Erato_Heti
1993
DOOM is phenomenal. ID software team really created the Fast FPS genre with this one. This is not worth understating. The only other game that came close to what this game was doing was Wolfenstien-3D. It only takes a few minutes of play to recognize just how sluggish it is. No title had this degree of 1st person haptic feedback by this point in history¹.
I love this one and I could gush about why in an endless multitude of ways. I could go for the comparative approach by looking at how this game does Fast FPS combat better than any game after it. How effective it is in creating atmosphere without relying on thick shadows and darkness (DOOM 2 really drops the ball here). I want to keep things simple though, so I'll just focus on this: DOOM solved the Door Problem of combat design before the genre was even the cashcow we know it as today. If you're unfamiliar with the Door Problem its quite simple: You as the player instead of entering an aggressive and dynamic room back off using the door as a shield with which to leash enemies, simplifying the dynamic within you control often in ways that rob the fiction of its bite.
Andrew Yoder has a great article that covers this phenomenon here . It's a fantastic read just in general if you have a chance but I want to pull 2 main excerpts. For one he notes that the Door Problem is not actually about the door, as he puts it "the door itself isn’t the problem. The problem is the relationship between these two spaces, a problem that the player experiences when crossing the threshold, which is often a door."
He also makes a much bolder claim which is that FPS combat has almost nothing to do with the gratification of violence from ballistic combat but instead is a complex game of territory control as he states
"Building a level for a classic shooter is not about killing scary monsters with cool guns, though this is part of their appeal. A classic shooter level also isn’t about its sequence of locks and keys. These are both means to an end, and that end is map control. As the player moves through a level, they are taking territory from their enemy and locking the level into a solved state."
So then how does DOOM solve this problem you might be wondering? It does this I believe in a couple ways. For one the weakest enemies, the Zombiemen and Shotgun Guy's have hitscan. What that means is there is no ballistic firing, these dude take a second to see if your in view, do their gun animation and instantly hit. So standing in place near a doorway means that these guys will hurt you, its not 'safe'.
On top of this you have the fact that if you try to escape to dispatch from a corner the 'Pinkies' which only do melee damage can cornor you and pummel you to death. This means that running around like a rabbit in an occupied zone is often actually safer than hiding. In part because of the fact enemies can hurt each other with projectiles causing infighting. You are rewarded for getting into the action rather than avoiding it.
The one other factor that raises the combat stakes is how bizarre enemy movement patterns are. In most contemporary shooter the enemies will walk in a straight line towards the player but in DOOM they do a zigzag and functionally wander in the players direction. This may seem bizarre at first glance but is justified by the demonic possession aspect in the narrative. This is crucial because if they were actually humans this pathing would be nonsensical. Regardless of their impressive symbolic justification for the unique movement patterns, when you actually play it it means you're always having to adjust your aim and be on your toes. Moving while shooting allows you not to have to move your retical as much. Precision is often best while moving as strange as it seems. This is yet another way in which the Door Problem is rebuffed, having to constantly adjust your aim when standing in one place is more ironically taxing than running around.
A lot of why this works is because there are no actual corridor levels in DOOM, every map has a reasonable open space for the combat encounters with the exception of some hallway sections in Map E2M6, "HALLS OF THE DAMNED". This is because the enemy pathing doesnt actually deal with hallways well, often getting stuck or confused. Thus the levels in DOOM are open and inviting allowing for players to dash around and get their bearings. Swapping weapons and planning their approach. It can not be understated enough that I think almost all the Maps in DOOM are fun to play on simply for the reason alone. I'm actually quite partial towards the later 2 episodes because of their wideness in comparison to some of the romero maps in episode 1 which feel claustrophobic and often require you to fetch keys.
In my mind this is what makes doom work and worth actually playing through and thinking about. This is not to say that there are no moments where hiding behind a door is the right call, but it no longer becomes the dominant strategy. It becomes another strategic tool in your wide arsenal.
With all that said I agree entirely with HPE's post on DOOM in both what it focuses on as its strength and the idea that 'Pistol Start' is the way to go. Pistol Start is where you die at the beginning of the level to only set you with 50 pistol bullets and none of the other guns or ammo. What this does is cause you to risk further into the map for resources and 'feel' out the level. On that point I played this game around the 2nd Episode in a very extreme 'purist' fashion: Ultra Violence difficulty, almost no saves, and pistol start. I played it like this my first ever play through of it and it greatly enhanced my play through of the game and appreciation of the artistic and novel qualities each map had for me. See, by this point Save Scumming would have been a relatively novel concept to the point that people may not have used it much beyond saving their point so they could come back later. Save Scumming started happening with point and click games which by this point had not been so profoundly popular yet. SCUMM only had the first 2 Monkey Island game by this point which didn't have a death mechanic anyway. Meanwhile the most applicable example of the King's Quest games were made up to Kings Quest 4 by this point, but the demographic for those games was not particularly the demographic for DOOM. My mom played King's Quest, she did not play DOOM. Point is most people were still playing No Save games so the prospect that you could leverage the save functions to create a new Door Problem via temporal trickery hadn't been established yet.
I mention this not to get into a rancid difficulty argument but instead to say that yes, in a contemporary context after the boom of save state emulation and anti death set back nueroticism a biased interface to save every 3 minutes and reload if you die is obviously going to trivialize DOOM. We all know how to play FPS games by this point, we don't need to make a game like this even more easier for ourselves. You will take out what you put in with this one. Play on at least the Pain difficulty and dont save often. Let yourself die sometimes and restart the map! Sometimes friction is good for you, it forces you to be more engaged with the system. DOOM taught me that and did it in the best way possible.
There is a lot of other factors I particularly enjoy about DOOM, I love the fact you can see your character portrait in the HUD, an alienation that later FPS games would introduce. I love how 'strafing' become this unique movement function that feels so satisfying. The horizontal mouse movement and QWE propulsion feels SO much nicer than the normal WASD layout I've become too accustomed to, it also means I can hit the number buttons easily. There are about 100 small little details like this I find deeply satisfying, but I wanted to hone on that 1 reason you should want to try and respect DOOM: It literally solved the Door Problem this early on.
I feel like I should just tell you I wrote this entire thought in a fevered and smiling state. DOOM really did it so well. I wont lie, this game really does bring out my happy Boomer side :D
Sidenote: I reccomend playing a sourceport of DOOM, im particular Chocolate DOOM. Steam DOOM is fine but has some really irritating visual additions. Do not play any version of DOOM with vertical aim, it cant be trusted.
As for the rest, Surf on!
----------------------------------------------------
1. I would understand if you don't believe me here. Surely there was an action shooter by this point that did what DOOM did? No there wasnt. Watch Errant Signal's Children of DOOM series if you dont believe me. This is by all accounts one of the first First Person Action games but absolutely the first shooter of its kind. Nothing else was doing this. It's a technological marvel. The fact the backgrounds and enemies look stunning as you run around is absolutely astonishing.
I love this one and I could gush about why in an endless multitude of ways. I could go for the comparative approach by looking at how this game does Fast FPS combat better than any game after it. How effective it is in creating atmosphere without relying on thick shadows and darkness (DOOM 2 really drops the ball here). I want to keep things simple though, so I'll just focus on this: DOOM solved the Door Problem of combat design before the genre was even the cashcow we know it as today. If you're unfamiliar with the Door Problem its quite simple: You as the player instead of entering an aggressive and dynamic room back off using the door as a shield with which to leash enemies, simplifying the dynamic within you control often in ways that rob the fiction of its bite.
Andrew Yoder has a great article that covers this phenomenon here . It's a fantastic read just in general if you have a chance but I want to pull 2 main excerpts. For one he notes that the Door Problem is not actually about the door, as he puts it "the door itself isn’t the problem. The problem is the relationship between these two spaces, a problem that the player experiences when crossing the threshold, which is often a door."
He also makes a much bolder claim which is that FPS combat has almost nothing to do with the gratification of violence from ballistic combat but instead is a complex game of territory control as he states
"Building a level for a classic shooter is not about killing scary monsters with cool guns, though this is part of their appeal. A classic shooter level also isn’t about its sequence of locks and keys. These are both means to an end, and that end is map control. As the player moves through a level, they are taking territory from their enemy and locking the level into a solved state."
So then how does DOOM solve this problem you might be wondering? It does this I believe in a couple ways. For one the weakest enemies, the Zombiemen and Shotgun Guy's have hitscan. What that means is there is no ballistic firing, these dude take a second to see if your in view, do their gun animation and instantly hit. So standing in place near a doorway means that these guys will hurt you, its not 'safe'.
On top of this you have the fact that if you try to escape to dispatch from a corner the 'Pinkies' which only do melee damage can cornor you and pummel you to death. This means that running around like a rabbit in an occupied zone is often actually safer than hiding. In part because of the fact enemies can hurt each other with projectiles causing infighting. You are rewarded for getting into the action rather than avoiding it.
The one other factor that raises the combat stakes is how bizarre enemy movement patterns are. In most contemporary shooter the enemies will walk in a straight line towards the player but in DOOM they do a zigzag and functionally wander in the players direction. This may seem bizarre at first glance but is justified by the demonic possession aspect in the narrative. This is crucial because if they were actually humans this pathing would be nonsensical. Regardless of their impressive symbolic justification for the unique movement patterns, when you actually play it it means you're always having to adjust your aim and be on your toes. Moving while shooting allows you not to have to move your retical as much. Precision is often best while moving as strange as it seems. This is yet another way in which the Door Problem is rebuffed, having to constantly adjust your aim when standing in one place is more ironically taxing than running around.
A lot of why this works is because there are no actual corridor levels in DOOM, every map has a reasonable open space for the combat encounters with the exception of some hallway sections in Map E2M6, "HALLS OF THE DAMNED". This is because the enemy pathing doesnt actually deal with hallways well, often getting stuck or confused. Thus the levels in DOOM are open and inviting allowing for players to dash around and get their bearings. Swapping weapons and planning their approach. It can not be understated enough that I think almost all the Maps in DOOM are fun to play on simply for the reason alone. I'm actually quite partial towards the later 2 episodes because of their wideness in comparison to some of the romero maps in episode 1 which feel claustrophobic and often require you to fetch keys.
In my mind this is what makes doom work and worth actually playing through and thinking about. This is not to say that there are no moments where hiding behind a door is the right call, but it no longer becomes the dominant strategy. It becomes another strategic tool in your wide arsenal.
With all that said I agree entirely with HPE's post on DOOM in both what it focuses on as its strength and the idea that 'Pistol Start' is the way to go. Pistol Start is where you die at the beginning of the level to only set you with 50 pistol bullets and none of the other guns or ammo. What this does is cause you to risk further into the map for resources and 'feel' out the level. On that point I played this game around the 2nd Episode in a very extreme 'purist' fashion: Ultra Violence difficulty, almost no saves, and pistol start. I played it like this my first ever play through of it and it greatly enhanced my play through of the game and appreciation of the artistic and novel qualities each map had for me. See, by this point Save Scumming would have been a relatively novel concept to the point that people may not have used it much beyond saving their point so they could come back later. Save Scumming started happening with point and click games which by this point had not been so profoundly popular yet. SCUMM only had the first 2 Monkey Island game by this point which didn't have a death mechanic anyway. Meanwhile the most applicable example of the King's Quest games were made up to Kings Quest 4 by this point, but the demographic for those games was not particularly the demographic for DOOM. My mom played King's Quest, she did not play DOOM. Point is most people were still playing No Save games so the prospect that you could leverage the save functions to create a new Door Problem via temporal trickery hadn't been established yet.
I mention this not to get into a rancid difficulty argument but instead to say that yes, in a contemporary context after the boom of save state emulation and anti death set back nueroticism a biased interface to save every 3 minutes and reload if you die is obviously going to trivialize DOOM. We all know how to play FPS games by this point, we don't need to make a game like this even more easier for ourselves. You will take out what you put in with this one. Play on at least the Pain difficulty and dont save often. Let yourself die sometimes and restart the map! Sometimes friction is good for you, it forces you to be more engaged with the system. DOOM taught me that and did it in the best way possible.
There is a lot of other factors I particularly enjoy about DOOM, I love the fact you can see your character portrait in the HUD, an alienation that later FPS games would introduce. I love how 'strafing' become this unique movement function that feels so satisfying. The horizontal mouse movement and QWE propulsion feels SO much nicer than the normal WASD layout I've become too accustomed to, it also means I can hit the number buttons easily. There are about 100 small little details like this I find deeply satisfying, but I wanted to hone on that 1 reason you should want to try and respect DOOM: It literally solved the Door Problem this early on.
