deersong
Bio
i went to the park yesterday
i think
it was how i remembered it.
i went to the park yesterday
i think
it was how i remembered it.
Badges
Noticed
Gained 3+ followers
Favorite Games
017
Total Games Played
018
Played in 2024
001
Games Backloggd
Recently Played See More
Recently Reviewed See More
playing this left me in a strange but familiar place of numbness, total emotional destruction. it brought the ghost out again, but it also embraced her, in time. it gave me a piece of something deeply painful, but still something i needed.
i have a lot of love for things like this, the small stuff on itch.io. in most other places, you don't really find anything that "gets it" in the same way. it's right about the fuzz, the way that the destruction of your life becomes boring. it doesn't hurt you because you become someone else, and that thing isn't supposed to feel emotion. but then you just kind of stay as that ghost. everything else becomes fuzz too. you wake up to find you barely remember the last decade of your life, and the bits you do remember have something radioactive around them. all automatic pathways in your brain direct you away from it. it feels like you don't remember those things either. at some point, it became hard to see yourself as a human being. you're someone else, something else now. and then you get up and go to work like yesterday.
there's a painful comfort in seeing something "get it". on one hand, i'm glad that i'm not alone. finding other people experiencing similar things allows me to process some of myself, or at least take an early step forward. at the same time, i wish that this never happened to any of us. i wish this world was empty of ghosts.
trauma is everything else. i really appreciated this game.
i have a lot of love for things like this, the small stuff on itch.io. in most other places, you don't really find anything that "gets it" in the same way. it's right about the fuzz, the way that the destruction of your life becomes boring. it doesn't hurt you because you become someone else, and that thing isn't supposed to feel emotion. but then you just kind of stay as that ghost. everything else becomes fuzz too. you wake up to find you barely remember the last decade of your life, and the bits you do remember have something radioactive around them. all automatic pathways in your brain direct you away from it. it feels like you don't remember those things either. at some point, it became hard to see yourself as a human being. you're someone else, something else now. and then you get up and go to work like yesterday.
there's a painful comfort in seeing something "get it". on one hand, i'm glad that i'm not alone. finding other people experiencing similar things allows me to process some of myself, or at least take an early step forward. at the same time, i wish that this never happened to any of us. i wish this world was empty of ghosts.
trauma is everything else. i really appreciated this game.
i think i've always been running.
This review contains spoilers
i returned to this recently after only playing it once years ago, and i found myself really struck by the pervasive melancholy emanating off of this thing. both in the way that it lives and the way that it "ends". even as it fucks with your head in really fun ways in the back couple levels, the vibe still seeps into you. the entire third act up till the ending is lodged deep into my brain.
it's crushingly lonely in a way, a game about an oncoming apocalypse and a single woman, neither of whom we really get context for. why is the world ending? what will everything become once it's gone? why is naya running directly into it? you hear about exactly one other person in the whole of the game, a monk who ends up wishing naya well in the form of a written note. "i hope you find what you're looking for". their words grow kind of tragic once you learn that she apparently never does. same with us - playing through the new game plus gives you more illumination on how the game levels work in a literal sense, but the ending doesn't change. you don't get any new text or lore, or insight. it's just knowledge.
maybe it's a game about the good in turning back and calling it quits, but i kind of balk at literalizing it to that degree. putting it in a box like that compresses it and the degree of freedom it has. it might be a game about hubris, but i think the part of it that'll stick with me is how the game feels before that (lack of) resolution is made clear. a woman venturing into shattered, abandoned areas, nobody for miles, trying to see the end of the world. a quiet kind of self-destruction.
it's crushingly lonely in a way, a game about an oncoming apocalypse and a single woman, neither of whom we really get context for. why is the world ending? what will everything become once it's gone? why is naya running directly into it? you hear about exactly one other person in the whole of the game, a monk who ends up wishing naya well in the form of a written note. "i hope you find what you're looking for". their words grow kind of tragic once you learn that she apparently never does. same with us - playing through the new game plus gives you more illumination on how the game levels work in a literal sense, but the ending doesn't change. you don't get any new text or lore, or insight. it's just knowledge.
maybe it's a game about the good in turning back and calling it quits, but i kind of balk at literalizing it to that degree. putting it in a box like that compresses it and the degree of freedom it has. it might be a game about hubris, but i think the part of it that'll stick with me is how the game feels before that (lack of) resolution is made clear. a woman venturing into shattered, abandoned areas, nobody for miles, trying to see the end of the world. a quiet kind of self-destruction.