I think it's generally easy for cis people to write off stories that center around dysphoria due to a surface-level "I won't be able to relate to it" mentality. I am saying this as a generalization, but I'm really projecting my own trepidation regarding trying this particular game stemming from lingering transmisogyny on my part. which is to say that even though I consciously accept and support trans people in my words and deeds, I still was quick to other the transness within the game and write this off after first hearing about it as "this sounds interesting, but it probably won't really hit for me." this is of course blatantly untrue: no one will ever know features a rich level of detail for a game of its scope with surprisingly engaging exploration mechanics. I have to thank my current fascination with survival horror for pushing me to plunge into this one and take a detour from my usual gaming habits, as generally I have ignored smaller, more confessional games like these on some arbitrary "quality" metric. it feels easy sometimes to avoid games with subject matter I irrationally don't think I know how to engage with. I dunno, I've been revising this paragraph over and over again trying to make it less ugly, but I guess I also feel like the context is important for my interpretation of the game.
because really a lot of my experiences do rhyme with the protagonist. I went to a small high school in the south with a generally friendly student body, all the way down to jamming with my friends in the recording studio and frequently skipping class (I once got caught by a teacher having left in the middle of The Manchurian Candidate to play through a very decent chunk of SotN in our student commons). on a smaller scale I understand the general alienation demonstrated through flavor text as the player observes the idle behavior of other students in the building. through that I began a long web of synthesizing goufygoggs's experiences to my own, and especially to those of the people around me that I observed through all my years of high school and most of my undergrad before the pandemic hit.
goufygoggs's self-depiction reminds me a lot of people I knew in engineering school specifically; technically capable and driven by passion but ultimately overwhelmed by an consistent inability to perform and intense self-loathing. everyone has a certain ambient level of anger and hate and depression that they deal with, and dysphoria drenches this resting kindling like kerosene, able to potentially spark an intense fire at any moment. in-game intrusive dysphoric thoughts are represented as unavoidable encounters that the players must engage with a resident evil-style dichotomy of options: waste precious resources mowing the monster down or run along and take the hit. in theory we optimize towards the former, but in reality we end up reluctantly accepting the damage as we play, and the game runs with this concept to demonstrate the inability to mitigate each and every dysphoric thought one experiences throughout the day. in particular one person comes to mind that I connected to these musings: a rather talented trans girl I was acquaintances with thanks to our shared interest in 6502 assembly and TIS-100. I recalled two specific instances that tied well to this game:
1) she and I were in a digital logic class together, and she completely missed our second midterm for reasons that I do not know and never asked her about. shortly after, we had a final project where we had to build a working stopwatch from scratch on an FPGA board. I remember after nearly a month of being absent she showed up with easily the most impressive stopwatch of all of us; full hour:minute:second display, the ability to save times, et cetera. as a last desperate attempt to score much needed extra credit, she far exceeded the requirements and produced something truly excellent. she did not pass the class.
2) after returning from summer vacation, I went to a meeting for a club that she had a leading role in. in the intervening time since I had last seen her it was clear she was beginning her transition, as she had visibly grown breasts and had begun wearing makeup. despite this, the team captain took the opportunity to deadname another member of the team who happened to be this girl's best friend. she protested and the captain awkwardly mumbled an apology followed by "I don't really know a lot about that stuff." when the meeting was over I went ahead and asked her what her pronouns were; she responded that no one had asked her in our department before and she didn't really know what to say, though she eventually settled on she/her "for now." I remembered this moment specifically after the in-game line about resigning one's self to using he/him around the school.
in that sense my initial excuse of "this doesn't relate to me" is wrong. many moments in this game led me to flesh out my mental depiction of people that I hadn't seen in years and had always wondered about if I had maybe gotten to know them better, or what their mental state might have been. in essence, a story this raw and unyielding about the trans experience really did reframe the way I thought about prior experiences and gave me a better theory of mind. I think this phenomenon really only could have come out of this style of game given just how it truly bares the creator's soul in a way that a fully fictional story could not approach. much like how watching documentaries in my adulthood led me to recontextualize current events I had witnessed in my past, no one will ever know reorganized my mind palace in a way. there are a lot of memories there that are too painful to bring up, ones that remind me of how much pain I dealt to people in the past. I was that friend the protagonist mentions in passing who knew people were out but didn't know how to bring it up or talk about it. in some cases, I selfishly let the flames of their dysphoria rise even higher with my actions without proper apology or consideration for what I had done. much of this is tied in with goufygoggs's owns admission of physical harm to loved ones, a stark confession of wrongdoing that fuels her self-hate in a way I can understand. that's a good deal of what I relate to here.
