Distills the vapid vapours of those Twitter and Instagram accounts that post screencaps of Goku and Shinji and Lain staring out into the mid-distance with fake subtitles like "Everything happens so much"; anime and depression as tumblr tote-bag therapy totems, medications as aesthetic-dialectic collectibles to be flexed on Discord and TikTok. Refines the things I didn't like about Milk Inside and discards the things I did like - a classic example of someone being given more time and space to speak and ultimately showing ass over class; everyone's entitled to express themselves however they like in their own art, but careless depiction of mental health is something I struggle to commend, especially given the target audience here. Milk Outside's not entirely without merit, but the most interesting nugget here - 'web people' and their existence as random images and text to be hoarded in your personal Pokedex in lieu of meaningful relationships (1300 webfriends who like drawing and a notebook with half a dozen drawings) - is coated on either side with an unpleasant film of gibberish that's hard to wipe off before digestion. Looks great, though!
Trauma-induced delusions are one of the least supported and understood areas of mental health that is represented in media/larger society in general. So I was incredibly skeptical discovering there was a sequel to the original "bag of Milk" game.
The first game kind of felt like it was trying to express how the player cannot ever understand the experiences of those that exist within fiction and telling a challenging story within that. It follows a protagonist who is attempting to go outside of her home for the first time since her father died with monsters and cruel thoughts following her every step. Along the way the player is interacting with her thoughts and representing a sort of "medication" for her. This first game doesn't necessarily succeed in its aims. However due to it's short amount of timespan and ambiguity in low fidelity it surprisingly doesn't feel exploitative. Instead it just feels like a short story that presents us with ideas and images for us to carry and think about.
By making a second game in relation to this, I have to wonder what the goals are. Why do the ideas and images from the first title need to be expanded upon? Unfortunately it feels like "Milk outside" doubles down on the moments from the previous title as a means of reveling in traumatic iconography. This sheds the sympathetic lens formed from the first game's lo-fi constrained ambitions, and reveals a voyeuristic kaleidoscope of torturistic pleasure with higher fidelity animation and visuals.
I have heard there is some pretty cool stuff the game does with narrative structures and I also think it looks nice. However, I just don't feel a desire to play through more of this game's depictions of delusions and trauma.
The first game kind of felt like it was trying to express how the player cannot ever understand the experiences of those that exist within fiction and telling a challenging story within that. It follows a protagonist who is attempting to go outside of her home for the first time since her father died with monsters and cruel thoughts following her every step. Along the way the player is interacting with her thoughts and representing a sort of "medication" for her. This first game doesn't necessarily succeed in its aims. However due to it's short amount of timespan and ambiguity in low fidelity it surprisingly doesn't feel exploitative. Instead it just feels like a short story that presents us with ideas and images for us to carry and think about.
By making a second game in relation to this, I have to wonder what the goals are. Why do the ideas and images from the first title need to be expanded upon? Unfortunately it feels like "Milk outside" doubles down on the moments from the previous title as a means of reveling in traumatic iconography. This sheds the sympathetic lens formed from the first game's lo-fi constrained ambitions, and reveals a voyeuristic kaleidoscope of torturistic pleasure with higher fidelity animation and visuals.
I have heard there is some pretty cool stuff the game does with narrative structures and I also think it looks nice. However, I just don't feel a desire to play through more of this game's depictions of delusions and trauma.
For me this was an extremely relatable story about the complicated relationship we have with our pills. The benefits always have tradeoffs; they make you more normal, but they also change how you think and in my ways who you are. You’re never really sure what you’re putting in your body; you're placing an enormous amount of trust in complete strangers and making yourself both vulnerable and dependent.
I really like this creator’s work; it’s simultaneously cerebral and visceral. It’s validating in the ways it mirrors my experience and elucidating in the ways it doesn’t. I need to get my hands on more of this.
I really like this creator’s work; it’s simultaneously cerebral and visceral. It’s validating in the ways it mirrors my experience and elucidating in the ways it doesn’t. I need to get my hands on more of this.
