Bahiyya Khan - After HOURS after hours: When Making a Game Makes You Want to Die [Summit 2018] -
https://youtu.be/SbVyf8kzygI
Edit: Dang it! That video is for some reason gone so here’s a different one -
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skh9MQW3tgU

I don’t know why but after playing this I felt like I wanted to know more and understand what exactly this game was about, and then I ended up in a loophole learning about this rad emo Muslim lady from South Africa and I’m very glad I did. I also think she might be dating the female photographer of this game, which would mean that she’s gay in some capacity and that just makes me happy (I’m gay too, don’t make it weird)! I’m rooting for them if they are actually dating (it seems very obvious they are from a video I watched from Bahiyya’s YouTube channel, but my HOCD convinces me they aren’t) and I’m really looking forward to what Bahiyya does next. Also, just to mention, I don’t know exactly how, but I feel like I relate deeply to the feeling of not knowing whether or not something that changed your life so negatively yet so positively was worth it (this is what she talks about in the video above). I think I feel that with my OCD, man. It feels like Stockholm syndrome a bit. I went through SUCH a hard time during the pandemic, but without having those thoughts and going through the worst time of my life, would I have found out my sexuality and managed to embrace it as much as I do now? Would I have realized how strong I actually am and realize I don’t need to prove it to anybody else? Would I have realized many of my faults and tried hard to change as a person (cause might as well if I’m already going through all this crap)? I don’t know dude, this is some deep stuff. Didn’t expect to go down such a rabbit hole with this game but I’m glad I did. Give this a play, it’s worth your time.

P.S. Bahiyya’s favorite game is Thomas Was Alone, so that’s how you know she’s rad!
P.S.S. Also don’t think I’m weird okay? I watched like a few videos.

I thought I was like solid at Tetris, but in order to actually enjoy this game I think I need a very easy mode cause 10 speed starting 60/90 lines in ain’t working for me. (Especially when it takes forever to get there.)

My heart rate seemed to stay stable, but I was also just dying too much for it to be a nice experience?

Edit/Addition: Really do think there should be a chill difficulty because I was not able to enjoy this game the way I wanted and I was suffering through it getting stuck every few levels. With a game that’s supposed to be a meditative journey, why not have a chill difficulty?? Having challenge for the other difficulties is perfectly fine, but why does changing the difficulty to easy literally change nothing!? I’m a complaining baby, but I think I still make a valid point. I was expecting a relaxing chill experience, kinda as advertised and ended up getting really frustrated and annoyed (not to mention some of the music really takes you out of it (by some I mean all of the ones with vocals)). It’s bad (like pretty bad) cheesy pop and I’m saying that as someone who enjoys very basic pop. All electronic instrumentals would’ve be fine, no? Either that or Madeleine McQueen should’ve been the one singing 🤷🏻‍♀️ Video game soundtrack QUEEN!

This game can be very glitchy, especially on the contracts. For example, you can painted the whole room but the game still says you have 2% left. It gets really annoying when you (stupidly) trust what the game is saying and look everywhere to find the speck of paint you missed. It wants you to do the house in a very specific order or else it’s going to glitch out and you have to exit out of the level and go back in, which can take maybe up to 5 minutes in itself in waiting time (at least on the Xbox One) to fix it. I switched off the cockroaches, yet I find myself switching it back on, so it registers that I vacuumed up all the glass, which can be very hard to see. What’s the point of that option if you have to switch it back and forth for it to actually work?

This game also got me very frustrated when it wouldn’t tell me what walls to break down! It doesn’t tell you anything about the minimap color coding, or which color it is that it wants you to break down, so I ended up breaking a lot of the house down just to find which wall it wanted (this happened to other people because it’s one of the many things the game doesn’t tell you!). Well anyway, after confusedly tearing the house down, my Xbox one controller died and I needed to get batteries, which just so happened to be in my basement. So I started walking down the stairs and I slipped. I don’t know why, but I just slipped. I I thankfully caught myself, but I still had two very scraped elbows for like a week. I blame this game for making me angry.

You would think this is a relaxing game on the surface, which it is, until it either breaks in a way which is not your fault, or doesn’t communicate something as in WHICH WALLS TO DEMOLISH AND THEN YOU FALL DOWN THE STAIRS.

