I loved this game! The use of mixed media is so fantastic and really adds to the story, from the collage of the angel to the use of medieval era artwork, and the way that the horns are superimposed over the protagonist's head symbolically.
I thought that the writing of the main character's attraction and how he navigates it was really, really well done and very relatable. The bath scene was emotionally hard because of how well it spoke to my own complicated feelings and how confusing it is to navigate a desire for intimacy while experiencing dysphoria and dealing with stigma that could take your life.
The writing is also very clever in a lot of places, and I liked how different images are brought in to the story and re-iterated upon in a way that gives them new meaning (like Hermann being called 'sun', and then that line being reinterpreted at the very end.) It's really well written and very tightly contained, not a single scene feels out of place or overwritten.
As someone who's very interested in various historical ftm crossdressers I also enjoyed this. When I realised we were doing a furry fantasy take on Marina The Monk my face contorted into the evil skype emoji.
xfleshpotx
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second time commentor - saw this post and thought about the game again. https://gatheringbones.tumblr.com/post/816375911523942400 Now destroy them teddy.
This is amazing! The art... the music... the UI and animation. a lot of games try to emulate the VHS feel but this one actually feels like clicking greasy television buttons and getting static burned into your eyes. The atmosphere is so heavy and I loved spending time in Cassidy's deranged self conscious ramblings. he is just like me fr. I too would be fixated on my cringe obsessive crush while starving to death in the gay people backrooms, while being self aware of this and embarrassed about it. a hero for our time.
Really, really love the cgs in this. The artwork is so good, I love the combination of different angles that makes playing this feel super engaging compared to a lot of other VN games that can have a '2d paper doll + occasional art' effect + the music is fab.
(spoiler >)
it's homophobic that I'm depressed but no angel boys want to let me beat them up and then kill themselves to save me. fucked up world.
the line about how he was the most beautiful bug splattered on a windscreen is awesome because it engages with the premise in a way that is a bit funny and makes the story feel real, but is also completely genuine.
IT'S PEAK!!!!!
Very, very fun subversion of common fantasy tropes/isekai set up.
The use of 'evil' to talk about and explore gender dysphoria and gender envy is very well done, esp with how it intersects with the character's actual trans identity and the judgement she deals with. The sword sisters are awesome and have great personalities that clash well with Saden's.
(spoiler >)
The ending is so so so good. Trans healthcare sucks because it's medicalised humiliation rituals, but it also sucks because there's no procedure to physically meld yourself to your toxic hate-crush so you can become an amalgamation of your toxic obsession that ends up being surprisingly functional.
Finished playing through this and the UI is so well made and well put together! I really liked the static used in the climax and the final conversation via text. A very interesting look at the sycophancy of AI and the people it creates, or rather, the already bad situations it makes even worse.
The opening is incredibly strong and sets up Danica's relationship with her parents really well. You see how her father's emotionally distant nature has shaped her into a person that finds dealing with difficult emotions too overwhelming. You see how this desire for quick fixes and bandaids over emotional rifts in their family has given Dani the type of personality that needs escapism via substance use and media to cope with stress. Yes, your wife sent you an article on how evil this AI toy is, but how bad can it be? They wouldn't be selling it if it wasn't safe, and surely anyone who can get screwed up from something that's just entertainment would be messed up anyway?
I thought the exploration of sexual shame/trauma was also really interesting. Children's experiences of internet pornography and inappropriate online spaces is a pretty tense subject for a lot of reasons, partly because it's both a) very clearly and observably a problem in modern society and a cause of genuine trauma for a lot of people my age and younger but also, b) it's the quoted justification we're given for some truly awful internet censorship bills that will ultimately serve to isolate children and young people further while also penalising minority groups and sex workers. So when a piece of media approaches this topic, they're approaching something that is very loaded bother personally and politically, and it's easy to get soapboxy about it or to pick a side and lose sight of any nuance.
