This review contains spoilers
Unraveled Companion
CW: Discussions of Child Abuse, CSA, and Rape
This is an interesting instance, to a certain extent, of how the functions of what a 'game' should do get in the way. For instance even the set up here wants to have its cake and eat it to. The warning at the beginning of the work is a bland and vague warning that the 'topics in the game' may be 'sensitive to some players' but then when you're actually playing it, its pretty clear its about extreme parental abuse and child rape. This is not rape as in 'allusions to extreme creepiness', this directly and bluntly a fiction about CSA and rape. The kid gets impregnated in the route towards one ending or theres a drugging and belt unbuckling sound reveal in the other. You have to signpost this stuff or at least put it in a strongly recommended readme you can't mess around with depictions like this. That's the literary approach. The game developer approach is to hold onto some cards and not 'give away' the impact you're setting up.
Then there's the smaller details: There's a leapfrog leapster clone in the work, but the game there is just a bland minimalist minigame rather than anything a child would actually want to play. The goal marker in the corner is both extraneous and a little odd from a UI standpoint as it always has this little dash marker next to it despite only showing one task on screen at a time. The dots hovering over the items you can interact with and the wait function also feels like a very basic UI element. These are once again game design tricks that impair a more serious narrative.
It may seem incredibly anally retentive to bring this up, but I do so for a very specific reason: Most of the problems for why the game are bad is because the creator has decided to make their very first public project this heavy and is thus borrowing assets and plotlines from other horror games they like. Most clearly the work is borrowing from Presentable Liberty (2014) with the limited 1 room environment, minigame that marks itself as completed and unreplayable after you beat it, and the dual endings with one being a desecration into further abuse and the other being escaping the confines of your imprisonment. The issue here is that Presentable Liberty's tone is way more of a zany scenegirl approach (ala Invader Zim or Llamas with Hats) which allows the mechanics to function fine in line with the tone. These mechanics don't work with this more sombre tone at all and actually impairs it immensely. If this work wanted to do this subject matter effectively it should have been borrowing from the more muted interface of a chrstphfr work like The Space Between (2019). Thereby removing the hackneyed music, the UI overlays, removing button prompts, simplifying dialogue text to silent hanging statements, relegating to a single ending, probably focusing more on sound design, etc. This approach, along with more general refinement, would have garnered the game a lot more staying power and success at what its trying to depict, whereas in its current state it became an amateur youtube flash in the pan horror game of the week.
Obviously I feel we need to bring back trigger warnings as a serious notation to the public in a big way. However, I am also concerned this game is gonna open up a giant 'sexual assault storytelling' commercial portal in the middle of what is generally considered to be videogames indie creepypasta scene. Imagine something like this with this level of attention dropped back during the early days of the SCP, and then you had a bunch of sombre rape stories floating around in there. It would be a mess and it would taint the whole joy of that niche when recommending it to your buddies. 'Oh dont read SCP-1030 that one is a forced impregnation story where the person gets gangraped by the subject'. Like I'm not trying to be histrionic I'm just giving a comparison point for why this reaks.
I'm glad to see the game has gone mostly ignored by this point, but if any more games like this come down the line I'm gonna chew them out to.
CW: Discussions of Child Abuse, CSA, and Rape
This is an interesting instance, to a certain extent, of how the functions of what a 'game' should do get in the way. For instance even the set up here wants to have its cake and eat it to. The warning at the beginning of the work is a bland and vague warning that the 'topics in the game' may be 'sensitive to some players' but then when you're actually playing it, its pretty clear its about extreme parental abuse and child rape. This is not rape as in 'allusions to extreme creepiness', this directly and bluntly a fiction about CSA and rape. The kid gets impregnated in the route towards one ending or theres a drugging and belt unbuckling sound reveal in the other. You have to signpost this stuff or at least put it in a strongly recommended readme you can't mess around with depictions like this. That's the literary approach. The game developer approach is to hold onto some cards and not 'give away' the impact you're setting up.
Then there's the smaller details: There's a leapfrog leapster clone in the work, but the game there is just a bland minimalist minigame rather than anything a child would actually want to play. The goal marker in the corner is both extraneous and a little odd from a UI standpoint as it always has this little dash marker next to it despite only showing one task on screen at a time. The dots hovering over the items you can interact with and the wait function also feels like a very basic UI element. These are once again game design tricks that impair a more serious narrative.
It may seem incredibly anally retentive to bring this up, but I do so for a very specific reason: Most of the problems for why the game are bad is because the creator has decided to make their very first public project this heavy and is thus borrowing assets and plotlines from other horror games they like. Most clearly the work is borrowing from Presentable Liberty (2014) with the limited 1 room environment, minigame that marks itself as completed and unreplayable after you beat it, and the dual endings with one being a desecration into further abuse and the other being escaping the confines of your imprisonment. The issue here is that Presentable Liberty's tone is way more of a zany scenegirl approach (ala Invader Zim or Llamas with Hats) which allows the mechanics to function fine in line with the tone. These mechanics don't work with this more sombre tone at all and actually impairs it immensely. If this work wanted to do this subject matter effectively it should have been borrowing from the more muted interface of a chrstphfr work like The Space Between (2019). Thereby removing the hackneyed music, the UI overlays, removing button prompts, simplifying dialogue text to silent hanging statements, relegating to a single ending, probably focusing more on sound design, etc. This approach, along with more general refinement, would have garnered the game a lot more staying power and success at what its trying to depict, whereas in its current state it became an amateur youtube flash in the pan horror game of the week.
Obviously I feel we need to bring back trigger warnings as a serious notation to the public in a big way. However, I am also concerned this game is gonna open up a giant 'sexual assault storytelling' commercial portal in the middle of what is generally considered to be videogames indie creepypasta scene. Imagine something like this with this level of attention dropped back during the early days of the SCP, and then you had a bunch of sombre rape stories floating around in there. It would be a mess and it would taint the whole joy of that niche when recommending it to your buddies. 'Oh dont read SCP-1030 that one is a forced impregnation story where the person gets gangraped by the subject'. Like I'm not trying to be histrionic I'm just giving a comparison point for why this reaks.
I'm glad to see the game has gone mostly ignored by this point, but if any more games like this come down the line I'm gonna chew them out to.
Erato_Heti
1 month ago