I spent so much time decorating a home in a contract (a waste of time and money I now know, because doing extra work and decoration isn’t acknowledged in this game), and for some reason it was glitching out with the walls. I looked it up and apparently so many people had issues with this aunt’s house level, so much so that it had to patched, since people were having trouble with the radiator installation. It got patched, but this level is still broken for me, 3 years later, and my issue is completely different with the walls saying I didn’t demolish them, even though I did and I didn’t rebuild them after. So, I decided to exit out of the level and go back in, and when I came back it turned out I had to get rid of the majority of the decorations I now placed to 100% the level.

Part of me has a lot of fun renovating houses, but all of these stupid glitches that happen because I don’t do rooms in a specific order (seriously, the solutions people had to come up with for the aunt’s house and other levels are renovating the rooms in a very specific order- so you can 100% the level, without it breaking)!!! I also read that people think they did the bare minimum in making this game and I think I agree. They made a game where you can renovate houses, but it also has many glitches, you have to buy expensive dlc just to get more furniture (the base game should make it where you unlock more furniture as you level up!) doing anything extra after finishing the checklist of requirements is literally just a waste of money, you can’t change the roof, you can’t expand the house except by rebuilding rooms if you want more space, there’s no options for windows, no outdoor furniture whatsoever in the base game, I could (clearly) go on and on. It very likely didn’t happen this way (because making games is extremely difficult and time consuming), but it does feel like the bare minimum of effort went into this - there’s such a lack of polish to this game which really undermines all the fun aspects, which they must’ve spent so much time working on!!! Sorry this is a rant but I just got fed up with this game today when Chang Choi wouldn’t buy my home (which I specifically catered to him) because I installed a freaking toilet. He apparently liked the house less than Mr. Futuristic Bachelorpad when I installed a TOILET. I ended up having to delete decorations for him to enjoy having a toilet and a shower in his bathroom.

P.S. I guess I have a personal vendetta against this game now? My poor elbows…

Just to quickly explain this game, One Person Story is supposed to be a game giving life lessons, which apparently blur real life and the game (?), and are also hints to each level. Now, let’s get to this garbage!

Oooh boy, this game’s not good! The best way to describe One Person Story is that it’s pretentious. It thinks it knows what it’s talking about, while that could not be further from the truth. It takes a random turn at the end where the narrator wants to commit suicide, while the whole game, she’s just been spewing out generic “inspirational” quotes that you’d find on social media. If there was a build up to that, maybe even mentioning a good while before she turns to that, like maybe that she’s telling herself these meaningless quotes to maker herself feel better, and that it’s not working, and maybe have her commentary get grimmer, and less hopeful, reflecting her degrading mental state, but the game doesn’t do that. If anything it romanticizes suicide, because if you take the jump route instead of the not jump route (I took jump accidentally), her friends end up somehow catching her off of a cliff, and everything was okay again. THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS. I know I’m not one to talk, because my mental state has never gotten to the point where I ever attempted suicide, but I think it’s pretty obvious that this game doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It just decided to jump on the mental health game bandwagon, and tried to make something deep, meaningful, relatable, and maybe even inspirational, but it falls flat on all of those fronts.

Now, the gameplay, is not engaging or good at all! Just to add on to this already awful game! The gameplay can get annoyingly difficult on certain levels, especially since you don’t have control on the ball “character” itself, and somehow you’re supposed to move it with opening and closing doors, while it just gets stuck on corners most of time, which hampers on the impossible-to-understand timing.

The music is the same piano song for a hundred levels. IT’S THE SAME BORING, BLAND, AND ANNOYING SONG FOR A HUNDRED LEVELS!!! Imagine that, and the game takes two hours to finish. The same song for TWO HOURS.

Bottom line is: If your looking for a good, and educational video game about mental health, this is NOT that!!! DON’T waste your three dollars on it! It is not worth it! Buy something like Hellblade, and maybe Fractured Minds instead (which is a blind recommendation, since I still have to play it, but I have faith in it!).

Edit: Just finished Fractured Minds; it comes from a genuine place, but the execution is really no so good or coherent. Ideas don’t feel very fleshed out, and just bounces from one to the next. I still respect that it was made by one person across a ten month span, and that the majority of the proceeds go to a video game/mental health charity (I forgot the name). It’s worth a try, especially to donate a few bucks, but Hellblade seems like a much safer and better bet.