I feel like I should just tell you I wrote this entire thought in a fevered and smiling state. DOOM really did it so well. I wont lie, this game really does bring out my happy Boomer side :D
Sidenote: I reccomend playing a sourceport of DOOM, im particular Chocolate DOOM. Steam DOOM is fine but has some really irritating visual additions. Do not play any version of DOOM with vertical aim, it cant be trusted.
As for the rest, Surf on!
----------------------------------------------------
1. I would understand if you don't believe me here. Surely there was an action shooter by this point that did what DOOM did? No there wasnt. Watch Errant Signal's Children of DOOM series if you dont believe me. This is by all accounts one of the first First Person Action games but absolutely the first shooter of its kind. Nothing else was doing this. It's a technological marvel. The fact the backgrounds and enemies look stunning as you run around is absolutely astonishing.
2023
CN: Anti-gamer sentiments, intellectual discussions of 'games', lots of reference quotations, Feminist sentiment
Stated Potential Conflicts of Interest: Kye is one of my closest friends at the moment, however, it's a non-monetary relationship. However, I do post all of my write up on games in her invitation only discord server as its one of only 3 places I have to share my write ups off site with people who might be users here (the other 2 being another invitation only discord, and twitter).
Policy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflects my favourite type of videoplay jank, you have a PNG image for a title screen with the minimum number of options to choose, and then you're dropped into a floating environment box in the middle of the sky unable to know how to interact with things, no exposition either. If you move the camera the trees will switch position and hang off the side. It takes a second to figure out what the controls are here for interacting bizarre objects. None of these are complaints against the experience though, it enhances the strangeness of the environment that much more. The Catamites' writes on the "computer memories" in play environments stating
"playing a computer game can be a strangely unmemorable activity - move here, move there, eat the cherries, etc. we keep track of a kind of vague gestalt impression of what's going on but it's hard to remember exactly what we've just been doing or why, in part because the game keeps track of that for us. in many of lilith's games this perpetual present is placed against a frozen and inscrutable memory world, and part of their power comes from playing with the back and forth between the two forces."
I think this videoplay intervenes on that usual fetchquest style of play by dropping you into a world without the grace of some expository explanation, and by the fetch quest itself being truncated. Most of play is in figuring out the nuance of controls, how to 'express' Kye.
After you get a hang of the controls, the endearing quality of this usually generic 3D RPGMaker asset type visual style sinks. Everything about these assets is bright, soothing, and melancholy. The camera panning to a fixed position on the other end of the environment box amuses you when you realize that 2/4 of them are obscured by trees.
princess/GirlSoftware argues in terms of channeling girliness that:
"if u can reimagine a game but make it girlier ur already contributing more to the medium than any guy as far as im concerned."
In this case, Kye has reimagined a feminine melancholy in what is often referred to as the 'joke game' or 'gag game'. Videoplay like You Have To Burn The Rope and Space Funeral are both games that amuse me, but quantify a more belligerent aura around their appeals of videoplay winstate hollowness.
I think this piece is snubbing false binaries of choice in games and leads to its punchline in a mellow enough way that its stings when it happens. It's a joke, but one that sees an anxious cruelty in losing a loved one and trying to find them again.
I recognize the perception as just paying lip service here, but I don't think that's the case. I think instead it's because I enjoy systems that enhance 'aliveness' and quell 'deadness'. This is a concept I've picked up from Alt Designer and professor Melos who defines these aspects as follows "An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is something to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it. It can be as simple as a 1-hour game made for a friend's birthday." in contrast to a deadgame which is "On the other path of history, we have the endless, dead, self-consuming Deadgame Industry, exhausting the creative lives of millions on producing these empty games that might be ‘fun’ but are, mostly, just there for us to whittle away the time and leave ourselves unchanged." While I've abandoned all use of the term 'game' for the moment, as I believe its very usage advocates deadness¹ , advocating instead for something like 'play environment', 'piece', 'videoplay', etc. I believe the general idea of aliveness being found in experiences small in scale is spot on, though I disagree slightly with his humanitarian agenda. While the aspect of 'deadness' in a play experience can speak to aspects of monetization, crunch, minority hatred, etc. which are all hideous. The appreciation for aliveness has nothing for me to do with a 'human' connection. Instead, its a connection to a 'thrust' in the articulation of a play experience as doing something distinct and beautiful is usually felt here in the same way that it is for poetry in the written word. Regardless of if experience is ambiguous in function, or clear, the compactness of the form allows for all of the dangly bits to read out much more clearly. Simply put, I just think their formal quality of engagement is superior in every way, and the only reason people play 'dead' games is because of pleasure trickery and to be a 'part of the discussion'.
The play environments I engage with at this point are mainly from a site brimming of aliveness, Itchio. The aura in general there is in a more open trading of communal resources and function, with few if any of the financialized aspects that can create hierarchies that build towards deadness and gamification². I believe deadness in games can be valuable, but mainly as a reflection of current capitalist conditions in the arts rather than any innate appreciation in the 'hollowness' of the corpse. Functionally deadness can also depict to me a specific kind of lost melancholy but it has to be done very particularly. Regardless deadness is not a significant value in what I tend to pursue.
That said, aliveness doesn't completely explain my preferences either. People may wonder why I tend to like stuff like this, supposed bottom of the barrel videoplay jank because its 'obviously rushed'. Well, it's ultimately because these small PC throwaway experiences are consistently transformative and new, and allow for a large amount of comparative data to draw on in relation. I truly am getting something out of experiences like this, it's not just for show.
The only main issue I ever tend to take with small scale alive play experiences is aspects of writing, stuff like typos or weak word choice, excessive alliteration, etc. Those have been avoided here and that's good enough for me. I think its better to not see yourself as being 'tricked' or 'disappointed' by such small experiences. Nor should be any shame in conveying a world in 30 minutes or less. On the contrary, the thrust of that shame should go to audience mob vindictiveness over the grievance of 'expectations'. Anyway, I hope Kye makes more of these soon I thought it was really cute and has exactly the visual sensitivity I crave for these days.
----------------------
1. I recognize it's an extremely bizarre take on my part to throw out the term 'game' as if its a dirty word, but I think it might be useful to know I'm not alone. Iconoclast dev Chris Crawford says something similar when laying out the syllogistic logical network between 'game', 'play', and 'fun' before ultimately lampooning them, saying that
"The problem with this reasoning lies in the fact that the words "game," "play," and "fun" are in flux. They have historically been associated with the behavior of children, yet in the last century, with the creation of significant amounts of leisure time, adults have taken up play as well. This new, adult kind of play is still play by any definition, but the word "fun" doesn't quite fit the adult's experience."
He uses this analysis of the rampant fluctuation in the terminology to prod at the term 'fun' as destabilized, which I think is correct to do. This was mainly for the attempt to lampoon the 'Fun Factor' theory of design, but where does that leave 'game'. Well in my view this term is also a form of strict infantilization, if you frame such experience as a 'game' then you risk de-emphasizing their maturity into some isolated experience with no 'bioreality' (that you don't spend time sitting with it, or use your eyes to actually view it, etc). Furthermore that its also not something to be taken seriously or considered outside tabletop game functions like a win state or as if an experience is supposed to 'give' you something in particular, like you would a child. It also deemphasizes risk, traffic lights are a 'game' within the field of game theory but playing it as if its zero sum (valuing your own time at the expense of everyone else) will cause you to risk suffering and death. If everyone framed and treated traffic lights as a 'game' then people would try to 'game' the system and endanger themselves and others more in the process. In my view this 'gamification' of everyday life is a bad thing. By compelling myself to speak of exeriences as if they are games is to pull a highway robbery on what they are expressing to me. I take no judgement for people who continue to use it but I want to rid myself of it, at least for a while.
On the other hand, what about the word 'play'? Surely it's culpable of one in the same? For me, concepts of 'leisure' and 'play' at least only speak to the specific behaviors the audience has to engage in, a form of enhanced input. Flipping through channels is 'playing with the TV' you can 'play with' a movie by rewinding it, etc but neither is a 'game'. Just in the same way that I've come to a violent opinion within myself that there is no such function as 'the arts' the same is said for 'games'. They both reek of me of industry, trying to justify its habituation. That all said, in order to anchor down what we are specifically doing here is to call it a computer 'play environment' so that we can segregate it as an isolated function of experience. We can be even more word anal some other time.
2. If you would excuse the tangent, there's one exception: The GameJam. GameJam's are not in themselves a bad concept, but I take issue with the time constraints on many of them, often being only a week or two. Along with often the designation of a 'winner'. Meaning that what becomes rewarded from this structure is a small scale version of the 'crunch' hierarchy which praises the most 'polished' work of the bunch. Other parasitic process of play design, voting out all the aspects of a games work on a public pool for the 'best game'. All this crap ends up creating a lot of works on the platform with a profound amount of 'deadness' within them, while also causing an unfathomable amount of harm. At this point I find those jams utterly deplorable in function. I've explored this 'abandonment' of creative labor in my Yo! Noid 2 write up here if you're interested, despite my love of it I think it's deeply engaged with 'deadness' as they had to go back and make a more 'finalized' version of the game on its own later due to bugs etc. With that said, there are good GameJams, but they are far and few between as of now. It should also be mentioned that most games included into these more deplorable jams do end up being good games but they usually are not the 'winners' of those jams which tend inhabit the most 'deadness'.
-----------------------------
References:
Betsy Hospital Game FAQ by the Catamites http://harmonyzone.org/text/betsyhospital.html
video game feminization hypnosis by GirlSoftware
https://girlsoftware.itch.io/vgfh
Deadgames and Alivegames by Melos https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2021-01-10%20Deadgames%20and%20Alivegames
Excerpt from Chris Crawford on Game Design
https://flylib.com/books/en/2.178.1.21/1/
Stated Potential Conflicts of Interest: Kye is one of my closest friends at the moment, however, it's a non-monetary relationship. However, I do post all of my write up on games in her invitation only discord server as its one of only 3 places I have to share my write ups off site with people who might be users here (the other 2 being another invitation only discord, and twitter).
Policy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflects my favourite type of videoplay jank, you have a PNG image for a title screen with the minimum number of options to choose, and then you're dropped into a floating environment box in the middle of the sky unable to know how to interact with things, no exposition either. If you move the camera the trees will switch position and hang off the side. It takes a second to figure out what the controls are here for interacting bizarre objects. None of these are complaints against the experience though, it enhances the strangeness of the environment that much more. The Catamites' writes on the "computer memories" in play environments stating
"playing a computer game can be a strangely unmemorable activity - move here, move there, eat the cherries, etc. we keep track of a kind of vague gestalt impression of what's going on but it's hard to remember exactly what we've just been doing or why, in part because the game keeps track of that for us. in many of lilith's games this perpetual present is placed against a frozen and inscrutable memory world, and part of their power comes from playing with the back and forth between the two forces."
I think this videoplay intervenes on that usual fetchquest style of play by dropping you into a world without the grace of some expository explanation, and by the fetch quest itself being truncated. Most of play is in figuring out the nuance of controls, how to 'express' Kye.
After you get a hang of the controls, the endearing quality of this usually generic 3D RPGMaker asset type visual style sinks. Everything about these assets is bright, soothing, and melancholy. The camera panning to a fixed position on the other end of the environment box amuses you when you realize that 2/4 of them are obscured by trees.
princess/GirlSoftware argues in terms of channeling girliness that:
"if u can reimagine a game but make it girlier ur already contributing more to the medium than any guy as far as im concerned."
In this case, Kye has reimagined a feminine melancholy in what is often referred to as the 'joke game' or 'gag game'. Videoplay like You Have To Burn The Rope and Space Funeral are both games that amuse me, but quantify a more belligerent aura around their appeals of videoplay winstate hollowness.
I think this piece is snubbing false binaries of choice in games and leads to its punchline in a mellow enough way that its stings when it happens. It's a joke, but one that sees an anxious cruelty in losing a loved one and trying to find them again.
I recognize the perception as just paying lip service here, but I don't think that's the case. I think instead it's because I enjoy systems that enhance 'aliveness' and quell 'deadness'. This is a concept I've picked up from Alt Designer and professor Melos who defines these aspects as follows "An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is something to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it. It can be as simple as a 1-hour game made for a friend's birthday." in contrast to a deadgame which is "On the other path of history, we have the endless, dead, self-consuming Deadgame Industry, exhausting the creative lives of millions on producing these empty games that might be ‘fun’ but are, mostly, just there for us to whittle away the time and leave ourselves unchanged." While I've abandoned all use of the term 'game' for the moment, as I believe its very usage advocates deadness¹ , advocating instead for something like 'play environment', 'piece', 'videoplay', etc. I believe the general idea of aliveness being found in experiences small in scale is spot on, though I disagree slightly with his humanitarian agenda. While the aspect of 'deadness' in a play experience can speak to aspects of monetization, crunch, minority hatred, etc. which are all hideous. The appreciation for aliveness has nothing for me to do with a 'human' connection. Instead, its a connection to a 'thrust' in the articulation of a play experience as doing something distinct and beautiful is usually felt here in the same way that it is for poetry in the written word. Regardless of if experience is ambiguous in function, or clear, the compactness of the form allows for all of the dangly bits to read out much more clearly. Simply put, I just think their formal quality of engagement is superior in every way, and the only reason people play 'dead' games is because of pleasure trickery and to be a 'part of the discussion'.