this is before even getting into her poignant character study of her father, in many ways the reflection of the protagonist. caught up in his own cycle of self-loathing, he has an equally dysfunctional upbringing as his daughter did, and though never spoken to, demonstrates the end result of years of refusing to properly cope with both his trauma and his failings. his infidelity mirrors the protagonist's own physical outbursts as expressions of unmitigated psychic damage, all covered by socially-acceptable addictions: the father's prescription drugs and the daughter's video game obsession. yet through this shines a muddled but unconditional love between the two, not always visibly shown but conveyed with pitiful tenderness. it's heartbreaking but absolutely a necessary component to understanding the protagonist's pain and inner turmoil from the moment she wakes up in his apartment.
as mentioned prior, the game itself draws heavily from classic survival horror. it plays with the same basic resource management scheme while imploring the player to explore every room in a claustrophobic and purposefully opaque map. each class takes place at a specific time of day, for which the player must find a certain number of time-wasting activities strewn throughout the halls of the school while also contending with the aforementioned dysphoric thoughts and the dwindling phone battery (your ammo against said thoughts) that comes with it. once time has been spent and the correct start time for class has come, the player must navigate to said classroom (which hopefully they have already found) for another chapter of the story above. outlets are selectively placed in each wing of the school for the player to recharge their phone at a single time, forcing classic routing techniques in order to wasting too many resources running from place to place. the "puzzle" here becomes more clear as the game progresses, as the player must also keep track of when certain rooms open up later in the day for the player to waste more time in. these are unavoidable as there is strictly just enough activities to take part in between each chapter (especially as the game continues) and thus not a single one can be missed without being too early for the upcoming class. outside of the story I found this action well-paced and fascinating enough with the fantastic amount of character and stinging humor goufygoggs's brings to the writing here.
one final thing to mention before I go ahead and post this so I can go to bed: the ending is absolutely hideous and made my heart twists in knots. I'm not sure if it depicts a true event (another connection, this happened to my roommate and his girlfriend just nine months ago to my shock) but it preys upon all of my worst medical fears. this is all accentuated by some truly inspired soundtrack selection, perfectly timed to increase the looming dread and eventual shock the player experiences. true survival horror.
because really a lot of my experiences do rhyme with the protagonist. I went to a small high school in the south with a generally friendly student body, all the way down to jamming with my friends in the recording studio and frequently skipping class (I once got caught by a teacher having left in the middle of The Manchurian Candidate to play through a very decent chunk of SotN in our student commons). on a smaller scale I understand the general alienation demonstrated through flavor text as the player observes the idle behavior of other students in the building. through that I began a long web of synthesizing goufygoggs's experiences to my own, and especially to those of the people around me that I observed through all my years of high school and most of my undergrad before the pandemic hit.
goufygoggs's self-depiction reminds me a lot of people I knew in engineering school specifically; technically capable and driven by passion but ultimately overwhelmed by an consistent inability to perform and intense self-loathing. everyone has a certain ambient level of anger and hate and depression that they deal with, and dysphoria drenches this resting kindling like kerosene, able to potentially spark an intense fire at any moment. in-game intrusive dysphoric thoughts are represented as unavoidable encounters that the players must engage with a resident evil-style dichotomy of options: waste precious resources mowing the monster down or run along and take the hit. in theory we optimize towards the former, but in reality we end up reluctantly accepting the damage as we play, and the game runs with this concept to demonstrate the inability to mitigate each and every dysphoric thought one experiences throughout the day. in particular one person comes to mind that I connected to these musings: a rather talented trans girl I was acquaintances with thanks to our shared interest in 6502 assembly and TIS-100. I recalled two specific instances that tied well to this game:
1) she and I were in a digital logic class together, and she completely missed our second midterm for reasons that I do not know and never asked her about. shortly after, we had a final project where we had to build a working stopwatch from scratch on an FPGA board. I remember after nearly a month of being absent she showed up with easily the most impressive stopwatch of all of us; full hour:minute:second display, the ability to save times, et cetera. as a last desperate attempt to score much needed extra credit, she far exceeded the requirements and produced something truly excellent. she did not pass the class.
