It's a sweet, low-paced, reflexive, and significantly subversive game based on a child spending three days in a hospital to help her mother (a nurse). Basically you just wander around, speak with patients, take notes on your journal. Time marches on, three days are quite short, and people mind their own business (meaning that they have their own schedules, dialogues, actions, and experiences even if you're not there - as in Deadly Premonition, but way more impactful). You follow them, spy them, speak with them as a bored child would do. You dream about becoming a journalist and solving some mysteries within the hospital, and there's a mysterious VIP who's supposed to visit someone soon. Eventually, it turns out there's nothing to solve, no VIP visiting, anything at all. The game subverts many gaming clichés and logics at the same time: from the concept of progression to empowerment, from tasks to exploration, from the relationships with npcs to dialogue-based storytelling. It works by subtraction, especially towards the ending - where you're entirely free to draw your own conclusions.

Reviewed on Apr 03, 2023


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