Sidenote: this is my 500th review what the hell
This was a lot better than the first one. The visuals are fantastic. This game looks incredible and even the few animated scenes are great. Such awesome twisted and surreal visuals, really carried the game for me. The main character is also incredibly cute, and all of her expressions combined with the surprisingly good and funny writing come together to make a really likeable character. The music/sound design is also great. Unfortunately, I dont think I could give this game higher than a 4/5 simply because I didnt get it. None of the endings clear anything up and outside of mental health issues, I really couldn't tell you what the game is trying to say. I dont really like open endings and this game kinda feels like its the "story is what you make of it" type deal, but that just doesnt do anything for me. Thankfully the dialogue and presentation is just so strong, and even if the endings arent very clear they can range from interesting to seriously quite unnerving. While I feel like the game could of conveyed its message better, it was a great time overall
Achievement Completion - 100%
Time Played - 3 hours 18 minutes
Nancymeter - 81/100
Game Completion #42 of 2022
April Completion #11
This was a lot better than the first one. The visuals are fantastic. This game looks incredible and even the few animated scenes are great. Such awesome twisted and surreal visuals, really carried the game for me. The main character is also incredibly cute, and all of her expressions combined with the surprisingly good and funny writing come together to make a really likeable character. The music/sound design is also great. Unfortunately, I dont think I could give this game higher than a 4/5 simply because I didnt get it. None of the endings clear anything up and outside of mental health issues, I really couldn't tell you what the game is trying to say. I dont really like open endings and this game kinda feels like its the "story is what you make of it" type deal, but that just doesnt do anything for me. Thankfully the dialogue and presentation is just so strong, and even if the endings arent very clear they can range from interesting to seriously quite unnerving. While I feel like the game could of conveyed its message better, it was a great time overall
Achievement Completion - 100%
Time Played - 3 hours 18 minutes
Nancymeter - 81/100
Game Completion #42 of 2022
April Completion #11
This review contains spoilers
“I ramble and give up, once upon a shut up.”
Just to get it out the way I played both Milk inside a bag and Milk outside a bag back to back, and like others here have said, I highly recommend that you do this, if you decide to play this.
Important notice: I find it difficult to talk about these plays without devolving into personal experiences from my life, so if you would like to continue the comfort of knowing nothing about me, please do yourself a favor and don’t read this. If you do continue, then take care.
For the sake of understanding, I will be referring to the protag as “Null”. I saw Erato do it in her review and I found it more understanding and comes off less demeaning than referring to her as “girl” or “milk”.
I’m going to try my best to organize my thoughts although it can be quite difficult but what you end up seeing is what you get.
Maybe you can help?
Exploitation and “The Connection.”
So to briefly touch on the topic of whether or not these plays are exploitive of mental illness.. I believe it’s understandable to have that gut feeling upon its first impressions considering the lain like art-style/aesthetics. Lain is something I question the intentions of but still feel some connection to it for a reason I am still internalizing to this day, it still feels paradoxical to me. I believe for this play, there’s something deeper than that. Perhaps it’s not as deep as what I wanted it to be but maybe it doesn’t have to be? Maybe the fact that it has the potential to begin new thoughts to be created in my mind is enough? Maybe not new but different, it’s always different.
Upon playing Milk inside a bag of milk, I already felt some form of emotional connection with its eerie music and atmosphere, the preparation of leaving your home to the store, rehearsing your social role/ques over and over again, then getting overwhelmed by your own thoughts and saying “I’m ready to burst into tears!” When I read those words I started crying a lot. It was that moment that I really felt like I was crying with this play, not at it. Which is an important distinction to me. The last time I felt this connection was playing Disco Elysium for the first time (and the other many many times..) in October, 2019.
Dissonance.
As hinted from the title, Milk inside a bag of milk is focused entirely on the internal conflicts and rambling of Null. Yet Inside a bag of milk still holds a level of dissonance, you have a name, she talks to you, asks you questions under her boundaries. The only time your name is said is if you’ve been nothing but disruptive and hurtful towards her, that’s when she gives up getting milk and you as well, hoping to find someone else for next time. Successfully helping her buy a bag of milk then leads to the beginning of Milk outside a bag of milk. Which then opens another level of dissonance where you can see her and she can see you, as if you’re really there, as if she trusts you.
In Disco Elysium, you play and interact with Harry Du Bois and his dissociative mind, you decide which thoughts come and go, his contradictions, his political beliefs, etc, in a matter of days. While the Milk plays have you as some form of entity projected by Null, it’s the only thing she has to not be alone, she doesn’t like the silence, she finds your presence to be “grateful” at times. By the words you choose to say, you can influence her emotions and lead her in directions in thoughts, causing either a level of understanding or a panic attack. This also influences the dream she will have when she finally goes to bed. The milk plays is an interactive dissociative experience, only witnessing a single day of Null’s life.
