Fiction is a powerful tool.

Through the phenomenological panopticon of worlds that we engage with in their entirety, we create our own realities. We create fantasies that we tell ourselves and exist in, as real as anything outside that. We know of everything inside them and seek to understand them, and in turn, understand ourselves.

These things are beautiful. These stories are what help us become more human, help us understand each other. They're what make us unique. We share our stories with each other to lighten our own burdens, and in turn, we listen to share the loads of others.

Childhood's End disagrees with me, though. It sees stories as not things of beauty, but a parasite. A means to an end - "creators shit out content from their asses", as it so... tactfully puts it. The beauty of stories and the worlds they create are portrayed as grotesque and aberrant, as merely coping mechanisms. Stories are creatures that fester inside your thoughts so they can be reproduced into other minds and endlessly continue their lineage.

Maybe it's wrong. Maybe it's right. I don't particularly care either way. What I do care about is that this game is cynical to the end - and in ways that don't interest me. A teenager commits suicide and it's treated as some romantic escape from suffering. A girl deeply in love is framed in the text as a crazed stalker. Sexual asasult is regularly brought up as a backstory plot device for no meaningful reason. One of the main characters herself even monologues about how art is nothing and means nothing, that it is only content to be consumed.

Stories are beautiful. Art is beautiful. The human experience is beautiful. Why make something so pointedly spiteful and mean-spirited?

This game only seeks to make its player suffer in their personal panopticon, helplessly watching, a terrible prank on those doomed to play it.

It's difficult for me to discuss Hello Charlotte's second episode without inevitably coming back to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which is one of my favorite games of all time.

Link's Awakening is a pretty simple game that has some interesting thematic trappings. The island that you're on is a dream, one that is destined to be ended once Link awakens the Wind Fish. It brings a lot to mind about the intersection of dreams and reality. What is real? What isn't real?

It doesn't much matter. The sleepy island of Koholint is one that you'll grow attached to and have as a fixture of your memories, one that will exist and bring you emotions throughout the rest of your life. It will live on that way. In some sense, this is what all worlds are like. We only know that they exist because we understand that they do.

The grey ending of Requiem Aeternam Deo has the revelation that Charlotte created the entire world and that she was its center the entire time. This comes at no surprise - after all, every character in the game centers themselves around Charlotte, from Anri, who is her best friend and has an unhealthy attachment to her, to the regular NPCs who tell Charlotte they aren't good enough to sit with her. Everything is about her, all of her hardships come from her difficulty in taking action to manifest her inner ideas and world.

With all that being said, Link's Awakening is so much more subdued, much more charming, and much easier to digest. Hello Charlotte' EP2 bounces its ideas all over the place, and doesn't really end up tying them together neatly by the end. It's a shame, because there's potential here, but it's buried by so much stuff (much of it being annoying or trite) that's it hard to wade through it. What we have here is a work that not only feels inconsistent within itself, but inconsistent with its previous entry as well despite their direct connection.

When you try to find coherent meaning to follow in Hello Charlotte, the abyss stares back.

"open hearts never break forever."
- Woodaba, a writer I deeply respect.

Breakups are hard, especially when you have BPD.

Borderline personality disorder is challenging. It's as if you're covered in emotional third degree burns all over your body, and even the slightest touch or irritation can lead to a spiral. Relationships can be particularly difficult with it, obviously. Even without the stigmatization of the illness that exists in a lot of discussions of romance due to that being such a neurotypical space, being so vulnerable all the time naturally leads to you opening your heart as much as you can to people and loving them fully. Despite how painful it is, it's a comfortable feeling as well, to open up so much to people. It's a blessing and a curse.

One aspect on the curse side of things is that when you love other people so much, you start to lose part of yourself in that love. You define yourself so much through it that it's hard to remember who you were before then. It's something that I know that I've struggled with a lot, and I know many other people who don't have this disorder have struggled with it. It can be hell to repair the pieces of you that have been left behind when part of your identity has torn itself from you.

In Sayonara Wild Hearts, we follow the journey of someone doing exactly that. She journeys through her own subconscious and visits all the aspects of the self that she had forgotten were a part of her. Her friendships, her love of nature, her emotions, her virtual identity and even her own relationship with mortality itself are all manifested as bosses here - all represented through different members of the major arcana in a tarot deck. Instead of closing off her emotions from the pain, she searches them. She feels them. When she resurfaces from her slump, she's ready to love once more.