The play environments I engage with at this point are mainly from a site brimming of aliveness, Itchio. The aura in general there is in a more open trading of communal resources and function, with few if any of the financialized aspects that can create hierarchies that build towards deadness and gamification². I believe deadness in games can be valuable, but mainly as a reflection of current capitalist conditions in the arts rather than any innate appreciation in the 'hollowness' of the corpse. Functionally deadness can also depict to me a specific kind of lost melancholy but it has to be done very particularly. Regardless deadness is not a significant value in what I tend to pursue.
That said, aliveness doesn't completely explain my preferences either. People may wonder why I tend to like stuff like this, supposed bottom of the barrel videoplay jank because its 'obviously rushed'. Well, it's ultimately because these small PC throwaway experiences are consistently transformative and new, and allow for a large amount of comparative data to draw on in relation. I truly am getting something out of experiences like this, it's not just for show.
The only main issue I ever tend to take with small scale alive play experiences is aspects of writing, stuff like typos or weak word choice, excessive alliteration, etc. Those have been avoided here and that's good enough for me. I think its better to not see yourself as being 'tricked' or 'disappointed' by such small experiences. Nor should be any shame in conveying a world in 30 minutes or less. On the contrary, the thrust of that shame should go to audience mob vindictiveness over the grievance of 'expectations'. Anyway, I hope Kye makes more of these soon I thought it was really cute and has exactly the visual sensitivity I crave for these days.
----------------------
1. I recognize it's an extremely bizarre take on my part to throw out the term 'game' as if its a dirty word, but I think it might be useful to know I'm not alone. Iconoclast dev Chris Crawford says something similar when laying out the syllogistic logical network between 'game', 'play', and 'fun' before ultimately lampooning them, saying that
"The problem with this reasoning lies in the fact that the words "game," "play," and "fun" are in flux. They have historically been associated with the behavior of children, yet in the last century, with the creation of significant amounts of leisure time, adults have taken up play as well. This new, adult kind of play is still play by any definition, but the word "fun" doesn't quite fit the adult's experience."
He uses this analysis of the rampant fluctuation in the terminology to prod at the term 'fun' as destabilized, which I think is correct to do. This was mainly for the attempt to lampoon the 'Fun Factor' theory of design, but where does that leave 'game'. Well in my view this term is also a form of strict infantilization, if you frame such experience as a 'game' then you risk de-emphasizing their maturity into some isolated experience with no 'bioreality' (that you don't spend time sitting with it, or use your eyes to actually view it, etc). Furthermore that its also not something to be taken seriously or considered outside tabletop game functions like a win state or as if an experience is supposed to 'give' you something in particular, like you would a child. It also deemphasizes risk, traffic lights are a 'game' within the field of game theory but playing it as if its zero sum (valuing your own time at the expense of everyone else) will cause you to risk suffering and death. If everyone framed and treated traffic lights as a 'game' then people would try to 'game' the system and endanger themselves and others more in the process. In my view this 'gamification' of everyday life is a bad thing. By compelling myself to speak of exeriences as if they are games is to pull a highway robbery on what they are expressing to me. I take no judgement for people who continue to use it but I want to rid myself of it, at least for a while.
On the other hand, what about the word 'play'? Surely it's culpable of one in the same? For me, concepts of 'leisure' and 'play' at least only speak to the specific behaviors the audience has to engage in, a form of enhanced input. Flipping through channels is 'playing with the TV' you can 'play with' a movie by rewinding it, etc but neither is a 'game'. Just in the same way that I've come to a violent opinion within myself that there is no such function as 'the arts' the same is said for 'games'. They both reek of me of industry, trying to justify its habituation. That all said, in order to anchor down what we are specifically doing here is to call it a computer 'play environment' so that we can segregate it as an isolated function of experience. We can be even more word anal some other time.
2. If you would excuse the tangent, there's one exception: The GameJam. GameJam's are not in themselves a bad concept, but I take issue with the time constraints on many of them, often being only a week or two. Along with often the designation of a 'winner'. Meaning that what becomes rewarded from this structure is a small scale version of the 'crunch' hierarchy which praises the most 'polished' work of the bunch. Other parasitic process of play design, voting out all the aspects of a games work on a public pool for the 'best game'. All this crap ends up creating a lot of works on the platform with a profound amount of 'deadness' within them, while also causing an unfathomable amount of harm. At this point I find those jams utterly deplorable in function. I've explored this 'abandonment' of creative labor in my Yo! Noid 2 write up here if you're interested, despite my love of it I think it's deeply engaged with 'deadness' as they had to go back and make a more 'finalized' version of the game on its own later due to bugs etc. With that said, there are good GameJams, but they are far and few between as of now. It should also be mentioned that most games included into these more deplorable jams do end up being good games but they usually are not the 'winners' of those jams which tend inhabit the most 'deadness'.
-----------------------------
References:
Betsy Hospital Game FAQ by the Catamites http://harmonyzone.org/text/betsyhospital.html
video game feminization hypnosis by GirlSoftware
https://girlsoftware.itch.io/vgfh
Deadgames and Alivegames by Melos https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2021-01-10%20Deadgames%20and%20Alivegames
Excerpt from Chris Crawford on Game Design
https://flylib.com/books/en/2.178.1.21/1/
CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny
The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.
It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007
"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?
I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².
Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that
"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."
Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.
I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.
I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.
-------------------------------------------------------
1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.
2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~
3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case
The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.
It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007
"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?
I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².
Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that
"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."
Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.
I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.
I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.
-------------------------------------------------------
1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.
2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~
3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case
Highly worth playing! I feel like this is the computer games enthusiast equivalent of enjoying a really sensitive and heartfelt cartoon (what comes to mind being Steven Universe or MLP). More to the point, there's often a lot of machismo jeering over seeing such displays of honesty and communicating sensitive information as crude and childish. I feel like by taking something so personal and painful like being trans in japan it displays a least to me how both at complete aversion to honesty or instead just sugarcoating the text as 'wholesome' and saying nothing else obscures the genuine bite underneath the surface.
Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry. Nobody dies if you make a wrong decision. The stakes are low and mundane but the rewards within the story system themselves are very high. The rewards outleap the risks in leaps and bounds, but shame creates a distortion effect where the rewards do not seem remotely worth it.
In America, where I'm playing this game from, the shame of asking a service place for particular accommodations is miniscule at best. 'Karen' customers in America come out of especially consumer privileging relationships with the service industry. American culture puts emphasis of shame instead to authenticity, employment dependency, and educational accommodations. There's a degree where which in private life there's a demand to be your 'authentic' self and that if you fail to meet up to the grand grin of authenticity you're not being a people person. However in employment life there's a degree instead to service the customer and the employer, to be everybody but yourself. Transphobia is most felt as an adult in America from the effects of employment discrimination like this.
I bring this point up mainly in relation to the zenful construction here, this cultural distinction is anticipated. Yes these considerations from the protagonist Haru are genuinely not that big of a deal to an American. For the people in Japan though these considerations are no laughing matter, bothering the system by asking for those accommodations is impolite and rude, which is a huge deal. The general impulse to a lot of these questions is 2nd hand cringe in japan, a higher likelihood to not make trouble. I believe part of what is great about this work is that it exposes within this cultural difference an implicit understanding just how hard and just how internal this process is.
I think the focus on specifically Japanese leisure experience reflects this to. The ginseng tea, clothing, and baths all have a quality of relaxing a tension. When Haru does get in a bath she mentions that she can feel the muscles in her body getting less tense. A lot of shame and self loathing itself marks itself in the body, its no surprise that Haru speaks often of being worn down and sleeping so much, and being 'too tired to talk about transgender stuff' if you refuse a lot of it. That effective connection between stress, shame, and discomfort and active bodily pain through not being able to be involved in the same leisure activity as everyone else speaks to a specific pain in discrimination that isn't generally touched on.
That's ultimately what makes the 'wholesomeness' of this text most worthwhile. It educates in the most non-intrusive way possible, hearts are deducted if you don't correct people for misgendering Haru or correcting people asking deadnames. You as the player are then implicitly encouraged by the games mechanics to go back in time and pick a different option. The game is encouraging you as much as possible to experience more. Going for the good endings is novel and going for the bad endings is just kind of boring. That doesn't mean people who got bad endings first in one night, hot springs are bad people. Instead I'm attempting to point out that such a mundane and transparent story with simple mechanics can reveal the concerns of the culture it spawned from.
There's a few different stories about particularly American reflection of trans shame. For purposes of here I'll highlight one He Fucked The Girl Out of Me, a text all about how labor relations and poverty create the blocks for shame. There is something very clearly vile and violent about that story, being around seedy people you have to fake fawning to. I believe that just as a lot of Japanese people would probably learn a lot about their cultural differences by playing that game, people outside Japan can see what one night, hot springs puts forward. Both reflect how trans people are suppressed and do it by focusing on the struggles of the mundane. Of having a tension in your muscles you cant get rid of.
Most importantly, what I love about these 'wholesome' texts is specifically how they try to bid and build networks of solidarity. In one night, hot springs being a good ally is about speaking up for discriminated people and motivating them into having a better time without pushing them, it's about communicating honestly about difficult topics. I believe that stories like this help us slowly push past the flaws of our own nation's culture and slowly build towards a necessary global solidarity.
This is why I take 'cartoons' more seriously and love them so much. The moral of the story is more complex the more you think about its wider implications and applications. Anybody who liked this game, you basically just played a really cozy episode of a TV cartoon, so think twice next time before you make jokes about bronies, otaku, or even 'disney adults' etc. They are not immature adults, they are people trying to interface with characterization and moral messages that are focused on solidarity and connecting with others. Tragic or violent art is often too stressful and reductive to those interests and so art very similar to this make it to their top 10s instead.
Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry. Nobody dies if you make a wrong decision. The stakes are low and mundane but the rewards within the story system themselves are very high. The rewards outleap the risks in leaps and bounds, but shame creates a distortion effect where the rewards do not seem remotely worth it.
In America, where I'm playing this game from, the shame of asking a service place for particular accommodations is miniscule at best. 'Karen' customers in America come out of especially consumer privileging relationships with the service industry. American culture puts emphasis of shame instead to authenticity, employment dependency, and educational accommodations. There's a degree where which in private life there's a demand to be your 'authentic' self and that if you fail to meet up to the grand grin of authenticity you're not being a people person. However in employment life there's a degree instead to service the customer and the employer, to be everybody but yourself. Transphobia is most felt as an adult in America from the effects of employment discrimination like this.
I bring this point up mainly in relation to the zenful construction here, this cultural distinction is anticipated. Yes these considerations from the protagonist Haru are genuinely not that big of a deal to an American. For the people in Japan though these considerations are no laughing matter, bothering the system by asking for those accommodations is impolite and rude, which is a huge deal. The general impulse to a lot of these questions is 2nd hand cringe in japan, a higher likelihood to not make trouble. I believe part of what is great about this work is that it exposes within this cultural difference an implicit understanding just how hard and just how internal this process is.
I think the focus on specifically Japanese leisure experience reflects this to. The ginseng tea, clothing, and baths all have a quality of relaxing a tension. When Haru does get in a bath she mentions that she can feel the muscles in her body getting less tense. A lot of shame and self loathing itself marks itself in the body, its no surprise that Haru speaks often of being worn down and sleeping so much, and being 'too tired to talk about transgender stuff' if you refuse a lot of it. That effective connection between stress, shame, and discomfort and active bodily pain through not being able to be involved in the same leisure activity as everyone else speaks to a specific pain in discrimination that isn't generally touched on.
That's ultimately what makes the 'wholesomeness' of this text most worthwhile. It educates in the most non-intrusive way possible, hearts are deducted if you don't correct people for misgendering Haru or correcting people asking deadnames. You as the player are then implicitly encouraged by the games mechanics to go back in time and pick a different option. The game is encouraging you as much as possible to experience more. Going for the good endings is novel and going for the bad endings is just kind of boring. That doesn't mean people who got bad endings first in one night, hot springs are bad people. Instead I'm attempting to point out that such a mundane and transparent story with simple mechanics can reveal the concerns of the culture it spawned from.