Medication.
”When I am under the influence of drugs, terrible and unpleasant melodies sound in my head. Mixing with the sounds of the world around me, they create a terrible dissonance in my head.”
Both entries also touch on a subject that I found to be lacking when talking about the experiences with mental illness, that would be the relationship with medication and its effects.
Null’s lifestyle is messy and unconventional, especially with her medication intake, either she takes none at all or more than she needs too, or just wastes them completely. She believes she can handle it without it until the “pain” comes back and she has to take her medication with defeat.
Psychiatry is what I would describe as a sensitive tread on wire in brain chemistry. It took me the twenty four years I’ve been alive for me to really internalize that the altering of chemicals in your mind can only do so much when everything else about your life fucking sucks. Of course, I thought I knew that enough to do a fine job during my psychology courses in college but it took a while for me to place that into my own life.
When I was growing up in my teens, all I did was sit in my room and feel bad about something, whether that would be something in my head or the effects of the medication. I mostly took antidepressants and amphetamines. I hated taking my meds, I hated how they made me feel, how it made the world feel, just all of it. At worst I felt awful, at best I felt nothing. But I took them because they were supposed to help me “function”, giving me this push to do labor which at the time was just school. I’ll let you know that I’ve dropped out of school multiple times. I dropped out of public high school because of a paranoia induced panic attack, I didn’t feel safe there, I couldn’t. I tried home schooling, I was too mentally disfigured at the time to really do it, my father tried to help but he just simply wasn’t patient enough. All I could hear when he tried to help me with algebra was how much I annoyed him. I would later get my GED which would feel like a drugged up trance, a lot of the details are very blurred to me when looking back. The medications I’ve had throughout my life have given me sprints of euphoria and long droughts of sedation.
I think one of the worst medications I’ve experienced was when I was put on Zoloft. It made the world spin and feel so slow, the voices I could hear at the time were slow, almost paul stretched whispers. I couldn’t understand them and for some reason that only angered me. I wanted to scream it all out of me but I couldn’t, just felt dazed instead. There’s an intense Thanksgiving story that’s very much about my episodes from the influence of Zoloft but ask me about it later. Speaking of medication induced episodes, did you know heavy use of amphetamines can cause episodes of psychosis? I sure learned that between the years of 2019 - 2020. I hate every medication I was put on! You name it. I hate Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Fluoxetine, and of course fuck Zoloft. I fucking hate Zoloft.
Ever since my last breakdown in early 2022, I’ve been clean from medications, I haven’t taken anything since. I’ve mostly been taking it easy and focusing on what I can do about how I live my life, to make it less suffering. I aim to be productive every day, to talk to someone, do literally anything but nothing. My episodes of psychosis have worked in conjunction with my long episodes of depression. If I learned anything last year, it’s “Inevitable depression when I do nothing.”. Of course, I’m not saying medication is just bad and that no one should take it, it can help, even save lives. But the relationship between one and their medication isn’t always as simple as taking a painkiller to make the pain go away. It’s complicated, it can hold pros and cons, like I said in the beginning of this: it’s a balancing act.
Repetition
“I do not repeat because I repress, I repress because I repeat.” - Guess who said this.
The repetition in Milk outside a bag of milk is miserable. The repetition of the same bad day, the same initial breakdown, over and over again. It’s just sometimes Null’s entity can influence her late night to be ok or worse. Don’t confuse this as me saying this is a “bad” thing about the play, on the contrary, this is fitting for the type of lifestyle she and many others live.
“So every thought would make a senseless and merciless circle in my head, destined to go back to where it started.”
Your conversations with her are nothing but circular thoughts that she's had before and will have again. She leaves everything in her room at their exact place to help her collect her thoughts, it supposedly helps her see. Whether that’s true or not, I am not sure. It is simply explaining an idea with another idea. Null’s lifestyle is nothing but repetition in disguise, interacting with these displaced objects of past and present. The synthesis of the past is tied to these objects in the present, this affects the synthesis of the real/present. Think of it like this, the objects you interact with are sets and inside the sets are elements of memory. (We’re going to talk more about this later.). Null desperately wants to forget her memories of the past but is still emotionally clung to these memories. The mind is constantly infatuated with the pure past, looking to understand its pure past. She doesn’t want to forget, you can’t forget, it’s about understanding. She begins to understand through reminiscence when interacting with these objects that contain the elements of memory, the objects in her room. You must collect all of her thoughts through this reminiscence for her to reach a greater understanding of herself.
