Truly accurate weird guy high school experience. This is what it's like folks

I really enjoyed this! I have some problems with it but I'll get into those in a bit. This is actually my second time posting this- I initially felt a little embarrassed posting this because it's pretty personal wrt how I connected with the game but fuck it. First, I wanna say why I really love Who's Lila, and felt weirdly seen by it. and in that it's just really aesthetically lovely.

There's a Jacob Geller video that some of this will probably sound a bit redundant next to, but I think for me Who's Lila's hit the "fear of losing control" mark a little differently and in a way that felt deeply cathartic. This game pokes at a LOT of my specific fears from growing up with some William-esque social deficits, and I think that's why it struck a chord with me- being misunderstood because of how I might express an emotion in a way that seems odd and of social interaction feeling like a game of delivering an "expected" response is kinda just what it's like when you've got that spectrum swag. Actively having to fight the way my brain wants me to talk and act, being worried that I'd offend someone with a strange noise or mannerism that was misread- these were the things that kept me awake and made life feel impossible when I was a little younger than William. It also can create a real sense of alienation when your school life feels like a social minigame- Will's intentional self-isolation and his need to construct a companion to keep him company feel like familiar concepts to me. I used to project thoughts onto my dog and guinea pig and have back-and-forths with them when I was too exhausted to actually talk to people, at least until I couldn't stop imagining them threatening me and had to stop. Coincidentally, Who's Lila has a scene that reminds me of this to a T when William and Lila are talking about the nature of the mind and she starts intentionally making him freak out.

Guess what I'm saying with all this is that Who's Lila feels like it taps into the fear of having a mind/thoughts that can work in ways you don't want them to very well. The autism/social anxiety parallels are pretty clear, but I also spent a lot of my early teenage years with overwhelming harm OCD- this fear that there was something inside me that would take control of my body and make me do some Martha's Apartment shit to my loved ones or peers. It got to the point where I would deliberately try not to be too physically close to people just so I wouldn't risk suddenly snapping someone's neck as I walked by. Who's Lila plays into that fear of hurting others and of being unable to do anything about it- to suddenly have something akin to Lila enter you, an intrusive thought that actually has power, and that's trying to replace you. I was in Will's position in some ways in High School, and these thoughts and images in my head felt like they were bleeding into me and were going to kill me. It's terrifying, and I think 14 year old me maybe would have benefited from seeing a game that captures that feeling so well, even if it wasn't the creator's intent.

"Yeah I constantly have uncontrollable, extremely distressing thoughts about murdering people in violent, horrific ways and perform rituals that I think are keeping me from acting on them" is not a feeling that's easy to talk to if you've never been told it's just the symptoms of a pretty common mental illness. I don't think Who's Lila is "about" OCD, much less the specific kind I have- but the way it dis-empowers the player and constantly reminds them that we are puppeteering a teenage boy's body and making it do horrible things really resonated with me and made for effective horror. The scenes with The Stranger feel particularly representative of this, especially the one in the Lovers ending. Just played out exactly how my nightmares from around that time of my life did. "You look very cute today. Don't scream." Being taken over by your own thoughts and made to do something horrible, presented nightmarishly. Genuinely gave me chills.

Moving away from why the game hit so hard for me and into some more general stuff; the dithering is both a really clever choice to mask the extremely low-detail models and to lend the game a ton of style- just gives it this hazy, dreamlike feeling that creates a constant alienation and that's backed up by the eerie, spacious soundscapes. The bizarre environments and characters you meet are immediately memorable and striking; shoutout to the Stranger. I love the Stranger. Captures the feeling of the Mystery Man without just ripping off Lost Highway entirely.

I do have some minor grievances with the game's writing- not problems with the themes or plot, but in the way it expresses them. GarageHeathen had, in my opinion, a pretty singular vision here, but I think there's occasionally an unfounded lack of confidence in the extremely effective mechanical and visual storytelling to get those themes across. There's a lot of expository text in Who's Lila, and there were a few times that it felt like characters were re-clarifying things that were hinted at in different endings. I don't think Who's Lila is pretentious or "fake deep", because it does have something to say and I think that thing is interesting- but it sometimes feels like the dialogue is actively trying to prove that to me- that yes, these symbols and concepts mean something! I don't think that's necessary. The storytelling here is strong but part of me wishes the visual/mechanical elements were able to speak for themselves just a tiny bit more. That said, I think Who's Lila is genuinely fascinating. It affected me and I think you should play it if it looks even vaguely interesting to you and you're down for a one-player ARG point'n'click