There's a few different stories about particularly American reflection of trans shame. For purposes of here I'll highlight one He Fucked The Girl Out of Me, a text all about how labor relations and poverty create the blocks for shame. There is something very clearly vile and violent about that story, being around seedy people you have to fake fawning to. I believe that just as a lot of Japanese people would probably learn a lot about their cultural differences by playing that game, people outside Japan can see what one night, hot springs puts forward. Both reflect how trans people are suppressed and do it by focusing on the struggles of the mundane. Of having a tension in your muscles you cant get rid of.
Most importantly, what I love about these 'wholesome' texts is specifically how they try to bid and build networks of solidarity. In one night, hot springs being a good ally is about speaking up for discriminated people and motivating them into having a better time without pushing them, it's about communicating honestly about difficult topics. I believe that stories like this help us slowly push past the flaws of our own nation's culture and slowly build towards a necessary global solidarity.
This is why I take 'cartoons' more seriously and love them so much. The moral of the story is more complex the more you think about its wider implications and applications. Anybody who liked this game, you basically just played a really cozy episode of a TV cartoon, so think twice next time before you make jokes about bronies, otaku, or even 'disney adults' etc. They are not immature adults, they are people trying to interface with characterization and moral messages that are focused on solidarity and connecting with others. Tragic or violent art is often too stressful and reductive to those interests and so art very similar to this make it to their top 10s instead.
2022
Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?
Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?
To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET
The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.
While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.
The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.
A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.
The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.
Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.
I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.
It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.
Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?
To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET
The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.
While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.
The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.
A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.
The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.
Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.
I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.
It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.
Firstly I'm openly reflecting upon this game so that people know that if you care about LGBT aubiographical trauma games (ie. No One Can Ever Know, Madotsuki's Closet, etc.) this is a very significant one to get to. My guess is that if you follow LGBT people, including me, youre going to see this on a lot of 'end of year' lists.
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
2014
CW: Suicide, Pandemic, Helplessness, Poverty, Global Issues Getting Worse
On Spoilers: I'm not actually a fan of spoiler tagging the whole document, so I have tacked in a 'spoiler section' point warning within it, with a bold capital lettering along with an 'end of spoilers' section. So just read around those points if you're interested in playing the game yourself and just want to know what I think in advance.
Est Reading Time: 15 minutes without spoilers, 20 with them.
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now this is a fascinating one. In this is an apocalypse horror game, the main mechanic is literally 'patience'. It's a sort of anti incremental game, you have no control over anything, all you can do is wait. You are placed in a very small dingy 5ftx5ft prison room with a clock ticking on the wall, a bed, and a thick iron safe door with a grate on the bottom which you can't escape from. Through the grate, letters come streaming in under your jail door from various characters who want to speak to you. The primary one being the antagonist named 'Mr. Money' who has imprisoned you with a specific purpose. You see, a majority of the population has been infected with a very deadly virus, and the only healthy people left are isolated in their jail cells. The problem here however is that a lot of those people are killing themselves, so as a result the game is about encouraging your character through this correspondence and various material gifts, like posters etc., in order to spirit you to keep on living. Since you have no control over escaping from your cell, you just have to be patient and wait for people's letters to read about what's happening in the outside world.
The use of a very limited and garrish grey dented room goes a long way in making your stay feel as uncomfortable as possible, with some incredibly strong sound design backing it. There's a constant wind and clattering noise that brings an eerie quality to it all. The visual design of the letters and posters you adorn over time, while somewhat amateur in quality, are still made with a fine aesthetic craft. One of my favorite bits about the game is how each of the characters who send letters have very distinct visual designs around them and font choices that make them come to life.
For the most part, this game has a 'pulpy' quality to its horror where its riding the line as a dark joke in the mania of its writing similar to something like Little Inferno or Five Nights at Freddy's, coy yet dreadful. It grins at you while telling you that the world is currently being organ harvested, like a darker invader Zim (which would be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you know what that is). The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride. Less psychological horror and more psychological humdrum. That churning of dread in itself is so rare, that it's worth the price of admission on that point alone.¹
Yet, the ticket on the ride comes with quite a few caveats actually. For one, people have reported being seriously shaken up by this game. For one, a website peer Luna, who I highly respect has this to say "I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again."ᵃ Calling it a 'mind poison' and mentioning it made several of her friends contemplate if they should even continue living, as she passionately puts it "I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it.". This is a rather serious charge.
Following this incredibly dramatic and compelling rhetoric. There's also the spooky issues this game seemed to anticipate early about our real world condition. Issues of isolation, despondency, and viral pandemics, economic depressions, mass incarceration, and political desperation. Recently its adjacency to the COVID pandemic has garnered with it a great deal of follow-up traction. Which is unfortunate because it seems the author can't enjoy the profound discourse around this game, since there's one final nail in the coffin of its horrific settlement. A game which depicts a highly normalized world of suicidality, in which people risk their lives or kill themselves, has a dev who, 2 years after this games creation, was driven to suicide himself. That all being said I was not really unsettled or disturbed by it too deeply, as I tend to get a lot out of reflecting on the 'darker' parts of humanity. This is not meant to be an 'edgy' point but I love reading pessimistic works like No Longer Human or the philosophy of Cioran, and generally enjoy the genre of psychological horror writ large. So if you have anything close to my proclivities take that as the go ahead to try it for yourself ^-^
Regardless of the interesting relationships to the text mentioned above, I would argue the main trauma the work is trying to deal with, and why it seems so prophetic, is that it is very concerned with the economy. Throughout the game you are told about the shady dealing of 'Dr. Money' who has manufactured a viral plague and then sells people a shoddy antidote. He does it all, selling people's organs, threatening and blackmailing people, war profiteering etc. All for his own pockets. None of this is even a spoiler, this is actually set up in the standard yet gothic incremental game predecessor game Exoptable Money which sets the backdrop for the lore here. You don't have to play that game first but this one is actually meant to be a sequel with events here that were a 'wedged' side plot in that one. We get to read about the decaying of the world: gray, black, and red markets merge into one bloody torturous chimera. As the supposedly pure 'white market' withers away. It's a brutal apocalypse one that Peter Frase, describes in his work Four Futures, as exterminism. He argues there's a punnett square of possibilities that exist after capitalism as we know it, and the one with the most hierarchy and scarcity of resources, and by far the most devastating, is exterminism:
"In a world of hyperinequality and mass unemployment, you can try to buy off the masses for a while, and then you can try to repress them by force. But so long as immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that one day it may become impossible to hold them at bay. When mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor." ²
More worryingly, one of the reasons why this game seems like it was able to 'tell the future' on COVID³ is clarified in a followup article he did on how the events of covid are a concerning predictor that currently in our real life we are on track for the 'exterminist' endgame hosted by the moment by the Party of Death
"For the Party of Death, the pandemic itself begins to appear economically useful, and the measures needed to combat it can come to be seen as worse than the disease — which, from the narrow perspective of capital accumulation, they may well be."⁴
He then goes on to highlight in that same article a warning, that you shouldn't just think the Party of Death as some indignant GOP candidates, the NY Times, Friedman, and honestly just basic cabal news is pushing for 'opening the economy back up'. I'm not the only one who lived through it either, people were constantly putting down and lifting restrictions every other week it seemed. The accumulation of scarce resources into the pockets of the rich, and clear structural 'violence' viciously merge into one monster, much like the ghastly cannibalistic world of Cruelty Squad. The only difference between that game and this one is you're kept at a birds eye view.
However here's the bit where I think the text is most brilliant, and also the one I find so fascinating. One of the main things that you get early on that you can use to stave off your dreary environment and bad situation, is video games. See, early on you're given a game device, and your hysterical 'buddy' sponsored by the institution to keep you happy, starts to buy you games. It's only after the second game he says he's too poor to get you any more games and profusely apologizes, and then his desire to keep you happy only gets worse from there as he disembowels himself to give you more incredibly basic and simple games.
This to me, is the brunt of the trauma that I felt was being communicated, almost as a sort of open form question 'is it even ok for game devs to expect money?'. Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money. This being a hyperlink in the game, and imbedded as a sort of quiet plea in the ending of both after everything I've described so far, it feels just to include it in a reading of the game's themes. If that's not enough to sway you, the reveal of the first game is using cat fur and human organs as money generators. It doesn't take a scholar to see how economies of suffering would make a game developer feel insecure about offering something or asking for money for their work.
A lot of games on websites like itchio will sell their games in bundles for dirt cheap, there's always sales. The only people daring to sell games at the 60 dollar mark anymore are studios selling AAA exclusives on the newest console. Not even highly polished AAA steam games can resist a steam sale markdown after a few months. So in theory, game devs should not feel worried about this and I'd be the first to reassure them they can price their game however they feel is right without much ethical issue.
But look, let's actually not discard it, lets dwell with this insecurity for a moment. From the inside, it's hard for a highly isolated yet passionate game dev not to see and putting game experiences behind a paywall as not being self cannibalizing the same working class it's supportive of. Even in the best case scenario it might risk doing this. And the various worse case scenarios intensify as our global crises do. Climate change is only getting worse and asking for 5 dollars for a game might have you in a neurotic state that people might starve or miss their electric bill because of trying to support you and your work. Might rack up debt interest just to try out your game. Might lose an arm working at Walmart or amazon just in order to buy your cute independent game everybody is talking about, or worse, nobody. So, if you beg them in the form of kickstarters, whereby you can also try to justify your game dev abilities as a core ability you have then you avoid it right? In a weird inverse way, street begging has more dignity than a paywall from this sort of worldview. All the more sad is that compared to a lot of kickstarters Wertpol was not asking for all that much "Alright, so the kickstarter is over, and failed again at 3188€/12000€."⁴ he closes with "So I guess, currently, it’s ‘on hold’, possibly cancelled, I don’t know. I really don’t feel like thinking about any of this much more.`` The disappointment here is palpable. This is all in spite of the fact it got it 5 minutes of youtube fame through popular lets players like Markiplier playing it. A depressing reality is that when it comes to indie games, most don't recoup the funds to continue developing games themselves.
What is the one counterargument that can be done? Well for the people already dead from these sorts of insecurities about world purpose and ability, there is none. No charitable set of words is going to make the dead change their mind about the value of their art. Or bring much healing to the affected families, who probably wouldn't appreciate having the suicide seen as non-rational, like 'its ok little Timmy was just wrong about how much he hated himself' doesn't ring well. So I must say as sympathetically as possible here, I deeply understand. I'm not out to overwrite the insecurity of one lost and young dev so much as trying to pave a path out for those currently suffering5. Honestly it's less a matter of being rational or not so much as being disconnected from kinships of care.
While not all suicidality relates itself so heavily to the feeling of the violence impacting others and themselves just by being alive, most at least tend out of self isolated loops of despair that are difficult to feel escape from. However if there is any way to quell these traumas for the living, one potentiality might be through gaming itself. In this setting, the entirely grim situation and circumstances can be almost entirely blocked out by minimalist gameboy games. Almost all are actually playable and Buddy mentions to you that the games have frustrated people with their difficulty. There are twenty levels for each and they all consist of dodging obstacles for a goal. They are all fun to play and they kept me occupied from the awful situation. I literally played the entire game hooked on these minigames, grinding through them for badges that would align my room, and stopping to read letters in between, because what else was I supposed to do? What was supposed to be unbearable became for me, actually meditative and fun, dampening the still upsetting tale within. For most of it I was in a better mood than I wasn't. A similar use of gaming inside the game, in order to stave off depression, shows up in 'No One Can Ever Know' and using it lowers your dysphoria from impacting you. It's just as effective in that text as well at 'dampening' the pain of being alive there as well. Computer games dampening the effects of trauma seem to have a legitimate is small amount of research supporting those claims⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ⁶. So perhaps game devs can take solace in knowing that their games can actually heal a lot more than they think. Even if it's a dreary art game I think the same basic point holds true. And rather than throwing these games in a dungeon, basic optional⁷ yet easy to read in advance content warnings about whats inside of each would go a much longer way than just throwing every game we don't like into a fire. If I sound passionate on this its because these same echos against challenging art exist in the discourses around queer novels in high schools, which many districts including the one I live in in america is currently out to pull from shelves.
Nonetheless, it's this focus on economies as harm, is bound to take an incredible toll if somebody is already having self esteem issues. The constant use of suicide in the narrative feels more like bleak if somewhat humorous at points narrative device rather than something you're supposed to consider seriously as an individual. As a matter of fact your character doesn't actually have a option to kill themselves even with the only 'decision' in the game, you just bear witness to others that do. At the same time, the letters you get from the people who do are wistful 'you can go on where I failed'. I feel like this game is answering a dark echo about economies themselves, which is to say that we call when they aren't working as desired depressions and recessions, but don't actually treat them as such. Which for me at least is a daring form of storytelling.
STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
I think another point where this economic concern comes across is that your main character is constantly being sent letters of pure sincerity and gifts. Your well spoken woodworking friend Salvador will over the course of the story send you a table. Other people send posters as mentioned earlier, and one even a cake.
This speaks to another part of economic powerlessness that people don't really like to address, which is the power imbalance found in gift giving. I'm incredibly poor and for the most part of my life young as I am, many people around me were getting me gifts and nice things. Even in my current state now, close friends and family often send me money, clothes, etc. Some will send me steam games and it goes on like this. Yet I can almost never repay in kind, I just watch as people send me things and have life issues. Sometimes I do something particularly wrong by a friend, and stop being friends. Only to then be left by myself with the present remains. After a certain point in the game, not only do you feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts from the various benefactors, some who you care for more than others, but you can't do anything in return either. This is actually the most direct and specific the depressive function gets and even then its economic, you just literally can't because you're in jail in the confines of the game. More interesting than that, the ones that care the most are equally hurting themselves the most when trying to help. Whereas the evil Doctor Money is the only one who expects repayment for his 'gift' of a jail cell (your organs). Still, eventually there's a physical feeling to the gifts, they don't feel good, they feel like the only vestiges of memory of others as it attaches to the outside. The imbalance of the world of gifts and how it can reinforce a person's sense of looming inadequacy is told brilliantly by your player character having no voice at all.
Finally I think it's worth mentioning where the game falls short. There are 3 characters aside from Dr. Money, who all try to be your friend. One is Salvador, your old friend who ventures across to a different land, who has known you for a long time. Yet, it's not ever explained how he knows to send letters to you since the course of your understanding of the confines of the jail cell exists purely for you, and how they don't get screened out entirely means his feuding for your attention exists only for thinly held narrative reasons. He also electrocutes himself to death via the generator. Then you have of course your buddy who is mostly well written but, his hysterical laughing over text uses a throttling of capitalization and lowercase which combined with a creepy poster makes him feel like way too gimmicky, although breaking character by pleading with you quietly to be happy is neat, they didn't need to write him so psychotically. The worst of them all however, is how they treat Charlotte. Charlotte is the lonely baker girl who lives near the prison and sells cakes. She's sweet and plays you music at one point. The problem however is that she commits suicide and tells you right after you escape 'sorry I couldnt be more patient but anyway'. The other issue here is that she is only bonded to your silent protagonist out of a random knowledge she has that you and her are both the only people not hit by the virus in town. For her to be this lonely yearning flowery girl who commits suicide just before you can get to her, even though she knows you're in there is very twee and offensively exploitative of women for a cheap narrative trick. Which sucks because the rest of the game runs completely fine on suicide. It's not the most offensive thing in the world or anything but it's far from narratively ideal.
Even then, there's other smaller issues too. For example, the Triangle game which meant as a geometry dash clone takes input of several jumps when you press the button, allowing you to fly and even go outside the screen, there's no way to play it without this flying glitch happening since a press takes several jump inputs at once. Another is how Salvador, who does not know the confines of your room is able to build you a table that is perfectly aligned in the room, in fact I think it being too big or small would have encouraged the points being made more.
END OF SPOILERS
The final thing I will say is I don't think it's reasonable to discard difficult art about despair as inherently harmful. This is an instinct I completely get since I found the depiction of despair and futility in Omori and Danganronpa so upsetting I could not actually finish the games. I get the desire to either condemn these titles or at least make them inferior. But self deprecation, despair, depression, etc. are all deep emotions in our real life, and to repress our relationship to their depictions in art is to fall into the same maniacal trap of forced hostage happiness that this game criticizes. The more we repress ourselves from the misanthropic parts of life, the harder it becomes to accept things like Global Warming, Genocides, War, Depression, etc as the violent realities they are. That all being said I will again reassert that this game is not far the faint of heart, its an abrasive experience of powerlessness that counters the typical designs of why people want to play videogames.
That all being said, I know that even after writing all of this I still haven't gotten rid of my own feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The game didn't give me them, just clarified them in nice ways. I feel kind of bad that as minimalist and simple as this, I couldn't accurately address the various other more nuanced depressions and discomforts in the game. Then there's the dearth in being able to make this a compelling piece to read, it's rather dour and unexciting. Honestly, this is likely because I'm still quite new to writing on games but I also try to put a lot of myself and knowledge into my writing as well. At the end of the day, maybe the fact that I abstracted depression to larger socio political issues means that I'm a bit of a death whisperer. For me, struggling with those feelings are just another part of the disappointments and degradations of life and to that effect perhaps that's also why I find a serious appreciation for art like this as well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
a. From Luna's insight on the game link. I do end up somewhat critical of this text in this piece, but I only do so out of respect to the original writer as a peer I hold great respect for on the website. Not to mention she was who originally spurned me to give this one a try in the 1st place.
1. Although besides my cautiously positive praise on this game, there's a few other games on similar notes I think are worth prioritizing first, Little Inferno, Static End, and Trash the Planet, along with Exoptable Money itself. You could consider this game a much rougher hard mode to the themes and focuses of these games. Consider those other games just general recommendations in any other case.
2.Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, sorry no page number on this one its an EPUB
3. I mean "Seems" here quite strictly. I don't believe in Predictive Programming and even if you did, a primary plot point in the story that is revealed is that Dr. Money manufactured the virus into existence, which makes him more similar to Bob Paige from Deus Ex than real life COVID. The pandemic connections are well meaning but not bringing up these facts can accidentally play into the hands of ludicrous conspiracies like that COVID-19 was lab grown. Which leads to other conspiracies like that the elite can just manufacture a deadly virus and various other bioweapons, a sorry conspiracy theory that even my highly liberal facebook dad seems to believe in. There's definitely some responsibility to be had to not just reference where games anticipate the future but also where they don't and probably don't even try to.
4.The Rise In the Party of Death link. For what it's worth, the leftism is not a politics I'm trying to push on you in this reading so much as a general understanding that the world we live in is slipping quickly towards apocalypse.
5. "We found that intervening with either Tetris or Word games four days after the trauma film was effective: participants in both Tetris and Word games conditions had relatively fewer intrusions after the intervention than participants without a task. The evidence for this finding was strong. " Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma link
6. "But Colder Carras emphasizes that the genre or specific game isn’t what necessarily helped with recovery. The benefits, she says, stemmed more from the connections the Veterans made with other video game players; the distractions they created for themselves by playing the games and removing their focus, for example, from alcohol or drugs; and the meaning they derived from the games." Study: Video games can help Veterans recover from mental health challenges link
7. My thoughts on Content Warning or the uncharitably termed 'Trigger Warnings' is complicated, because they can be spoilers in themselves in the sense they tip off what a piece of art is about. For some, knowing the exact confines of them all may be unwanted and take away from the 'surprise' of the experience even if having 1 or 2 mental blocks around certain content would make you want to air on the side of caution in all cases anyway. Personally, I'm rather indifferent to spoilers but it's something I think about a lot. I hope one day backloggd allows you to spoiler tag specific sections of text because I definitely would like to make it opt in :/
On Spoilers: I'm not actually a fan of spoiler tagging the whole document, so I have tacked in a 'spoiler section' point warning within it, with a bold capital lettering along with an 'end of spoilers' section. So just read around those points if you're interested in playing the game yourself and just want to know what I think in advance.
Est Reading Time: 15 minutes without spoilers, 20 with them.
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now this is a fascinating one. In this is an apocalypse horror game, the main mechanic is literally 'patience'. It's a sort of anti incremental game, you have no control over anything, all you can do is wait. You are placed in a very small dingy 5ftx5ft prison room with a clock ticking on the wall, a bed, and a thick iron safe door with a grate on the bottom which you can't escape from. Through the grate, letters come streaming in under your jail door from various characters who want to speak to you. The primary one being the antagonist named 'Mr. Money' who has imprisoned you with a specific purpose. You see, a majority of the population has been infected with a very deadly virus, and the only healthy people left are isolated in their jail cells. The problem here however is that a lot of those people are killing themselves, so as a result the game is about encouraging your character through this correspondence and various material gifts, like posters etc., in order to spirit you to keep on living. Since you have no control over escaping from your cell, you just have to be patient and wait for people's letters to read about what's happening in the outside world.
The use of a very limited and garrish grey dented room goes a long way in making your stay feel as uncomfortable as possible, with some incredibly strong sound design backing it. There's a constant wind and clattering noise that brings an eerie quality to it all. The visual design of the letters and posters you adorn over time, while somewhat amateur in quality, are still made with a fine aesthetic craft. One of my favorite bits about the game is how each of the characters who send letters have very distinct visual designs around them and font choices that make them come to life.
For the most part, this game has a 'pulpy' quality to its horror where its riding the line as a dark joke in the mania of its writing similar to something like Little Inferno or Five Nights at Freddy's, coy yet dreadful. It grins at you while telling you that the world is currently being organ harvested, like a darker invader Zim (which would be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you know what that is). The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride. Less psychological horror and more psychological humdrum. That churning of dread in itself is so rare, that it's worth the price of admission on that point alone.¹
Yet, the ticket on the ride comes with quite a few caveats actually. For one, people have reported being seriously shaken up by this game. For one, a website peer Luna, who I highly respect has this to say "I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again."ᵃ Calling it a 'mind poison' and mentioning it made several of her friends contemplate if they should even continue living, as she passionately puts it "I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it.". This is a rather serious charge.
Following this incredibly dramatic and compelling rhetoric. There's also the spooky issues this game seemed to anticipate early about our real world condition. Issues of isolation, despondency, and viral pandemics, economic depressions, mass incarceration, and political desperation. Recently its adjacency to the COVID pandemic has garnered with it a great deal of follow-up traction. Which is unfortunate because it seems the author can't enjoy the profound discourse around this game, since there's one final nail in the coffin of its horrific settlement. A game which depicts a highly normalized world of suicidality, in which people risk their lives or kill themselves, has a dev who, 2 years after this games creation, was driven to suicide himself. That all being said I was not really unsettled or disturbed by it too deeply, as I tend to get a lot out of reflecting on the 'darker' parts of humanity. This is not meant to be an 'edgy' point but I love reading pessimistic works like No Longer Human or the philosophy of Cioran, and generally enjoy the genre of psychological horror writ large. So if you have anything close to my proclivities take that as the go ahead to try it for yourself ^-^
Regardless of the interesting relationships to the text mentioned above, I would argue the main trauma the work is trying to deal with, and why it seems so prophetic, is that it is very concerned with the economy. Throughout the game you are told about the shady dealing of 'Dr. Money' who has manufactured a viral plague and then sells people a shoddy antidote. He does it all, selling people's organs, threatening and blackmailing people, war profiteering etc. All for his own pockets. None of this is even a spoiler, this is actually set up in the standard yet gothic incremental game predecessor game Exoptable Money which sets the backdrop for the lore here. You don't have to play that game first but this one is actually meant to be a sequel with events here that were a 'wedged' side plot in that one. We get to read about the decaying of the world: gray, black, and red markets merge into one bloody torturous chimera. As the supposedly pure 'white market' withers away. It's a brutal apocalypse one that Peter Frase, describes in his work Four Futures, as exterminism. He argues there's a punnett square of possibilities that exist after capitalism as we know it, and the one with the most hierarchy and scarcity of resources, and by far the most devastating, is exterminism:
"In a world of hyperinequality and mass unemployment, you can try to buy off the masses for a while, and then you can try to repress them by force. But so long as immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that one day it may become impossible to hold them at bay. When mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor." ²
More worryingly, one of the reasons why this game seems like it was able to 'tell the future' on COVID³ is clarified in a followup article he did on how the events of covid are a concerning predictor that currently in our real life we are on track for the 'exterminist' endgame hosted by the moment by the Party of Death
"For the Party of Death, the pandemic itself begins to appear economically useful, and the measures needed to combat it can come to be seen as worse than the disease — which, from the narrow perspective of capital accumulation, they may well be."⁴
He then goes on to highlight in that same article a warning, that you shouldn't just think the Party of Death as some indignant GOP candidates, the NY Times, Friedman, and honestly just basic cabal news is pushing for 'opening the economy back up'. I'm not the only one who lived through it either, people were constantly putting down and lifting restrictions every other week it seemed. The accumulation of scarce resources into the pockets of the rich, and clear structural 'violence' viciously merge into one monster, much like the ghastly cannibalistic world of Cruelty Squad. The only difference between that game and this one is you're kept at a birds eye view.