When you're as vulnerable as I am, this cycle should seem familiar. You've been wounded, and you have to take time to process who you really are again. At the end of that, though, you come to a new understanding of yourself and the world around you - just like all emotionally challenging things. This disorder is agonizing, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but without it I wouldn't understand myself as well as I do. I wouldn't be so emboldened to love and feel the highs of emotion.

Without my open heart, I would have never recovered from my ex-boyfriend taking his own life almost two years ago.

Back then, I had told myself I would never love again. But I found it once more. It took a long time to find the pieces of my broken heart to put myself back together, and even then I still don't quite know how to process some aspects of his death, but I keep going. I keep living. I keep loving.

Welcome back, wild heart.

A toymaker sits over the miniatures they've created. They ponder them for a bit, and glance over each and every one. The features that they carved into them, the paint that's worn thin in places. Each figurine given such care and detail. They give a warm smile to the world they've created in miniature.

Though it is a world that has no life outside of themselves, the world of these toys is as real as can be to them. The names and faces of the people they've created, each reflected in their beady eyes, run through their mind. The stories they've spun, the relationships each toy's been a part of. Their desires, their hatreds, their fear. All of them a reflection of the toymaker's own, in some way or another.

The toymaker sets down the green-clad figure that they had pondered. After he puts the set he so carefully crafted to rest, he reclines on a nearby rocking chair. Through the jostling of the chair back and forth, the warm old wood inviting them to the realm of sleep, their jumbled thoughts create two clear questions:

What is real?

Does it matter?

The land of dreams and the land of waking may not be so different after all.

The technocapital singularity is a unique and flashy hell.

It’s a hell full of spectacle. The city glows with lights at night, people have cybernetic augmentations that enhance them in different ways - some people are even just brains in jars. It’s truly something to behold how far technology has come, the way that talking dogs and people with vestigial cat ears walk into bars without so much as a second glance. Robots with advanced artificial intelligence are citizens of this city and are just as much human as you or I.

But no matter how much glitz and glamor permeates its outer shell, the city is still a hell.

It’s a capitalist dystopia, one where nanomachines are implanted in every person from birth in order to control them and track them and sell their data. People talk like they’ve been on the internet constantly because all versions of the self have been consolidated, capital allows no room for privacy or identity outside of its own simplistic understanding because nuance isn’t profitable. A company has complete control over the city’s laws, with a bumbling fool as a front for the malicious actions committed by it. A group of military police funded by said company runs the city, one that’s above the laws and commits atrocities against the people frequently with beatings being on the regular.

In all this, there’s a single glimmering light in the darkness. Through the depths of hell, as one travels down further and further through its nine circles with Vergil, one comes to a member of heaven's nine spheres sitting idly in a small corner on a street. It’s a small, slightly run-down, bar called Valhalla.

Well, not really called “Valhalla”, that’s just the nickname for its designation name, which is VA-11 Hall-A. However, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such a place would be named after a place where noble warriors fly when they die in combat, the drinking hall of the gods. In a similar fashion, this is where those who fight the everyday battle of work go for respite, though their rest is only temporary instead of permanent.

Our time in this world is through the eyes and ears of Jill Stingray, a bartender who works here and talks to all of her clients about their troubles. All of which are caused directly by the city that made things this way, the corporation that controls their lives. It’s a hopeful yet depressing game, one where despite everything every character is able to hold on, if only because they have each other.

A character who begins frequenting the bar after the first day is Sei, a member of the aforementioned military police I mentioned. Sei is an interesting character because she’s someone who does everything right by the standards of society. At first, it appears she’s going to be an argument for police. After all, how could these terrible fascists be so bad when there’s such a nice girl working with them? Of course, it’s not that simple, and she’s quickly used to turn that image around. Sei, despite doing everything right and going above and beyond to be the model member of her organization, like saving people who she was instructed to let die or bringing medical supplies to doctors in need of them in her free time, ends up betrayed and abandoned by the people she fought so hard for. She’s left behind, locked in a terrorist situation inside a bank, and only manages to escape by casting aside her identity as one of them. When they disband, she doesn’t know where she’ll end up going next, but she’s glad to have broken free from them. Sei is a character who is bound by the rigidity of capital and seems to be doing fine, but then she’s cast from it and it’s revealed how even working hard won’t save you from the realities of systems that don’t care about you.