-The book bag reveals that she hasn’t been in school for a long time, and how her last day of school was like. In addition, with prodding, you get a glance of what her relationship with her father was like, as well as detail that she was too old for her school curriculum at the time.
-The notebook consists of early sketches that Null has done, while the rest are blank unused pages. She doesn’t want to use the rest of the notebook because that would mean she would be out of paper. Being out of paper means you have to get more, having to get more means you have to go outside, having to go outside means problems. You can suggest that she asks her mom for a new notebook, all she does is insult herself and her way of thinking in response. The wind blows, moving the pages. This causes her distress, she closes her eyes, preventing any engagement with her past drawings. You convince her to open her eyes, none of the pages moved, she hears the rustle of pages and closes her eyes again, but only reveal is a firefly, one of her thoughts.
- The “bizarre” laptop that she had for years. She used to have plenty of hobbies with the laptop until she encountered the web. Similarly to the book bag, you can prod to gain more information about her time with the web. This part was very interesting because here you get to learn how she sees the web and the people on it and what she considers is “friendship.”. Here she explains that people on the web aren’t actual real people, that in fact they are just like computing programing, nothing but numbers. Yet she is eager to be friends with these people on the web just based on similar interests. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know her, if they both like video games then they are friends. This isn’t that bizarre of a perspective on the internet, in fact, I’ve encountered plenty that were similar. Her idea of friendship isn’t fully developed because clearly she doesn’t have a lot of experience with different forms of friendship to reference on. Well that’s until she manages to form a deeper relationship with someone on the internet, this person convinces her that he’s real, in her words, he tricked her. He cyber bullied her with bots and put her information online, this results her to believe that there are people watching her, always. You learn that part of information if you go to the balcony which results in
Death
Null can die two times in Milk outside a bag of milk. It triggers during specific things you say/lead her to do as her thoughts. These are just glimpses of dissociation episodes of her experiencing her own death, whether that's strangulation or jumping off of a balcony. What I find interesting about this is that you can’t gain a deeper level of understanding of Null without having to experience these parts of the play. It’s a lot like experiencing your own episodes, it’s not a good time in the moment but to reach a level of understanding of yourself and your conditions you have to engage with why and how it happens in the first place. The episodes of death have a major impact with how the rest of the night will go for Null. It affects her dreams when she finally goes to sleep.
Dreams
“Imagining myself to be outside of my mortal shell, but at the same time still being me. Ridiculous, like milk outside a bag of milk.”
The dreams Null can experience vary and are based on a few things. How many thoughts you collected, which deaths did you experience if any at all, did you explore certain thoughts deeper, and did you pick up that phone number? The results always show which of the five dreams Null ends up experiencing.
The shop dream is the above quote taken to the most literal. Null is experiencing a re-contextualized perspective on the beginning of her day (Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk..). This said perspective is a projection of her negative thoughts towards herself. This is also influenced by how she believes everyone around her sees her. Treska (the boy she's helping go to the store.) interacts with a customer, asking for directions. This causes a bad interaction as the customer wanted nothing to do with Treska, as the boy stood there in fear. Treska causes a scene, disrupting the atmosphere of the store. This displeases everyone. The part that stands out is how everyone talks to Null, and refers to Treska as her son. (The cashier also calls Treska a very mean word!) Null pays for the milk (and outrageous fees) with anger and leaves with Treska. After Treska’s attempts at breaking the silence are ignored by Null, he begins walking away from Null, and says “It seems like you’re not helping me at all.” (This is what Null says to you when you do a bad job during Inside a bag of milk.). The thoughts I took away from this was perhaps this is also showing how it was like for her to go to the store with one of her parents. Also I think in attempts at a meta narrative, it’s displaying how people were feeling when exposed to Null and her neurodivergent behavior. It expresses the undeniable frustration that’s emoted from everyone involved in this specific context.
[Here's a note you can read!]
