[post-note: in the vein of the game, this "review" is a deeply personal and voyeuristic look into myself. it's alright, you can come in. after all, half of the five people that might see this have already looked away with this foreword, and no one consequential in my life will ever find this.]

I sobbed through pretty much every second of this. Brief respites of laughter cut the raw resonance of emotion I brought upon myself. But it's not art, is it? It's a voyeuristic journal entry, a thing not to be anything, a mere piece of appreciation that likely picked up traction accidentally through wearing the skin of a fan-game. It's a self-evaluation tucked away in the infinite somewhere of the wired world. Yet, it's identically the exact experience I seek from any piece of media: to be profoundly overcome by a contextualization or re-formatting of the self. My suffering is a tangible existence both in what goes said and unsaid within this space. It rears it's head, it fucks with me, it doubts me, it tells me exactly what I want to hear, it tells me what I left behind, what I wish I had. It speaks to me in all the ways I speak to myself. I haven't experienced art. I've experienced another human being. I looked through her past, her personas, her friends and her dreams, and yet selfishly in her, I only saw myself. I think a lot of the untenable, uncrossable bridge, the endless space that exists between our minds. I'm so scared to talk sometimes, though I know I have so much to say. I can't translate myself except through my words, yet civil standards, self-doubt and floating judgements cut my tongue and halt my pen. I want to transcribe my bridge. I want people to see beyond the body, the voice, the hobbies, the opinions, even the words, to express the rawest form of self, of the magical thing of self that I love and no one else can feel, and to still be loved as that thing, to nullify this whole social game we oppress ourselves with. Madotsuki's Closet was perhaps the closest I've ever felt to standing on someone else's bridge. Even with my closest friends, their physicality and our shared history of things other than the self makes me incapable of willing myself to cleanly pierce through them. I don't mean to imply some odd parasocial bond I have with the creator, for as I said, I stared into it's abyss and only saw myself. It's part of why I sobbed. Her introduction to transness through Yume Nikki with a "there are worse ways" became my exposure through anti-SJW YouTube content making disgusting one who could be so presumptuous and fetishistic to dare challenge the institution of gender. Her jokes and irony became my own mask for online engagement that I renew time and time again to appease the people who use this space as a playground for pleasure. Her messages with her friends became my own hollowness of a lifetime of cowering in fear of my true self, then finally overcoming it all to be met with "oh, cool". The young girl on the bench (and oh GOD did she crush me) became my own wishes to simply have been born different. She became my desire not to be trans or trying to be female, but just to have been born it with the privilege of not having to question. She became my unalterable skeleton oppressing me from the deepest recesses of my flesh. She became, at once, all from my childhood I was while also being all the hundreds of little signs I missed and didn't have the language to will or question. She became who I dressed up as or roleplayed under the covers or in my literal closet. She became my opting into silence to not hear my own voice, my tantrums after haircuts, my rejection of masculine hobbies, my starving myself to be shorter and more frail, my fiction writing to create worlds and characters to escape into, my longing for death as my body turned itself more and more uninhabitable with the loss of that childhood androgyny. She became the childhood and happiness and optimism and celebrated, babied, blissful ignorance that everyone seemed entitled to up until their teens, but that I felt I had been born without. I appropriated Bagenzo's literal dreams, and I feel dirty for it. I took them and imposed myself on them. I overwrote her, and I can replay her, share her, discuss her like a thing to be chewed, swallowed and shat out. Yet, in overriding her, I filled in the holes of myself. I paved the narrative of pursuit of traditional femininity that underlied my whole childhood. I bridged the gap between the art I enjoy and their reflections on the person I am. Much like Yume Nikki, much like the thousands of fan theories on it, I took someone elses dreams and projected myself on them, not until they made sense, but until I did. This was perfect, exemplary of the very things I want from life and art. Yet, what was it that I am considering exemplary? Is the game a perfect product, is Bagenzo a perfect writer, or is what I have taken in a perfect addition to my self? I think rankings disgust me now, as do all the arguing I've done to uphold opinions and all the art I've experienced for other people. I'm not going to bother answering... the void has listened long enough. Perhaps I've let one of you onto my bridge, or perhaps not. Perhaps I appear insane, self-indulgent, pretentious. That's all right, as long as my bridge exists for now in this magical somewhere. As for me, don't worry, I've made peace with most of this stuff. But something tells me you might not have seen "me" here, right? You saw whatever could be morphed into you. If art is to be defined as anything, perhaps it's that.

I will, at some point, write a long essay on my thoughts on this game, but I want to note that more games should be like this. More games should be personal stories. More game should be full of emotions that don't wrap up in an easy package. More games should be about our experiences with other games. More games should pull from points in our lives.

Madotsuki's Closet is a magnum opus in the game essay, and I think we as a games culture still have not fully embraced the game essay as a viable genre. As a result, I think many will not really know how to look at this game without viewing it through the lens of how emotional stories "should" look or how a game story "should" look. However, years from now, when we look back on Madotsuki's Closet. We will know that it was setting the stage for a style of game that truly changes what we can expect from the medium.