Dorothy Haze is a complicated character to talk about. A 24 year-old sex worker robot who willingly never upgraded her model from that of a child’s in order to get a leg up on the competition, she represents a disgusting truth about the fetishization of youth presented by capitalism. When she appears, it’s always uncomfortable. She’s never meant to be titillating for the player, seeing as how she is never as sexy onscreen for them, only serving as a grim reminder of what capitalism at its extremes is: that is to say, its obsession with youth, which we see in our understanding of beauty standards. A lack of wrinkles, a lack of body hair, smaller frames and facial features - these things that our society values so much are a microcosm of this utterly vile conclusion. Younger people are prized in our society because they’re more easily influenced, more easily made to work and become “efficient”. This fixation becomes fetishization, if youth is good… then it must be attractive. That is how we get these beauty standards, and how this pedophilic look on life is something that goes part and parcel with capitalism. She even has her own existential dread over this. She wants to age normally, she wants to be able to have those human experiences, but because that would entail a disadvantage in her field of work created by societal predilections, she chooses not to. She’s a stark testament to how much capitalism fetishizes youth, the logical extreme of when that happens.

Even some of the smaller characters, who you never end up really meeting, end up factoring into this. Mario, a delivery driver who shows up twice at the bar, is someone who feels as if he has to hide his true identity. Capitalism divides us into groups so it’s easier for us to be controlled and marketed to, so he feels as if he has to fit into being the “tough biker type”, even if he’s quite sweet at heart, and jeopardizes parts of his personality for this. It’s only through embracing that sweet side that he finally gets to be happier, instead of insulting everyone all the time in half-hearted aphorisms. The dogs that frequent the bar, Rad Shiba and his boss, both have trouble finding funding for their dog rescue organization. The commodification of living is too much for them to handle, let alone extend to hundreds of other animals. So many characters hide who they are, or can’t fully achieve their potential because of capital. From brains in jars unable to find love to pompous critics putting on a front to bury their past created by police corruption in order to find a new future.

Then there’s our protagonist, Jill Stingray. While she initially seems as if she’s just a blank slate for the player to project onto, it turns out there’s more to her than meets the eye. A relationship Jill adored being in, one that she ended three years ago, haunts her because of the choices she was forced to make in order to preserve her autonomy. As stated, capitalism forces people into groups and to decide what they want to do with their life at a young age, no matter how ridiculous an expectation that is. Jill went through all of college and got a job at a research station, which was her ordained role in life, but realized she didn’t want to do that with her life - but breaking free from the trodden path that profit had laid out for her came with the cost of her lost Lenore. Despite this, she keeps going, she mixes drinks, and she banters with her coworkers and clients. She’s part of what makes VA-11 Hall-A, well, Valhalla. Without her, it would not be complete. Even though she’s lost everything, she keeps going. No matter what happens, even when she’s evicted, she never gives in.

One of the nine spheres of heaven rests in the depths of the circles of hell. Though Dante didn’t write of it, it’s a place for those beleaguered by the battering of fiscal burdens to come and relax for a while. It’s a place of sagacity - if only for a little bit.

And that’s really all you can ask for, sometimes.

Humans are strange. We obsess over figures from our past and deify them, invent entire systems to destroy lives, and try to justify the atrocities we commit with twisted rhetoric. None of the terrible systems that we've wrought upon ourselves make sense, from feudalism to capitalism, and the best way to see this for ourselves is to be removed from our own minds for a bit and look at what we're doing. The worst part is, the people who are doing this introspection are not the ones who can actually make meaningful changes, just victims trapped in a machine.

Stray is very concerned with this idea. It takes the humanity out of the humans it portrays and their squalid lives, making them robots. While they may be functionally the same as us, mimicking the lives that we lead before we all perished prior to the events of the game, they are still explicitly distinct. Through removing the humanity of these subjects, we begin to question their behavior and realize that it is the same: and how utterly baffling we can be sometimes.

To address the feline in the room, you yourself are taken out of the mind of a human and placed into that of a cat. While I see a lot of people cite that a cat being the main character doesn't add much to the story, I think that being non-human is incredibly important. After all, who is better to judge humanity than a third party? These strange robots might just be how a cat sees us. A strange species of people who mimic the traditions of those who came before us without much thought to why.

Though all the humans might have died a long time ago, humanity still lives on in the streets of the dead city. From a programmer who needs a blanket to stop shivering to one that's infatuated with New Age mysticism, the entire city has a life to it. A life that's concerned with what came before, just as we are.

