"I loved you, always.â
going to comment a little on this game: the overseeing voice talks as if it owns you, and defies your free will. if you follow its orders, you are praised, and the worldview becomes sharper and more detailed. if you donât, you are chastised, and the world becomes more vague and difficult to navigate, but also more colourful and loud. itâs odd, and sort of eerie, but definitely interesting. take it as you will.
This game really unsettles me. It unsttles me that my first choice to obey, and when I played again and disobeyed, I got really emotional really fast. Failure hurt me more the more I disobeyed. It was⌠interesting to experience.
iâve always said we are trained to obey more than to think.
holy shit. i reblogged this the first time without playing. then i played in and it is terrifying. i very much like this, but it will give you intense feelings.Â
Whatâs the game??
you obey everything the game tells you too, even jumping into barbs and basically killing yourself. if you dont youre chastised and even the scolding is terrifying
So, essentially, itâs a game that illustrates what itâs like to be in an abusive parents or an abusive relationship - and how it affects you emotionally. That is horrific and ingenious - the next time someone negates the affects of emotional abuse, Iâll take them to this game and let them come to their own conclusions.
This game absolutely gets it. The most solid and reliable degradation is a gendered insult. The more you obey and co-operate, the better understanding you seem to have of your word, and things seem easier. But what really gets me is the contradiction. You are not allowed to have the correct answer. Are you a boy or a girl? The answer is no, I will give you the answer. even towards the end, your âpraiseâ is âno, I will give you the answer. You earned this answer, but it is given to you by me.â Disobeying makes the world frightening and confusing and difficult, but beautiful in a world devoid of flavour.
Not just a gendered insult, either. The nameless voice that directs the playerâs actions is supposed to be a hateful, abusive monster, and when the gameâs designers asked themselves âokay, whatâs the most degrading, dehumanising thing this voice could possibly do to the player?â, the answer they came up with was âdeliberately misgender themâ.
Played it both ways â one where I implicitly obeyed everything and the other where I defied wherever I could.
Both endings are abrupt and without any sort of contextual resolution. When you obey, youâre praised and youâre given a clear landscape and what appears to be a coin (so a reward), but with the clear knowledge everything is at the behest of the voice, who is so very pleased to own you. When you play the game defyingly, the voice that smugly tells you that it will make you beg ends up being the one that begs at the end. âWhy do you hate me? I loved you.â âWhere will you go? Will you stay close?â Youâre given the choice between going and staying. If you choose to go, youâre given an unending corridor to walk through filled with the colorful glitchy distortion obscuring everything. It ends as you walk down it.
On one hand, youâre given the world you know, with all your needs met, but none of the will. On the other hand, youâre given a world of opportunity thatâs entirely yours but itâs undefined, unknown, and unending.
Itâs definitely an emotional experience.