2) after returning from summer vacation, I went to a meeting for a club that she had a leading role in. in the intervening time since I had last seen her it was clear she was beginning her transition, as she had visibly grown breasts and had begun wearing makeup. despite this, the team captain took the opportunity to deadname another member of the team who happened to be this girl's best friend. she protested and the captain awkwardly mumbled an apology followed by "I don't really know a lot about that stuff." when the meeting was over I went ahead and asked her what her pronouns were; she responded that no one had asked her in our department before and she didn't really know what to say, though she eventually settled on she/her "for now." I remembered this moment specifically after the in-game line about resigning one's self to using he/him around the school.
in that sense my initial excuse of "this doesn't relate to me" is wrong. many moments in this game led me to flesh out my mental depiction of people that I hadn't seen in years and had always wondered about if I had maybe gotten to know them better, or what their mental state might have been. in essence, a story this raw and unyielding about the trans experience really did reframe the way I thought about prior experiences and gave me a better theory of mind. I think this phenomenon really only could have come out of this style of game given just how it truly bares the creator's soul in a way that a fully fictional story could not approach. much like how watching documentaries in my adulthood led me to recontextualize current events I had witnessed in my past, no one will ever know reorganized my mind palace in a way. there are a lot of memories there that are too painful to bring up, ones that remind me of how much pain I dealt to people in the past. I was that friend the protagonist mentions in passing who knew people were out but didn't know how to bring it up or talk about it. in some cases, I selfishly let the flames of their dysphoria rise even higher with my actions without proper apology or consideration for what I had done. much of this is tied in with goufygoggs's owns admission of physical harm to loved ones, a stark confession of wrongdoing that fuels her self-hate in a way I can understand. that's a good deal of what I relate to here.
this is before even getting into her poignant character study of her father, in many ways the reflection of the protagonist. caught up in his own cycle of self-loathing, he has an equally dysfunctional upbringing as his daughter did, and though never spoken to, demonstrates the end result of years of refusing to properly cope with both his trauma and his failings. his infidelity mirrors the protagonist's own physical outbursts as expressions of unmitigated psychic damage, all covered by socially-acceptable addictions: the father's prescription drugs and the daughter's video game obsession. yet through this shines a muddled but unconditional love between the two, not always visibly shown but conveyed with pitiful tenderness. it's heartbreaking but absolutely a necessary component to understanding the protagonist's pain and inner turmoil from the moment she wakes up in his apartment.
as mentioned prior, the game itself draws heavily from classic survival horror. it plays with the same basic resource management scheme while imploring the player to explore every room in a claustrophobic and purposefully opaque map. each class takes place at a specific time of day, for which the player must find a certain number of time-wasting activities strewn throughout the halls of the school while also contending with the aforementioned dysphoric thoughts and the dwindling phone battery (your ammo against said thoughts) that comes with it. once time has been spent and the correct start time for class has come, the player must navigate to said classroom (which hopefully they have already found) for another chapter of the story above. outlets are selectively placed in each wing of the school for the player to recharge their phone at a single time, forcing classic routing techniques in order to wasting too many resources running from place to place. the "puzzle" here becomes more clear as the game progresses, as the player must also keep track of when certain rooms open up later in the day for the player to waste more time in. these are unavoidable as there is strictly just enough activities to take part in between each chapter (especially as the game continues) and thus not a single one can be missed without being too early for the upcoming class. outside of the story I found this action well-paced and fascinating enough with the fantastic amount of character and stinging humor goufygoggs's brings to the writing here.
one final thing to mention before I go ahead and post this so I can go to bed: the ending is absolutely hideous and made my heart twists in knots. I'm not sure if it depicts a true event (another connection, this happened to my roommate and his girlfriend just nine months ago to my shock) but it preys upon all of my worst medical fears. this is all accentuated by some truly inspired soundtrack selection, perfectly timed to increase the looming dread and eventual shock the player experiences. true survival horror.
The_Trash_Enby
1 year ago