Humans didn't die out, they simply changed the guard.

A game's atmosphere can completely make or break it, the worlds you explore and inhabit indicating the greater ideas that make up the work. To explore is to learn, to see is to believe. It's why it's troubling when people write off a game's graphics entirely - I loathe the idea of "good graphics" as much as the next gal, but presentation is incredibly important to an experience. It's part of what makes it.

Silent Hill 2 understands this extraordinarily well. It uses the town that its created as a dreamlike suburbia, one where nothing is really ever right, which is compounded by the fact that the game shows its age. A dense fog prevents you from truly understanding what's going on here, it prevents you from ever entering the small town in a meaningful or personal manner. It's guarded. Sometimes the architecture simply doesn't make sense - an infinite prison system underground comes to mind. You will never truly understand Silent Hill.

Fatum Betula's atmosphere is not trying to achieve the same things as Silent Hill 2, but its atmosphere is also palpable. It's a quiet, crusty, PS1-style game, one where nothing ever feels right. Instead of invoking familiar imagery to throw you off-guard, though, it brings the abstract and uncanny to life right out the gate, the imagined projected onto the real. A lake that distorts into a nightmare dimension that recurs into itself upon going to sleep there, an infinitely long foggy suburb that takes you to a laboratory if you walk for long enough, a library at the bottom of a well full of arcane knowledge in both literal and figurative senses. Life is scarce in these lonely environments, leaving one to wonder what exactly happened. There is an answer there, though obscured and not complete, but it's not important.

Throughout each of the game's endings, you learn of a different philosophical quandary. Are people naturally made to kill each other? Is it even possible to break free from the cycles of capitalism, considering how we're indoctrinated into them from birth? Is totally ending reality the right thing to do when everyone is suffering? None of these are presented as more or less important than the others, they are all just possible outcomes to a vast tapestry of ideas. They are all simply questions that you can come to answers for for yourself.

There is no inherent meaning to Fatum Betula, there is only a world laid out in front of you to explore and what you make of it. An immortal plane, one that has a mind of its own. It's your choice.

Quomodo Fatum Betula fovebis?

The idea of the unreliable narrator has been used a lot in fiction, and it's one of the more interesting tools in an artist's toolkit. It's visited less often in video games than it is in novels or film, mainly due to it being a burgeoning medium still: the most notable example in this space I can think of is Final Fantasy VII.

In Final Fantasy VII, the protagonist Cloud is someone who believes to have been an elite member of a corporation's military police at one point. Throughout most of the game you simply believe his testimony, and it's only at the turning point that you realize that he was never that - it was through systems of capital and their atrocities that his identity was twisted and warped, changing his very memories in order to suit the propaganda narrative of said corporation better, even if they didn't intend it to. Final Fantasy VII makes a bold declaration with this: our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us are tainted by systems of abuse and violence that we are thrust into.

Bastion attempts something similar, and it succeeds in some aspects. The propaganda narrative of the imperialist narrator, Rucks, is a pretty spot-on satire at points - a particularly clever usage of it is how whenever you try to talk to characters from the oppressed class of people, he will speak over them in vague non-answers to your questions. The systems of empire do not want their victims to have a voice. He's an effective antagonist, one that makes you commit terrible acts of genocide in the name of his warped ideology. The issue lies in that the game doesn't seem to want to commit to him being an antagonist.

This is the second Supergiant Game I've played, and it's two for two on terrible endings that back out of committing to the game's ideas at the last second. In Pyre, the ending is a changing of the guard as opposed to anything revolutionary. It's framed as a massive upheaval, but is just neoliberalism. It's not great, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time I think about it.

The ending of Bastion, similarly, leaves a lot to be desired. In a lot of ways, it's much worse. The aforementioned narrator and his awful views are swept under the rug. After the protagonist decides to evacuate the Bastion and break free from the cycles of violence, Rucks... shows no indication that he's even learned anything from the experience. This is an imperialist warmonger who tricked you into perpetuating racialized violence, but the game decides that everyone has to be friends by the end of it. There is no resolution to this. It's a vapid, feel good ending that doesn't address major issues with this character because to do so would be difficult. What we end up with is a disappointingly centrist "why can't we all just get along" story.

It seems that behind the illustrative beauty and innovative gameplay mechanics of Supergiant lies a deep disinterest in making any bold statements with their games, which is a true shame.