[ As we get closer to this topic (the social perspective on the neurodivergent) it gets more difficult not to express more of my thoughts on it. At best I believe people treat neurodivergent people as children and at worst, subhuman. Either way, it's a very frustrating thing to spectate and experience myself. The tone of discussions about it are always a mix between being condescending and accusatory. People get frustrated over others putting themselves down, thinking they can’t do said things because [insert flavor of neurodivergence here]. But never wonder why that’s the case? Why do they put themselves down? Perhaps, it’s because no one wants to help or no one wants to understand? Everyone is so indulged in their own selfishness, that anyone that's acting out of the social script is too much of an inconvenience to handle. It’s this ‘settle your own shit’ type of attitude that helps nothing! All these different flavors of the same discourse is nothing but just a meaningless cycle of psychic assaults. I realized that when expressing this whole paragraph made me realize that this could be applied to a lot of other different contexts of discrimination (because what I’m describing here is basically ableism). That’s because this shit is just a symptom of power in our current socio economic environment but I finally digress.]
The shop dream is, what I believe to be, the default dream. This is the dream you get on your first playthrough. Or at least you’re most likely to? (I learned from my girlfriend that she got the mirror ending on her first playthrough. I believe the shop dream is triggered based on the first death.) Remember that repetition? That sweet synthesis? It’s still here, and something that’s to be experienced to witness Null’s other dreams.
The mirror dream is probably the most simple one out of the five. Wake up everyday, feel the weirds again, look at the mirror, my face is dumb, repeat. Her face changes all sorts of ways, shit you would see on a piccrew- no offense. Anyways, it’s a weird feeling, that’s the best I can describe it. It’s a little humorful out of all the dreams, which makes sense. It is easy to make fun of your own appearance. It’s really easy. Trust me.
The next two dreams are interesting because they are more like nightmares in comparison to the other last mentioned dreams. It makes sense that they’re more intense because they are triggered if you let Null go to bed without collecting all of her thoughts. Which nightmare you get seems to dictate whether you decided to learn more about her history on the web (that includes going to the balcony.).
The room and field dream is a suffocating, paranoia induced nightmare. Everything about this dream is completely influenced by her thinking deeply about her time on the internet, everything that happened, and being on the balcony. It’s the common moment in a dream where you physically fail to do one task in every way that’s possible, it tends to feel slow and clutching to me. In the context of this dream, it’s opening a door while being trapped in a dark silent room. The sounds that play during this dream are noteworthy here, the beginning is nothing but these rapid wooden staccato taps and quiet droning in the background, while the field section is a louder drone with whispering wind. The dream consists of running from the uncertain darkness, then the slow dread in the fields with a looming presence of, you guess it, dark uncertainty! Null screams questions of Who are you? What do you want? Just for this presence to explode into darkness, looping back to the beginning of the dream- she wakes up.
The stairs ending is awful. It’s nothing but degrading, numbing, and despair. This is absolutely the dream she gets when you don’t even fucking try to help! Everything visual and sonically about this dream is abrasive and cold like metal. The giant concrete structures with stairways even look like drill bits to me. It reminded me of a recurring dissociation I would experience where I felt paralyzed and someone was drilling a hole in my head. Funnily enough there’s something about this dream that reminds me of Cruelty Squad. It’s most likely the abrasiveness and the flashing abstract smiling face. Also it quotes Wozzeck out of nowhere. Which speaking of which what the hell? (It explains the whole blood moon sky that’s going on in this play.) This dream is insanity inducing because it’s exactly what it’s like. Am I recovering? Am I making progress? Where am I going? Does it matter? Is it all meaningless? Do I have control? No, I don't have control. I cannot move my body, I cannot say what I want to say, I am trapped in my own head. There’s no thoughts, it's just words. Everyone is looking but not talking. There isn’t actually anyone, there is no me either. Everything is empty yet everything is heavy as well. I WANT TO SCREAM UNTIL MY EARS RING, I HATE DOING NOTHING, I HATE BEING NOTHING.
“I DON’T DOUBT THAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH SOME HARD TIMES. BUT YOU HAVE TO MAKE SACRIFICES. GROW UP. ONLY THEN YOU’LL BE ABLE TO OBTAIN THE MEANING OF LIFE. DO YOU GET IT? TRY THAT IF YOU FIND IT IMPORTANT. EVERY PASSING DAY IS A PRECIOUS GIFT.”