However here's the bit where I think the text is most brilliant, and also the one I find so fascinating. One of the main things that you get early on that you can use to stave off your dreary environment and bad situation, is video games. See, early on you're given a game device, and your hysterical 'buddy' sponsored by the institution to keep you happy, starts to buy you games. It's only after the second game he says he's too poor to get you any more games and profusely apologizes, and then his desire to keep you happy only gets worse from there as he disembowels himself to give you more incredibly basic and simple games.
This to me, is the brunt of the trauma that I felt was being communicated, almost as a sort of open form question 'is it even ok for game devs to expect money?'. Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money. This being a hyperlink in the game, and imbedded as a sort of quiet plea in the ending of both after everything I've described so far, it feels just to include it in a reading of the game's themes. If that's not enough to sway you, the reveal of the first game is using cat fur and human organs as money generators. It doesn't take a scholar to see how economies of suffering would make a game developer feel insecure about offering something or asking for money for their work.
A lot of games on websites like itchio will sell their games in bundles for dirt cheap, there's always sales. The only people daring to sell games at the 60 dollar mark anymore are studios selling AAA exclusives on the newest console. Not even highly polished AAA steam games can resist a steam sale markdown after a few months. So in theory, game devs should not feel worried about this and I'd be the first to reassure them they can price their game however they feel is right without much ethical issue.
But look, let's actually not discard it, lets dwell with this insecurity for a moment. From the inside, it's hard for a highly isolated yet passionate game dev not to see and putting game experiences behind a paywall as not being self cannibalizing the same working class it's supportive of. Even in the best case scenario it might risk doing this. And the various worse case scenarios intensify as our global crises do. Climate change is only getting worse and asking for 5 dollars for a game might have you in a neurotic state that people might starve or miss their electric bill because of trying to support you and your work. Might rack up debt interest just to try out your game. Might lose an arm working at Walmart or amazon just in order to buy your cute independent game everybody is talking about, or worse, nobody. So, if you beg them in the form of kickstarters, whereby you can also try to justify your game dev abilities as a core ability you have then you avoid it right? In a weird inverse way, street begging has more dignity than a paywall from this sort of worldview. All the more sad is that compared to a lot of kickstarters Wertpol was not asking for all that much "Alright, so the kickstarter is over, and failed again at 3188€/12000€."⁴ he closes with "So I guess, currently, it’s ‘on hold’, possibly cancelled, I don’t know. I really don’t feel like thinking about any of this much more.`` The disappointment here is palpable. This is all in spite of the fact it got it 5 minutes of youtube fame through popular lets players like Markiplier playing it. A depressing reality is that when it comes to indie games, most don't recoup the funds to continue developing games themselves.
What is the one counterargument that can be done? Well for the people already dead from these sorts of insecurities about world purpose and ability, there is none. No charitable set of words is going to make the dead change their mind about the value of their art. Or bring much healing to the affected families, who probably wouldn't appreciate having the suicide seen as non-rational, like 'its ok little Timmy was just wrong about how much he hated himself' doesn't ring well. So I must say as sympathetically as possible here, I deeply understand. I'm not out to overwrite the insecurity of one lost and young dev so much as trying to pave a path out for those currently suffering5. Honestly it's less a matter of being rational or not so much as being disconnected from kinships of care.
While not all suicidality relates itself so heavily to the feeling of the violence impacting others and themselves just by being alive, most at least tend out of self isolated loops of despair that are difficult to feel escape from. However if there is any way to quell these traumas for the living, one potentiality might be through gaming itself. In this setting, the entirely grim situation and circumstances can be almost entirely blocked out by minimalist gameboy games. Almost all are actually playable and Buddy mentions to you that the games have frustrated people with their difficulty. There are twenty levels for each and they all consist of dodging obstacles for a goal. They are all fun to play and they kept me occupied from the awful situation. I literally played the entire game hooked on these minigames, grinding through them for badges that would align my room, and stopping to read letters in between, because what else was I supposed to do? What was supposed to be unbearable became for me, actually meditative and fun, dampening the still upsetting tale within. For most of it I was in a better mood than I wasn't. A similar use of gaming inside the game, in order to stave off depression, shows up in 'No One Can Ever Know' and using it lowers your dysphoria from impacting you. It's just as effective in that text as well at 'dampening' the pain of being alive there as well. Computer games dampening the effects of trauma seem to have a legitimate is small amount of research supporting those claims⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ⁶. So perhaps game devs can take solace in knowing that their games can actually heal a lot more than they think. Even if it's a dreary art game I think the same basic point holds true. And rather than throwing these games in a dungeon, basic optional⁷ yet easy to read in advance content warnings about whats inside of each would go a much longer way than just throwing every game we don't like into a fire. If I sound passionate on this its because these same echos against challenging art exist in the discourses around queer novels in high schools, which many districts including the one I live in in america is currently out to pull from shelves.
Nonetheless, it's this focus on economies as harm, is bound to take an incredible toll if somebody is already having self esteem issues. The constant use of suicide in the narrative feels more like bleak if somewhat humorous at points narrative device rather than something you're supposed to consider seriously as an individual. As a matter of fact your character doesn't actually have a option to kill themselves even with the only 'decision' in the game, you just bear witness to others that do. At the same time, the letters you get from the people who do are wistful 'you can go on where I failed'. I feel like this game is answering a dark echo about economies themselves, which is to say that we call when they aren't working as desired depressions and recessions, but don't actually treat them as such. Which for me at least is a daring form of storytelling.
STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
I think another point where this economic concern comes across is that your main character is constantly being sent letters of pure sincerity and gifts. Your well spoken woodworking friend Salvador will over the course of the story send you a table. Other people send posters as mentioned earlier, and one even a cake.
This speaks to another part of economic powerlessness that people don't really like to address, which is the power imbalance found in gift giving. I'm incredibly poor and for the most part of my life young as I am, many people around me were getting me gifts and nice things. Even in my current state now, close friends and family often send me money, clothes, etc. Some will send me steam games and it goes on like this. Yet I can almost never repay in kind, I just watch as people send me things and have life issues. Sometimes I do something particularly wrong by a friend, and stop being friends. Only to then be left by myself with the present remains. After a certain point in the game, not only do you feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts from the various benefactors, some who you care for more than others, but you can't do anything in return either. This is actually the most direct and specific the depressive function gets and even then its economic, you just literally can't because you're in jail in the confines of the game. More interesting than that, the ones that care the most are equally hurting themselves the most when trying to help. Whereas the evil Doctor Money is the only one who expects repayment for his 'gift' of a jail cell (your organs). Still, eventually there's a physical feeling to the gifts, they don't feel good, they feel like the only vestiges of memory of others as it attaches to the outside. The imbalance of the world of gifts and how it can reinforce a person's sense of looming inadequacy is told brilliantly by your player character having no voice at all.
Finally I think it's worth mentioning where the game falls short. There are 3 characters aside from Dr. Money, who all try to be your friend. One is Salvador, your old friend who ventures across to a different land, who has known you for a long time. Yet, it's not ever explained how he knows to send letters to you since the course of your understanding of the confines of the jail cell exists purely for you, and how they don't get screened out entirely means his feuding for your attention exists only for thinly held narrative reasons. He also electrocutes himself to death via the generator. Then you have of course your buddy who is mostly well written but, his hysterical laughing over text uses a throttling of capitalization and lowercase which combined with a creepy poster makes him feel like way too gimmicky, although breaking character by pleading with you quietly to be happy is neat, they didn't need to write him so psychotically. The worst of them all however, is how they treat Charlotte. Charlotte is the lonely baker girl who lives near the prison and sells cakes. She's sweet and plays you music at one point. The problem however is that she commits suicide and tells you right after you escape 'sorry I couldnt be more patient but anyway'. The other issue here is that she is only bonded to your silent protagonist out of a random knowledge she has that you and her are both the only people not hit by the virus in town. For her to be this lonely yearning flowery girl who commits suicide just before you can get to her, even though she knows you're in there is very twee and offensively exploitative of women for a cheap narrative trick. Which sucks because the rest of the game runs completely fine on suicide. It's not the most offensive thing in the world or anything but it's far from narratively ideal.
Even then, there's other smaller issues too. For example, the Triangle game which meant as a geometry dash clone takes input of several jumps when you press the button, allowing you to fly and even go outside the screen, there's no way to play it without this flying glitch happening since a press takes several jump inputs at once. Another is how Salvador, who does not know the confines of your room is able to build you a table that is perfectly aligned in the room, in fact I think it being too big or small would have encouraged the points being made more.
END OF SPOILERS
The final thing I will say is I don't think it's reasonable to discard difficult art about despair as inherently harmful. This is an instinct I completely get since I found the depiction of despair and futility in Omori and Danganronpa so upsetting I could not actually finish the games. I get the desire to either condemn these titles or at least make them inferior. But self deprecation, despair, depression, etc. are all deep emotions in our real life, and to repress our relationship to their depictions in art is to fall into the same maniacal trap of forced hostage happiness that this game criticizes. The more we repress ourselves from the misanthropic parts of life, the harder it becomes to accept things like Global Warming, Genocides, War, Depression, etc as the violent realities they are. That all being said I will again reassert that this game is not far the faint of heart, its an abrasive experience of powerlessness that counters the typical designs of why people want to play videogames.
That all being said, I know that even after writing all of this I still haven't gotten rid of my own feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The game didn't give me them, just clarified them in nice ways. I feel kind of bad that as minimalist and simple as this, I couldn't accurately address the various other more nuanced depressions and discomforts in the game. Then there's the dearth in being able to make this a compelling piece to read, it's rather dour and unexciting. Honestly, this is likely because I'm still quite new to writing on games but I also try to put a lot of myself and knowledge into my writing as well. At the end of the day, maybe the fact that I abstracted depression to larger socio political issues means that I'm a bit of a death whisperer. For me, struggling with those feelings are just another part of the disappointments and degradations of life and to that effect perhaps that's also why I find a serious appreciation for art like this as well.
a. From Luna's insight on the game link. I do end up somewhat critical of this text in this piece, but I only do so out of respect to the original writer as a peer I hold great respect for on the website. Not to mention she was who originally spurned me to give this one a try in the 1st place.
1. Although besides my cautiously positive praise on this game, there's a few other games on similar notes I think are worth prioritizing first, Little Inferno, Static End, and Trash the Planet, along with Exoptable Money itself. You could consider this game a much rougher hard mode to the themes and focuses of these games. Consider those other games just general recommendations in any other case.
2.Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, sorry no page number on this one its an EPUB
3. I mean "Seems" here quite strictly. I don't believe in Predictive Programming and even if you did, a primary plot point in the story that is revealed is that Dr. Money manufactured the virus into existence, which makes him more similar to Bob Paige from Deus Ex than real life COVID. The pandemic connections are well meaning but not bringing up these facts can accidentally play into the hands of ludicrous conspiracies like that COVID-19 was lab grown. Which leads to other conspiracies like that the elite can just manufacture a deadly virus and various other bioweapons, a sorry conspiracy theory that even my highly liberal facebook dad seems to believe in. There's definitely some responsibility to be had to not just reference where games anticipate the future but also where they don't and probably don't even try to.
4.The Rise In the Party of Death link. For what it's worth, the leftism is not a politics I'm trying to push on you in this reading so much as a general understanding that the world we live in is slipping quickly towards apocalypse.
5. "We found that intervening with either Tetris or Word games four days after the trauma film was effective: participants in both Tetris and Word games conditions had relatively fewer intrusions after the intervention than participants without a task. The evidence for this finding was strong. " Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma link
6. "But Colder Carras emphasizes that the genre or specific game isn’t what necessarily helped with recovery. The benefits, she says, stemmed more from the connections the Veterans made with other video game players; the distractions they created for themselves by playing the games and removing their focus, for example, from alcohol or drugs; and the meaning they derived from the games." Study: Video games can help Veterans recover from mental health challenges link
7. My thoughts on Content Warning or the uncharitably termed 'Trigger Warnings' is complicated, because they can be spoilers in themselves in the sense they tip off what a piece of art is about. For some, knowing the exact confines of them all may be unwanted and take away from the 'surprise' of the experience even if having 1 or 2 mental blocks around certain content would make you want to air on the side of caution in all cases anyway. Personally, I'm rather indifferent to spoilers but it's something I think about a lot. I hope one day backloggd allows you to spoiler tag specific sections of text because I definitely would like to make it opt in :/
Est. Reading Time 20 minutes.
CW: Ableism, Mental Illness, Drug Addiction
There are some mild 'plot spoilers' but I don't spoil the ending of the game, and most of what I do spoil is incredibly mundane, so feel free to read with that in mind.