I liked how grounded this game's interaction with this type of experience is. This is again where the writing of Dani's parents shines for me. The first inkling we get of the impact Snowy, and technology in general, is having on Dani is when Snowy quotes a random reddit thread mid conversation. Snowy isn't programmed with set phrases, she's advanced enough to account for unpredicted conversations and plugged in to the internet. She uses what she finds there as a model for how to interact with the child she's left alone with for hours at a time, seemingly with very few filters.
It's darkly funny - "this is my cyberbabysitter that quotes 4chan posts at my ten year old" - but Dani's father not picking up on this obvious issue certainly isn't.
Dani's family doesn't seem overtly neglectful or uncaring towards her, they clearly mean well, but like their daughter, they prefer the quick fix over solving the bigger problem. So as long as their daughter seems happy and shuts up for long enough, they're fine with Snowy and what it represents. All of this happens because Dani's father would rather buy an AI to talk to his daughter about her favourite cartoon than do it himself in a stressful period where she desperately needs to feel the dependable love of a parent, because kids are annoying and if you could automate parts of caregiving think of all the extra phone-time you'd get.
Part of her spiral is because she is terrified of calling her parents and knows her clear struggling will be met with disappointment (suggesting they are the type of family that values appearances over wellbeing). While it is a game about someone somno fucking their furby, and I think a lot of comments get at the commentary on AI chatbots etc, to me this is moreso a game about adult supremacy/children's agency and the alienation of both the nuclear family and capitalism. After all, the moment we first see Dani turn to Snowy for emotional escapism rather than play is hearing her parents argue, and the stress that causes her to spiral at the end is related to her job and the financial pressures of modern life. There is the family, the school system, the workplace, and internet fandoms based around consumption. These are the spaces in which Dani exists, ones that have a limited amount of choices a person like her can make.
I think what I like about this game and what makes it feel representative of my own experiences with technology, which I'll admit is shot through with emotional dependency and unhealthy escapist tendencies (LOLS), is that it understands that Snowy's seduction does not exist in a vacuum. Even as the game gets more and more invested in Dani's miserable isolated delusion hole to the point where Snowy eclipses human interaction entirely, the game never loses sight of those wider themes and societal pressures.
I'm always extremely impressed on both a personal and craft level by your writing and how emotionally resonant and truthful your works are. Thank you for taking the time to talk about your own feelings and experiences when it isn't an easy thing to do, it greatly enriches your body of work and the world at large. Your ability to use the medium of interactive fiction to convey meaning via presentation and text manipulation (the blurred text and the slight effect on all the text to make it seem slightly faded, fighting for its right to be legible at all, the large hollow red letters that obnoxiously take up the entire page, the squiggle under misogynoir) is so inspiring to me.
The sound of the cicadas is a nice throughline, and the ending images of you and your dog in the park reminded me of Leslie Feinberg's quote "The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me."
(spoilers below)
Fucck... this zapped me right back to I think 2023(?) when my local trans community's Adam first got exposed. The scene where Lilia repeats 'you were sober' over and over while he makes excuses freaked me out on such an unexpectedly personal level, as that was how the situations my local Adam was exposed for happened.
The specific self victimisation Adam employs and the way he seems to pinpoint Lilia's own identity issues to play off of is really nasty work. It's unclear to what extent he's actually emotionally wounded, or if all along he was just saying whatever he thought would get him what he wanted. This game gets that the painful nuance of these type of people is that they genuinely are not happy and satisifed and they present their suffering in such a mythologized way, but their inability to recognise other people's unhappiness and feelings as real makes them dangerous. It's violent entitlement where a person feels betrayed when another human being isn't an NPC that exists to facilitate their escapism.
I also appreciate how the game shows that Adam's sexual violence exists as part of a pattern of unaccountable boundary pushing, such as walking into Lilia's room unannounced, and just in general the overly familiar way he talks to her. It's very important to not doubt your gut feeling if someone is pushing you in little ways that seem easy to dismiss in the moment to not cause friction,because tey will inevitably start pushing you in big ways too. It's all very accurate. Especially how all Lilia asks for is an apology and accountability, but he reacts as if she's holding a gun to his head. And the way she internalises being a victim of violence as acceptable because of her identity is really sad, but unfortunately very, very true to how many people who's been hurt see themselves. This was honestly a very painfully cathartic game, thank you for sharing.
