CHZHXY ART DUMP

Wahoo!!! Yippeeee!!! I'm so glad to finally have this game idea done so I can finally move on with my life after thinking about this for over 6 months!

First of all, thanks a lot for checking out my game! And even more so if you decided to play it <3

Special thanks to:

haunthill, and my housemates bob and pie

for all your support during the worst months of my life so far <3

So, let's talk a little about this game why don't we?

If you follow me on my social medias, you'd know that I've been very inactive for over half a year, only popping back in recently. Consider this game as some sort of an explanation for it ^^

Around last year, around October 2023 my little goober, my silly little puffball, my cute little meow meow, Yakult (pictured below) was diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). A few weeks later, he was also diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) and then diagnosed a few days later with Chronic Arthritis. Did I mention he also has IBS on top of all this? 😅

(behold: my sickly victorian child)

(note, I've included 40 of his photos in the OST pack if you wanna support us <3)

tl;dr: I spent the last half a year after this getting it all under control, going to the vet weekly (sometimes 2-3 times a week) trying to find meds that work, routines that work, and food that works for him (it took almost the entire 9 months to convince him to eat the appropriate prescription diet because it's low protein and thus: not yummy for the kitties. Hell, none of my other cats wants it LMAO) I basically had no time or energy to do anything else besides driving back and forth to the vet and spending my entire day trying to keep this little goober fed and hydrated. I barely had the time to work (thankfully i work remote, and my then-manager was very understanding about my situation.)

It was an incredibly stressful time for both of us, and there were many points where I had to do things that my cat didn't like to ensure that he stayed fed and hydrated and didn't deteriorate too quickly. During a lot of these times, I'd feel very guilty too. I'd think whether or not I'm being cruel or selfish. I'd have plenty of discussions with my friends and family about what to do, whether or not I should keep going, how to balance between my stress levels and his, between his happiness and unhappiness. Things like: When do you call it quits? When to let him go? What would make the kitty happiest? How do you know if they still want to be here?

It is amidst all this that I found some discourse about Orpheus and Eurydice (god it sounds so funny now that i'm mentioning it) but it was largely a discussion about whether or not they'd look back, and what it means to look back. I remember seeing someone comment something about the story not being literal, and that we should be thinking about Orpheus and Eurydice (and other greek myth stories) not as characters, but what the entire story meant to teach and express. Why is it that there is no version where he brings her back to life? What does that mean? Why did Orpheus look back in all the different versions? He no longer hears her footstep, she asks him to look at her and say something. He hears her fall, he made it out and looked back, not realizing she's still not out yet. If we were not to look at this literally, what would it symbolize? What can we learn from it?

It's not too difficult for me to connect that to my own situation, taking care of an elderly cat in palliative care. We'll part ways at some point. He'll keep deteriorating, I'll keep trying to help him. He's still okay for now, but sometime in the future I will have to really look at our situation and let go of him, whether I like it or not.

In the first ideation of the game, Eurydice was still human. But humans can talk, and communicate. You can ask them what they want sometimes. You can ask when they want to go, and how. These are things you can discuss beforehand. That's not the case with animals, though. You'll have to make the call entirely on your own, and I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer. No one really does. You can't exactly ask the animal, can you? I think whatever I'll choose in the future, i'll regret it nonetheless, and I felt that the non-communication and definite regret despite whatever choice the player makes is an important thing that I wanted the players to think about.