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
Milk outside is a sequel psychological horror short VN, where you explore the apartment bedroom of a schizophrenic young girl and attempt to assist her over the course of the night in her dirty room, in making sense of her mind as a disembodied part of her own brain. The game is a short VN, in part riffing on the dating genre with an point and click adventure portion wedged within. With compelling visual animations and sound work to boot.
Lets be honest here, Null (I choose to refer to her as Null because of her shirt) is very difficult to chat with. Shes incredibly self loathing and tedious to deal with, there's even an achievement you get from pestering her about her last day of school called 'youre annoying' which from outside reading I did seems to imply her dad said that... What I find so beautiful about this portrayal is it talks to something real about neurodivergence or in the disorderly cases mental illness: It kind of makes you come off like an insensitive jerk.
First I want to mention something about Null I don't think people picked up on, I think this text reflects a less 'well masked' form of autism than what people are used to seeing. It's easy to read the speaking repetitions for instance or the non desire to clean her room as just 'quirky' if you don't recognize these as legitimate life complications autistic people deal with. Echolalia, stimming, unusual organizational strategies, its all there. I don't know if I am personally autistic but I know people who've exhibited those traits who are.
On another note we discover, yet not right away, her room being a right fucking mess. It's very relatable. Even from a matter of logistics, there's often a problem for neurodivergent people, where more stuff is imported into the domestic space, primarily trash, than exported. This goes beyond just neurodivergence into a bigger issue for anybody who is being socially shamed by their society. The beat writer and opium addict William Burroughs played with this idea of 'junk'¹ in this way to drawing on his own experiences with addiction
""Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk in a big industry. ""
While I couldn't find a direct quotation and depiction, Burroughs himself also lived surrounded by piles and bags of trash going to the ceilings. All while alienated from his friends during his time in Morrocco. Compare the aggressive quote with the physical junk in the room, and the fact its maintained by milk packets blocking her off and you find a stunning picture and perhaps you can see what I'm saying.
This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray. Even her perception of time is exaggerated and all she can think about is the many ways she can die. Once you get into a point of frankly rather valid persecution and neglect its hard to pull yourself out on your own, if not impossible. Just as the inability to export trash reflects social neglect, so to does psychological self shaming reflect an inability to export violence done upon someone. One point about this I thought was particularly revealing is not only in the parental neglect surrounding her, but also in smaller moments like how when she was having issues in school other kids would call her a 'schizo'. Pretty much using ableist insults of non normative action to ostracize people and put them down.
This is also extremely relatable for me, and, I would imagine a lot of people. Even if you are able to function for the most part you've probably had your thoughts and actions dismissed as 'crazy' or 'spergy' before. Recently I found a very compelling dictionary on reverting from ableist language², here's what it has to say on 'schizo'
""This is ableist when used as a substitute for "switching rapidly" or "acting without regard for others" or otherwise implying a person seems mentally ill simply because they are unpredictable or make someone uncomfortable. The words "schizophrenic," "schizoaffective," and "schizotypal" are not ableist when actually referring to a person with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizotypal personality disorder.
Consider instead: wild, confusing, unpredictable, impulsive, reckless, fearless, lives on the edge, thrill-seeker, risk-taker, out of control, scary, lacks empathy, toxic, manipulative, egotistical, abusive, unpredictable""
It's a useful tool, but the fact of the matter is imagining these alternative phrases being used in public school, at least when I used to go, seems highly utopian. On top of this there's a lot of mockery around this as 'language policing' which is sad because in reality it means people are trying to ignore the potential pains of their callous speaking norms as 'freeing' when the very opposite is the case. People used to use the word 'retard' all the time in school and in gaming communities in the 2010s, but its very much out of vogue and offensive now. That being said I think the text of Milk Outside balances this well by pointing out the many other ways language can perpetuate it outlined in this dictionary as well. For example, early on you can tell her to 'act normal' which has to be a phrase almost everyone's frustrated parents have said at least once. It's one of the reasons I recommend giving this source a read.
The primary issue is using almost any phrase as a matter of derision but also as a matter of intentionality to be so. It's the 'schizo's job to 'stop being a schizo' and its their fault when they fail. As somebody who has screwed up a lot due to panic attacks and then had the people get upset at me for it, its something I deeply relate to. People often see when I panic and leave places and yell that people don't understand me as me being toxic, and of course its not something I desire to do, but in reality I have about as much control of it as a fish out of water once its gotten to that point, most of the time it can only be controlled by preventative measures in advance. Once they happen, its already too late. We can similarly read mental hangups like this a similar issue of that import/export analogy, if you have more negative perspective coming in than positive self perceptions (often encouraged by others) going out, the mind will become a junkyard of self loathing. Ultimately, you can't really control how you feel, at best you can nudge it a little. Ligotti describes this well in his deeply discomforting text Conspiracy Against the Human Race
"But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did
have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads."³
So then it follows well that the 'protagonist' does not have all that much control or feel like they are piercing the 'heart' of the problems shes dealing with. It's supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to be frustrated by it. Instead neurodivergence is repaired by a series of, often quite tiring upkeep of negotiations and preventative care. Not just with others but with yourself as well.
Let's talk about how well this works as a sequel. It's important to play the prior game first to get yourself acquainted with some important pieces of information, like for example her dad committing suicide. In fact I would say a better relationship with the character would be playing them back to back. This is meant to be a sort of meditational space away from the terrifying and blunt messaging in the first game, within which she can unwind and try and think about the difficulties of her life. The point being mental illness is not always something so easy for people on the outside to follow or sympathize with. Sometimes it consists of hard to untangle phrasing, and difficult moments of trying and failing to connect with them. It would be absolutely foolish to think this game didn't do its research either, because the main symbol on her shirt is the null symbol from Lacan used to explain the concept of the big other.
This game is a literary work which means you really have to play with it and be patient in order to appreciate it if you don't have these experiences. But trust me this is not a bad or 'toxic' reflection of mental illness. The neurodivergent require respect, accommodation, and patience. Through what you can pick up, this girl has been robbed of all of those. We all express being on edge in different ways, whether you find them endearing enough or you want to be closer to them, or want nothing to do with someone like this, fine. But this is a completely legitimate reflection of the stigmatization of mental illness and how they produce traumas the victims try to ignore. Ironically everyone referring to her as a lain clone or 'Milk Girl' is, I believe, missing that very point. After playing this game, if you have difficulty unraveling the complexity of its psychological portrayal check out this plot synopsis inquiry and this insight on the academic psychoanalysis work. Needless to say there's a lot of literary and technical depth in the game, especially in comparison to a lot of other VN's who are just going to show their characters at their most chipper with you and only get upset with you during the bad ending. This text throws those sort of dichotomies out the window.
I would urge my fellow gamers to not play games they in advance think they wont like. And not to publicly talk haven't been patient with, if you just kept fast clicking through all the dialogue prompts and reading as fast as possible then your inexperience will be negative out of impatience. I haven't continued to play Omori because of the dichotomous segmentation of 'pleasant fantasy worlds' vs. 'horrific apartment' and how much I felt locked off from the personality of my main character. But I'm not out to shit on it because I literally have not interacted with the text deeply enough to try and explain any sort of opinion on it, nor do I know where it goes. I'm not going to feel comfortable just saying 'bad vibes' on a text that is bearing such difficult and painful trauma like this. It's telling however that other people are so willing to do so. I think in a way this game made a brilliant commentary on a type of gaming experience that gets dismissed and ignored without even having to resort to meta. Intense word heavy games (VNs, Interactive fiction, etc) that discuss rough subject matter more pessimistically have been the laughing stock of gamers for a good while now.
That said, I do think there's legitimate reasons not to like this game. Even if its as simple as 'this just reminds me of how bad the intersection of poverty and mental illness is and makes me sad' or 'I sympathize with the character but the despondency doesn't make for a great game experience'. Or even more technical issues like the lack of skip or save functions (which for me don't matter at all and as I've laid out in my No One Can Ever Know writeup can actually enhance an experience for me). These disconnects are perfectly fine, but throwing the game away for its annoying aesthetics and circuitous dialogue is I think more than a little dismissive, and as a result playing exactly into the hands of the ableist prejudice it so accurately critiques.
That all being said, I feel like I haven't yet addressed any of the specifics. Most of my insight is more on other people's prejudices and an explanation of mental health, rather than highlighting why I enjoy this game so much. So here's a few more specific reasons I like it:
-The game was gifted to me by a girl who is incredibly similar to this character, who deals with a lot of ambiguous mental hurdles, and is also just starting to come to terms with her 'plurality' recently. This is something I'll speak about more in another text soon, but all that means for the moment is she, just like this girl, has personality issues that she is just starting to unravel. The similarities between her and this girl are to such an extent it goes beyond just a vacuous representation. In my experience there are people like this, and despite being difficult to speak to sometimes they have truly brilliant minds. It's funny because the masculine version of this type of character is found in the movie A Beautiful Mind, which I found insufferable to watch. That was because I couldn't really feel like I was 'interacting' with the paranoid delusions so much as being a specter. It made it seem like people really don't even try to intervene, this text makes it clear: they do but poorly. A lot of the mathematical fixations between her, for example squaring pyramids and such, seems similar to John Nash's thinking patterns.
-The music OST is 4 hours long apparently, most of it to do with the radio you can put on. This is longer than the expected length of a playthrough game, this is crazy considering most of the tracks seemed pretty good, if only about Yume Nikki length (like a minute long).
-The color palettes are soothing, using reds to display a sort of mistlike feeling, moving away from the oppressive use of purples and such in the first game.
-The text doesn't try to get you to 'date' the character but puts your protagonist in a similar engagement of inquiry you would find in those dating VNs. This is in itself a sort of micro genre, there's a list on this very site about it. However, its a microgenre that i'm fond of, since I see the ubiquity of the visual novel as a 'dating simulation' unfortunately. It also feels like a nod to how if it had been a more 'moe' human relationship with the character, it would have been more vapid and possibly offensive.
-The sound effect work on this one is just as brilliant as the visuals. Those little 'dings' whenever it's your turn to speak feels very satisfying and prevent you from accidentally hitting a choice on the screen without meaning to.
-I always love this eastern European architecture. It's so stalwart and gloomy, yet functional. I love how it makes the room look disorganized but not immediately 'gross' since its through her perception this stuff is happening.
-The opening with the horrific creature giving her a shot was incredibly well written and shows the text is not choosing more airy 'obnoxious' dialogue out of inability.
-A lot of the visual representations throughout the game have a mystical quality to them, falling down a hole or looking in a twisted funhouse mirror. A lot of the quiet visual representations are killer, wallpaper worthy, and absolutely worth the price of entry.
-On top of the clear literary thoughtfulness and understanding of psychology mentioned earlier. I'm impressed that the dev was able to construct a text with a convincing female lead. Even if he had to use a patriarchal gaze through the players role in order to connect. The dev here is Nikita Kryukov, who dons large gauges, a baseball cap, and a seemingly quiet demeanor and social presence. Primarily focused on appreciating the fan art put out and talking about various stuff around the game. From my cursory glance he's not even a comparatively active or political twitter user which is honestly quite rare and appreciated. And so, for a demure Russian dude, who you would probably seem more at home on the front of a nu-jazz record to so effectively write a vibrant story about the ableist oppression of women as it relates to imperial countries. It fills me with hope. For me, it means that if you try hard enough you can escape the biases of your own positionality to write about what you arent and capture the heart of that pain. This is a struggle and insecurity that plagues a lot of writers, with it being so in vogue for academics to tear apart 'poor representation'.
This all works to convince me the text has added something fundamentally unique to add to the VN form. I think perhaps my own experiences with girls that act like this and aren't doing it as a 'tumblr core' thing makes me a bit more sympathetic to them. But regardless, there's enough going on here for it to actually touch people who aren't on the inside of these struggles.
Mostly I felt I should just let people know there's more going on here. And on the charge of any sort of 'ableism' I will note that the people who call her 'Milk-chan' are also doing a huge disservice and seeing right past the character as well. So ultimately its not just the naysayers that are at fault here. Milk Outside asks us all to be more patient across the board and for that I consider it a masterwork of the visual novel short story. Quite honestly, it seems to me a lot of yall just got filtered by a Visual Novel, and thats pretty damn funny to me.
-----
1. DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness.
2. Ableism/Language
3. p.15, not for the faint of heart. I found a copy of it on Libgen but I wont link it here for obvious reasons.
CW: Ableism, Mental Illness, Drug Addiction
There are some mild 'plot spoilers' but I don't spoil the ending of the game, and most of what I do spoil is incredibly mundane, so feel free to read with that in mind.