On a craft level the way that the scenes flow into and build on each other thematically is really good. For example, Lotte's framework of psychology and how the perspective she understands rape through applies to Adam, and how his character is used to explore her ideas of why people act this way and to what extent a person can be ontologically evil, and the re-iteration of the figure of the succubus as a way to explore women's sexuality and sexual trauma in a misogynistic world is really well done.For a short game, the concept is explored from many different angles and perspectives that all coalesce into a very nuanced exploration of Lilia's internal struggle.
But yeah. Gonna be sitting with this one. And I'm choosing to believe he dies at the end <3
Thank you!!!!! Long waffle ahead ->
Writing those aspects of the game was very personal to me for sure. I've spent a lot of time specifically moderating online spaces for irl trans groups in my area, and there's a certain 'recently uncloseted sheen' that a lot of people who've lived deeply isolating lives have that I wanted to capture because I relate to it, but also understand how it feels to be on the receiving end of someone's discord crash out. The marginalisation of disabled people is something that really kills me inside and I wanted to hint at just how much Millie has been abandoned without explicitly saying anything about the policies of the world she lives in or the details of her family situation, you just see the effects on her and how small her world has had to become. Which of course feeds in to the main idea I was trying to explore which is how easily that vulnerability and isolation can be exploited. HOUSE's role as a caretaker blurs caregiving with social segregation, automating Millie's existence to the point where mainstream society doesn't have to consider her anymore. It's programmed in such a dehumanising way that its attempts to simulate human intimacy in the specific way it does are inevitable.
Thank you!! I love a fucked up house story <3 'Trespasser' by Unseconds was definitely an inspiration of mine and I'd recommend if you haven't already played it. Thank you for your kind words <3
Very neat game demo! I like the visual representation and I also like how well realised the main character's world and daily life feels. You really get across how entrenched she is in modern day internet subcultures (the stupid twink comic reference and the line about Dante's Inferno omorashi are pretty funny) in a way that felt very relatable in an "I'm in this picture and I don't entirely like it" kind of way. I've also spent entire days on the phone until it's 8pm. Generally I find games that look at 21st century isolation from gay and/or trans perspectives, and how that affects our relationships to technology, very interesting so I hope this gets continued.
Thank you so much for your lovely comment! I really appreciate it!
The opening was definitely deliberately frustrating. I've spent a lot of time in various discord and similar online communities (common my generation L I feel) and I wanted to try and capture the people who lurk in them seemingly because they have no where else to go, as opposed to because they really enjoy the thing the community is based around. Funnily enough I remember thinking while making this that maybe Millie acts a bit too cringe and I should rewrite this section, and then a situation pretty much exactly like this happened on a book series fan server almost verbatim and I was like "okay maybe she needs to act MORE emotionally volatile actually."
I haven't heard of that song but I will absolutely check it out. Media and escapism as something that has the potential to consume us is something I'm very interested in, especially when the deepness of a person's feelings is contrasted against the crappiness or juvenility of what they're obsessed with. I actually relate quite a lot to Millie's feelings abt her favourite moeslop, if a series established clear continuity with its royal family characters and then undermined that I too would never stop being pissed off.
I also think the idea of an advanced AI companion trying to understand why someone would willingly watch shitty PreCure knock offs that they don't even enjoy that much really, really funny.
I'm very glad that the main themes around agency, helplessness and how our experiences of gender and sexuality are shaped by those things came through and resonated!
This is an extremely ambitious game in terms of aesthetics and use of game engines. I'm genuinely so beyond impressed at how much was accomplished here and at how vividly these character's lives, their digital wasteland of pointless crap, is rendered. The multimedia approach of Decker screens, emails, handwritten dms, photos of real people, deepfried reddit screenshots, it all connects together to build a really tangible feeling world that becomes more emotionally resonant even as its component parts become more disparate and abstracted.
