions both within and outside of yourself. Agoraphobia transforming others into insurmountable obstacles with nonsensical rules.

I don't think it's necessarily perfect in everything it tries to do. But I dig it and its structure. I dig the separation between the thoughts and you yourself as the reader. I dig the way it tackles disassociation especially. I dig the end and the dread instilled by it. Exhausting and continuous, seemingly never ending in its cruelty. Gotta get that milk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cqX3UNAUeA

The most interesting thing this game offers the player is the ability to respond to some questions with free-form text. Despite being the dominant interaction method of the DOS era, freetext has become a tragically underused form of user input - perhaps because Natural Language Processing is such a hard thing to get right, and gamers are infamously impatient and illiterate. God knows we struggle with self-expression and spurn any opportunity for ambiguity, but that seems to be the negative space of pixel-art rorschaches in which this game best exerts itself. The traditional dialogue binaries offered here are mean-spirited, but as a representation of everyone's belligerent and regressive inner saboteur-child I think they get the job done; I wanted to dispense with them and talk honestly with the subject, and that's a good representation of mental illness as it presents itself internally and in our external observations of others - a combination of pre-written responses and original thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO7waTp10f4

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk, made entirely by Nikita Kryukov, is a short visual novel with horror elements. It focuses on a mentally ill girl struggling with agoraphobia as she walks to the store to buy milk. Milk inside of a bag’s narrative breaks down the fourth wall completely, acknowledging its player as a figment of the girl’s imagination - someone she’s created to help her complete this seemingly small task. Someone to perform for in her mind, to try to keep her thoughts in check and focused.
It’s a small, neat story about the difficulties of interacting with the outside world when you’re not doing well. The girl’s perception of reality is heavily skewed; she views the people around her as monsters that are, in her words, ‘probably more scared of her than she is of them’. She speaks often of the endless stream of medications she’s taken in both the past and present to try to help her conditions. The very first time we meet her, she’s rehearsing her script for buying milk for nearly the twentieth time. The girl even exhibits symptoms of OCD; for example, counting her footsteps, getting upset when she walks ‘incorrectly’, and taking a dislike to the letter ‘O’ because of the intrusive thoughts it gives her.
Throughout the game, the player will be given the chance to comment on the girl’s train of thought or outward actions. Sometimes, there’s only one option, simply serving as a way to keep the dialogue flowing. Other times, you’re given two (or more) options - usually to either direct the girl’s thought process and actions, or to senselessly degrade her. However, if you choose to be mean too often, you’ll earn a ‘game over’ accompanied by a small jumpscare where the girl asserts that you’re not helpful to her. You may then restart (and choose to be nicer this time!)
Milk provides a very interesting take on having both a mental illness-focused narrative and an unreliable narrator. It may not be saying anything particularly new or groundbreaking, but the lens through which its story and main character are expressed is enough to make it feel fresh. A huge part of this is because you never once take direct control of the girl herself, instead acting as nothing but a voice in her head the entire game - the player to her visual novel protagonist, as she puts it (a role you’re also filling literally.) The way the girl perceives the world is captivatingly surreal and uncanny, including her largely self-contained interactions.
But Milk’s charm is not only due to good writing, but also beautiful art (and sound direction.) The top half of the screen serves as your view into the girl’s world. Its pixel art is intentionally minimalist, to the point of being near-obfuscated; its color palette is made up entirely of dark red, bright purple, and black. The environments depicted are mundane in their normalcy - a street, a light stop, a store - yet they feel so strange under this presentation. They’re the half-skewed world of someone struggling to separate their mind from reality.
Peppered throughout this seemingly rather normal town are fascinating horror elements which lean much further into the unknown. While at the store, the girl interacts with a few monsters who challenge the bravery she’s drummed up to go out and interact with the world. Yet, easily the most disturbing parts are the imagery revolving around her own home and family during the latter half of the game. But I won’t reveal more than that.
Just like how these visuals merge reality and delusion, the sound design does the same. A detail I found interesting is how Nikita chooses to apply the classic audio ‘babble’ to only select portions of the girl’s inner monologue. Lines meant primarily to describe the girl’s surroundings and actions may also be interspersed with her thoughts on what she’s observing; yet she clearly stays silent while doing so. Conversely, during the meager amount of dialogue she has with characters outside of the player, she’s accompanied by a chiptune ‘babble’. What’s notable is that this ‘babble’, along with quotation marks, are also applied to certain thoughts of hers - but only the ones directly addressed to the player. AKA, the voice in her head. This implies she may be speaking to herself out loud, a common symptom of the sort of hallucinatory mental illness the girl exhibits.
Most environments are accompanied by their own unique music, but the overarching style is droning and repetitive in a uniquely unsettling way. The tracks evolve over the course of the game, drowning out and coming back into focus between scenes. Eventually, when the girl’s medication starts to wear off, the noise is replaced altogether with wind. In stark contrast from the rest of the game, the last few minutes are completely silent.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of thought put into all of Milk’s small details. It manages to tell a captivating story in the span of only 20 minutes, filled to the brim with character and intrigue. There’s a perfect balance of half-explained story threads and vagueness to really engage the player, who can come to their own conclusions about many parts of the narrative. This is one of my favorite flavors of horror worldbuilding - abstract, strange, compelling you to fill in the blanks yourself.
Milk is absolutely worth a play for me. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys psychological horror - and possibly also to those who want to try out some new kinds of visual novels. The jumpscares are light and manageable, yet the atmosphere remains consistently thick and creepy. Good writing, great visuals, and equally great sound design combine into a disturbing, unique experience that I loved.


Visuals: 4.5/5
Sound: 4.5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Worldbuilding: 4.5/5
Overall Game Score: 4/5

thought i would be more annoyed at the meta elements, but theyre surprisingly affecting in how laser focused they are on the processes of overthinking and dissociation, keeping everything at a safe enough distance to be understood as an abstraction, with the only thing that can bring it crashing down being like...anything that requires something Other then thinking. i yearn for the seeming lack of stakes of navigating the internal world. climactic conversation gives me slight laura palmer feelings....horrific vouyerism subverted into an angelic Being The Only One Who Can Hear And Understand