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
Milk outside is a sequel psychological horror short VN, where you explore the apartment bedroom of a schizophrenic young girl and attempt to assist her over the course of the night in her dirty room, in making sense of her mind as a disembodied part of her own brain. The game is a short VN, in part riffing on the dating genre with an point and click adventure portion wedged within. With compelling visual animations and sound work to boot.
Lets be honest here, Null (I choose to refer to her as Null because of her shirt) is very difficult to chat with. Shes incredibly self loathing and tedious to deal with, there's even an achievement you get from pestering her about her last day of school called 'youre annoying' which from outside reading I did seems to imply her dad said that... What I find so beautiful about this portrayal is it talks to something real about neurodivergence or in the disorderly cases mental illness: It kind of makes you come off like an insensitive jerk.
First I want to mention something about Null I don't think people picked up on, I think this text reflects a less 'well masked' form of autism than what people are used to seeing. It's easy to read the speaking repetitions for instance or the non desire to clean her room as just 'quirky' if you don't recognize these as legitimate life complications autistic people deal with. Echolalia, stimming, unusual organizational strategies, its all there. I don't know if I am personally autistic but I know people who've exhibited those traits who are.
On another note we discover, yet not right away, her room being a right fucking mess. It's very relatable. Even from a matter of logistics, there's often a problem for neurodivergent people, where more stuff is imported into the domestic space, primarily trash, than exported. This goes beyond just neurodivergence into a bigger issue for anybody who is being socially shamed by their society. The beat writer and opium addict William Burroughs played with this idea of 'junk'¹ in this way to drawing on his own experiences with addiction
""Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk in a big industry. ""
While I couldn't find a direct quotation and depiction, Burroughs himself also lived surrounded by piles and bags of trash going to the ceilings. All while alienated from his friends during his time in Morrocco. Compare the aggressive quote with the physical junk in the room, and the fact its maintained by milk packets blocking her off and you find a stunning picture and perhaps you can see what I'm saying.
This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray. Even her perception of time is exaggerated and all she can think about is the many ways she can die. Once you get into a point of frankly rather valid persecution and neglect its hard to pull yourself out on your own, if not impossible. Just as the inability to export trash reflects social neglect, so to does psychological self shaming reflect an inability to export violence done upon someone. One point about this I thought was particularly revealing is not only in the parental neglect surrounding her, but also in smaller moments like how when she was having issues in school other kids would call her a 'schizo'. Pretty much using ableist insults of non normative action to ostracize people and put them down.
This is also extremely relatable for me, and, I would imagine a lot of people. Even if you are able to function for the most part you've probably had your thoughts and actions dismissed as 'crazy' or 'spergy' before. Recently I found a very compelling dictionary on reverting from ableist language², here's what it has to say on 'schizo'
""This is ableist when used as a substitute for "switching rapidly" or "acting without regard for others" or otherwise implying a person seems mentally ill simply because they are unpredictable or make someone uncomfortable. The words "schizophrenic," "schizoaffective," and "schizotypal" are not ableist when actually referring to a person with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizotypal personality disorder.
Consider instead: wild, confusing, unpredictable, impulsive, reckless, fearless, lives on the edge, thrill-seeker, risk-taker, out of control, scary, lacks empathy, toxic, manipulative, egotistical, abusive, unpredictable""
It's a useful tool, but the fact of the matter is imagining these alternative phrases being used in public school, at least when I used to go, seems highly utopian. On top of this there's a lot of mockery around this as 'language policing' which is sad because in reality it means people are trying to ignore the potential pains of their callous speaking norms as 'freeing' when the very opposite is the case. People used to use the word 'retard' all the time in school and in gaming communities in the 2010s, but its very much out of vogue and offensive now. That being said I think the text of Milk Outside balances this well by pointing out the many other ways language can perpetuate it outlined in this dictionary as well. For example, early on you can tell her to 'act normal' which has to be a phrase almost everyone's frustrated parents have said at least once. It's one of the reasons I recommend giving this source a read.
The primary issue is using almost any phrase as a matter of derision but also as a matter of intentionality to be so. It's the 'schizo's job to 'stop being a schizo' and its their fault when they fail. As somebody who has screwed up a lot due to panic attacks and then had the people get upset at me for it, its something I deeply relate to. People often see when I panic and leave places and yell that people don't understand me as me being toxic, and of course its not something I desire to do, but in reality I have about as much control of it as a fish out of water once its gotten to that point, most of the time it can only be controlled by preventative measures in advance. Once they happen, its already too late. We can similarly read mental hangups like this a similar issue of that import/export analogy, if you have more negative perspective coming in than positive self perceptions (often encouraged by others) going out, the mind will become a junkyard of self loathing. Ultimately, you can't really control how you feel, at best you can nudge it a little. Ligotti describes this well in his deeply discomforting text Conspiracy Against the Human Race
"But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did
have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads."³
So then it follows well that the 'protagonist' does not have all that much control or feel like they are piercing the 'heart' of the problems shes dealing with. It's supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to be frustrated by it. Instead neurodivergence is repaired by a series of, often quite tiring upkeep of negotiations and preventative care. Not just with others but with yourself as well.
Let's talk about how well this works as a sequel. It's important to play the prior game first to get yourself acquainted with some important pieces of information, like for example her dad committing suicide. In fact I would say a better relationship with the character would be playing them back to back. This is meant to be a sort of meditational space away from the terrifying and blunt messaging in the first game, within which she can unwind and try and think about the difficulties of her life. The point being mental illness is not always something so easy for people on the outside to follow or sympathize with. Sometimes it consists of hard to untangle phrasing, and difficult moments of trying and failing to connect with them. It would be absolutely foolish to think this game didn't do its research either, because the main symbol on her shirt is the null symbol from Lacan used to explain the concept of the big other.
This game is a literary work which means you really have to play with it and be patient in order to appreciate it if you don't have these experiences. But trust me this is not a bad or 'toxic' reflection of mental illness. The neurodivergent require respect, accommodation, and patience. Through what you can pick up, this girl has been robbed of all of those. We all express being on edge in different ways, whether you find them endearing enough or you want to be closer to them, or want nothing to do with someone like this, fine. But this is a completely legitimate reflection of the stigmatization of mental illness and how they produce traumas the victims try to ignore. Ironically everyone referring to her as a lain clone or 'Milk Girl' is, I believe, missing that very point. After playing this game, if you have difficulty unraveling the complexity of its psychological portrayal check out this plot synopsis inquiry and this insight on the academic psychoanalysis work. Needless to say there's a lot of literary and technical depth in the game, especially in comparison to a lot of other VN's who are just going to show their characters at their most chipper with you and only get upset with you during the bad ending. This text throws those sort of dichotomies out the window.
I would urge my fellow gamers to not play games they in advance think they wont like. And not to publicly talk haven't been patient with, if you just kept fast clicking through all the dialogue prompts and reading as fast as possible then your inexperience will be negative out of impatience. I haven't continued to play Omori because of the dichotomous segmentation of 'pleasant fantasy worlds' vs. 'horrific apartment' and how much I felt locked off from the personality of my main character. But I'm not out to shit on it because I literally have not interacted with the text deeply enough to try and explain any sort of opinion on it, nor do I know where it goes. I'm not going to feel comfortable just saying 'bad vibes' on a text that is bearing such difficult and painful trauma like this. It's telling however that other people are so willing to do so. I think in a way this game made a brilliant commentary on a type of gaming experience that gets dismissed and ignored without even having to resort to meta. Intense word heavy games (VNs, Interactive fiction, etc) that discuss rough subject matter more pessimistically have been the laughing stock of gamers for a good while now.
That said, I do think there's legitimate reasons not to like this game. Even if its as simple as 'this just reminds me of how bad the intersection of poverty and mental illness is and makes me sad' or 'I sympathize with the character but the despondency doesn't make for a great game experience'. Or even more technical issues like the lack of skip or save functions (which for me don't matter at all and as I've laid out in my No One Can Ever Know writeup can actually enhance an experience for me). These disconnects are perfectly fine, but throwing the game away for its annoying aesthetics and circuitous dialogue is I think more than a little dismissive, and as a result playing exactly into the hands of the ableist prejudice it so accurately critiques.
That all being said, I feel like I haven't yet addressed any of the specifics. Most of my insight is more on other people's prejudices and an explanation of mental health, rather than highlighting why I enjoy this game so much. So here's a few more specific reasons I like it:
-The game was gifted to me by a girl who is incredibly similar to this character, who deals with a lot of ambiguous mental hurdles, and is also just starting to come to terms with her 'plurality' recently. This is something I'll speak about more in another text soon, but all that means for the moment is she, just like this girl, has personality issues that she is just starting to unravel. The similarities between her and this girl are to such an extent it goes beyond just a vacuous representation. In my experience there are people like this, and despite being difficult to speak to sometimes they have truly brilliant minds. It's funny because the masculine version of this type of character is found in the movie A Beautiful Mind, which I found insufferable to watch. That was because I couldn't really feel like I was 'interacting' with the paranoid delusions so much as being a specter. It made it seem like people really don't even try to intervene, this text makes it clear: they do but poorly. A lot of the mathematical fixations between her, for example squaring pyramids and such, seems similar to John Nash's thinking patterns.
-The music OST is 4 hours long apparently, most of it to do with the radio you can put on. This is longer than the expected length of a playthrough game, this is crazy considering most of the tracks seemed pretty good, if only about Yume Nikki length (like a minute long).
-The color palettes are soothing, using reds to display a sort of mistlike feeling, moving away from the oppressive use of purples and such in the first game.
-The text doesn't try to get you to 'date' the character but puts your protagonist in a similar engagement of inquiry you would find in those dating VNs. This is in itself a sort of micro genre, there's a list on this very site about it. However, its a microgenre that i'm fond of, since I see the ubiquity of the visual novel as a 'dating simulation' unfortunately. It also feels like a nod to how if it had been a more 'moe' human relationship with the character, it would have been more vapid and possibly offensive.
-The sound effect work on this one is just as brilliant as the visuals. Those little 'dings' whenever it's your turn to speak feels very satisfying and prevent you from accidentally hitting a choice on the screen without meaning to.
-I always love this eastern European architecture. It's so stalwart and gloomy, yet functional. I love how it makes the room look disorganized but not immediately 'gross' since its through her perception this stuff is happening.
-The opening with the horrific creature giving her a shot was incredibly well written and shows the text is not choosing more airy 'obnoxious' dialogue out of inability.
-A lot of the visual representations throughout the game have a mystical quality to them, falling down a hole or looking in a twisted funhouse mirror. A lot of the quiet visual representations are killer, wallpaper worthy, and absolutely worth the price of entry.
-On top of the clear literary thoughtfulness and understanding of psychology mentioned earlier. I'm impressed that the dev was able to construct a text with a convincing female lead. Even if he had to use a patriarchal gaze through the players role in order to connect. The dev here is Nikita Kryukov, who dons large gauges, a baseball cap, and a seemingly quiet demeanor and social presence. Primarily focused on appreciating the fan art put out and talking about various stuff around the game. From my cursory glance he's not even a comparatively active or political twitter user which is honestly quite rare and appreciated. And so, for a demure Russian dude, who you would probably seem more at home on the front of a nu-jazz record to so effectively write a vibrant story about the ableist oppression of women as it relates to imperial countries. It fills me with hope. For me, it means that if you try hard enough you can escape the biases of your own positionality to write about what you arent and capture the heart of that pain. This is a struggle and insecurity that plagues a lot of writers, with it being so in vogue for academics to tear apart 'poor representation'.
This all works to convince me the text has added something fundamentally unique to add to the VN form. I think perhaps my own experiences with girls that act like this and aren't doing it as a 'tumblr core' thing makes me a bit more sympathetic to them. But regardless, there's enough going on here for it to actually touch people who aren't on the inside of these struggles.
Mostly I felt I should just let people know there's more going on here. And on the charge of any sort of 'ableism' I will note that the people who call her 'Milk-chan' are also doing a huge disservice and seeing right past the character as well. So ultimately its not just the naysayers that are at fault here. Milk Outside asks us all to be more patient across the board and for that I consider it a masterwork of the visual novel short story. Quite honestly, it seems to me a lot of yall just got filtered by a Visual Novel, and thats pretty damn funny to me.
-----
1. DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness.
2. Ableism/Language
3. p.15, not for the faint of heart. I found a copy of it on Libgen but I wont link it here for obvious reasons.
2017
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.
Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.
Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.
You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.
Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.
We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.
The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.
We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.
Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.
On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.
The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.
With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.
Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.
-----------------------------------------------------------
In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.
Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.
Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.
You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.
Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.
We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.
The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.
We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.
Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.
On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.
The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.
With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.
Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.