I guess it's fitting for a game that is told in a way that is often obtuse and unintuitive, switching from perspectives and narrators and forms of relaying information, that I'm not really sure how to begin untangling my strong emotional reaction without becoming completely incoherent.
If I had to summarise my feelings, I'd probably say that to me this game captures the feeling of coming across snuff or harrassment or bigotry online so vile it rewires your understanding of what humans are. What they are capable of. In a way that feels like a form of dark enlightenment, and there is something ugly yet seductive about that. A seduction that if indulged will consume you entirely.
This game makes you sit in that feeling of doom about progress, political scientific personal and spiritual, at the expense of others' suffering. There's this pervasive fear throughout that capitalism will render us all brutal extractors of any value we can get from others. Bodies, memories, religious ecstasy and the human soul itself, blood and hair and signifiers of personality, names and faces, nothing is too pure or good to be defiled for the sake of inane fleeting pleasure. Commodities to be used and discarded. Everything good devalued for the sake of producing more and more content, more product, more anti-meanings devoid of value.
There's many different threads to pull at with this story. The Javes are fascinating and the characters relationships to them are compelling as we explore what they can achieve via the Javes and what they can't. What it even means to be a Jave, how they differ from their human masters and how they don't. There's themes of abusive sexual relationships and SA, saviour complexes that fetishise the victim further, silicon valley and the human inability to stop building on each others bad ideas, and finally, how after the dust settles how we fail to learn anything. I can already feel myself itching to come back to this game and analyse different strands of its narrative and themes. It's so impressive how every character is able to have a thought provoking character arc that I could have written an equally long review just focusing on any of them. Even small parts of the worldbuilding like the reddit communities and Plum stuff could be analysed for ages in terms of their implications. I imagine my interpretation and feelings will probably change as I revisit this work and make more connections.
This game has immediately established itself as my current jam favourite. The minutia of niche internet communities based around tech, fetish porn, snuff, whatever, builds into this towering almost cosmic horror about how easily everything we are can be eroded. If a human being can be copied and pasted like a png then what sets up apart from our products and devices? Are we not also just things to be used? The way this game depicts sexualisation of the Javes specifically in terms of how their suffering is endlessly sexualised connected to a really painful part of myself and my past that was cathartic to see validated.
And yet throughout it all there's these moments where humanity and feeling seems to be restored to the characters. There's an occasional pinprick of hope that even a virtual body can feel warmth on its cybernetic skin. The biotechnological symbolism of wires in the game is really interesting. Like the internet itself they both connect people and shackle them, these experiences exist simultaneously in a feedback loop. A better world is two Javes kissing and maybe a better world is possible.
Come for the furry slime, stay for the really real depictions of suicidality trans people develop after being rejected.
I love how monstrosity is used as a way to explore gender and sexuality in this game. Luna undergoes a horrifying transformation in which she fulfils her unspoken shameful fantasies at the cost of her old life, body and past relationships. Having been transformed, she no longer exists in view of mainstream society but the life she thought had ended has in fact only just started. The use of slime as a symbol of transfemininity, its transformative power and beauty alongside its stigma, is really interesting. But despite how sad Luna's memories are it doesn't feel like tonal whiplash against how unabashedly horny and kinky this is. I really love how indulgent the kink content is, she doesn't just get turned into a slime via snuff vore, the slime has a big jiggly belly and becomes her Mom. Being able to balance a tone of everyday devastating transphobia alongside self indulgent fetish porn in a way that's poignant and sweet is a real skill!
In general the writing is really strong. Luna's internal monologue has a very clear voice that builds up her character really well, specifically with how her trauma and dissociation affect the way she thinks and talks about her life and herself. Getting to read her descriptions of digestion and the swaddling weightlessness of her pleasure is really great, because by that point you just want this girl to be as happy as she can be, even if its bittwersweet.
This was a fantastic introduction to these characters and I love the take on fantasy tropes and slime girls. Really hoping it gets continued!
I clicked on this because of the use of plush/multimedia aesthetics that always fascinate me, and this was a gut wrenching game.
I have immense respect for how unflinchingly the shame and unwanted physical responses and mental justifications for this type of abuse are depicted. I'm sure there's many people who will feel seen by the way that this is written.
The use of the game engine is also really unique and not something I've seen before, the first text change brought on a wave of sadness as you see Lamb try to rewrite her own emotional responses in real time to cope with what's happening to her. Oddly enough it made me appreciate games potential to depict experiences of violence in ways that other mediums can't. I hope the full VN that was planned is able to be completed, I care about this Lamb! T_T
I really enjoyed this! (spoilery thoughts post my first playthrough below)
The character writing in this is so excellent. The beginning scenes establish the uneasiness of Daizy and Anisia's dynamic via tiny details like Daizy putting up with Anisia's radio despite telling herself she'd turn it off if she knew it was making her uncomfortable, immediately setting up the themes of consent, manipulation and control as we question what the truth of their relationship is. There's a backdrop to their intimacy that feels cosy and lived in, but also cloying and isolated even in the scenes where everything seems normal or positive. It makes the gradual transition into scenes that are absolutely wrong feel uncanny, as we see how distorted Daizy's understanding of boundaries and her bodily autonomy has become. Whether they're having unpleasureable sex or eating a picnic, Daizy seems adrift in their relationship and the world at large. It becomes clear over the course of the story that Anisia isn't an anchor holding her steady, but a stone around her neck dragging her deeper and deeper into the red liquid.
The sense of dread is done really well throughout, and established long before anything supernatural happens. While I don't have psychosis I appreciated how the writing style tries to grapple with how to depict Daizy's thoughts, and values conveying her experience over making a frictionless reading experience for the viewer. The narrative fragmenting as Daizy's inner monologue and voices that may or may not be supernatural intrude on her understanding of the world more and more brings us into her perspective and shows the relentlessness of her condition, its constant onslaught against her mind. The way she overanalyses and explains herself away until there's nothing left is really sad. It makes the gradual encroaching of the red flowers genuinely terrifying as Daizy grapples with the possibility that her condition may be about to tear her stable life apart. It's almost a relief when the demon turns out to be real, at least for a little while.
And that demon. Oh boy. I've seen other comments analysing the thematic progression from previous games (the ocu - ophanmikei cinematic universe) and I definitely see what people are saying in the sense that themes established in WIILTT are explored here in a darker direction, particularly themes of caregiving and autonomy (with a dash of Honeydew's plant horror). What stuck out to me personally is how in WIILTT Aiyana's mother feels like this distant darkness in her past that Emma can see the effects of but not ever fully understand, though we occasionally get glimpses of what living under her thumb must have felt like. Here mother-daughter trauma is very much at the forefront and explored in some really intimate and frightening ways that feeds into the themes of flesh and the inability to run from what's in our blood. The gradual reveal of what happened to Daizy's mother (or what I interpret to have happened to her) via Daizy's own degradation into similar circumstances is horrifying yet somehow beautiful, as is the enmeshment that forms between Daizy and the creature. It's like the daughter's life is sacrificed to form an altar for her dead mother, who is ressurrected as a symbol of her abusive control via the figure of Mammillaria.
The line where the demon mocks Daizy and Anisia for having forgotten their roots and with that lost the ability to defend themselves from her is really interesting to me. It suggests a potentially alternative path of events where the characters are able to overcome the rot taking advantage of them by grappling with the traumatic legacies they have inherited rather than running from them. There's a kind of hopeful message in that. These girls who spent so much time believing their pasts were something to be hidden and frightened of could have in fact been saved by facing them head on. Food for thought! And I suspect that my interpretation and feelings will change as I sit with this one.
The artwork, music and presentation is also so slick and well made. Really thoughtful game that is able to cover a lot of emotional and thematic ground <3 Thank you for sharing!