“IF YOU SHARE A PIECE OF THAT GIFT WITH THE WORLD EVEN ONCE, IT’LL SEEM LIKE A SPECK OF DUST. DO YOU GET IT? NO, I’M SORRY. I WON’T GET THAT, THEN. DO YOU GET IT?”
“DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? YES, EVEN YOU GET IT. WHEN YOU NOTICE HOW PEOPLE LOOK AT THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN REFLECTION AND REALIZE THAT IT EXISTS IN REALITY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW EXACTLY IT EXISTS?”
“I WEEP”
“YOU ARE A ROTTEN HUSK”
“YOU OVERFLOW WITH BOUNDLESS POWER.”
“YOU HAVE THE SOUL OF AN EMPEROR”
“SACRIFICIAL HERO. BLESSED BY PRIMORDIAL LUCK.”
“YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN HELL YET YOU SMILE.”
“ONLY GOOD THINGS WILL COME TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU”
“SET GOALS. HAVE A TEN YEAR PLAN. INVEST. WAKE UP EARLY. CEO MINDSET.”
“GOOD LUCK”
The Last Dream and The Empty Set
“This is how the story of time ends: by undoing its too well centered natural or physical circle and forming a straight line which then, led by its own length, reconstitutes an eternally decentered circle.” - Guess who said this.
Before I move on to the last dream. Let’s talk about her sweatshirt or specifically the symbol on her sweatshirt. The symbol is referred to as the Null sign. I’ve been referring to her as Null this entire time because I feel like she truly identifies with this symbol. She goes on the whole mathematical rant about people on the internet not being real, and explains things with number binaries.
“If I lose something and then find it, it’s just going back to the starting point. No changes at all. A zero sum.”
The Null sign is the mathematical notation of “the empty set”, nothing resides within the empty set, there cannot be multiple empty sets, hence the name the empty set. It is a void but it is not nothing. No, a set is something. It is an empty bag.
The last dream requires a collection of all her thoughts, don’t trigger any deaths, and lastly to pick up a small thing on the ground. Some people say this is her phone, it’s probably that (or the phone number to the pizzeria.). Visually, this is the most mundane of her dreams, it’s the closest you’re gonna get to reality in this play. It starts with her sitting on a balcony with her phone, then throughout the dream she roams around the city. She’s mainly expressing all of her thoughts through texts on her phone.
“I’m all alone, but at the same time it feels like I’m not. There’s a lot of thoughts in my head, they always keep me entertained. I can create a whole world with them. I’m sure it’ll be able to fill the void around me if I try hard enough!”
If it wasn’t obvious enough, this dream is just thoughts about emptiness, she feels neither sad nor happy, but the places she finds herself to be are safe. She feels the world is empty around her, like a void. A lot of the thoughts displayed here are very circular, here’s an idea, she responds to it with another idea. If her presence is a waste of time, is there a point to it? Is she just part of the void instead of containing it? If the place I’m in feels nothing, then how come I can warm myself with warm thoughts? I can fill the void around me with my thoughts! Wait a minute. I’m still here even though there’s nothing around me? Ah. The world ain’t so empty after all.
Just to get it out the way I played both Milk inside a bag and Milk outside a bag back to back, and like others here have said, I highly recommend that you do this, if you decide to play this.
Important notice: I find it difficult to talk about these plays without devolving into personal experiences from my life, so if you would like to continue the comfort of knowing nothing about me, please do yourself a favor and don’t read this. If you do continue, then take care.
For the sake of understanding, I will be referring to the protag as “Null”. I saw Erato do it in her review and I found it more understanding and comes off less demeaning than referring to her as “girl” or “milk”.
I’m going to try my best to organize my thoughts although it can be quite difficult but what you end up seeing is what you get.
Maybe you can help?
Exploitation and “The Connection.”
So to briefly touch on the topic of whether or not these plays are exploitive of mental illness.. I believe it’s understandable to have that gut feeling upon its first impressions considering the lain like art-style/aesthetics. Lain is something I question the intentions of but still feel some connection to it for a reason I am still internalizing to this day, it still feels paradoxical to me. I believe for this play, there’s something deeper than that. Perhaps it’s not as deep as what I wanted it to be but maybe it doesn’t have to be? Maybe the fact that it has the potential to begin new thoughts to be created in my mind is enough? Maybe not new but different, it’s always different.
Upon playing Milk inside a bag of milk, I already felt some form of emotional connection with its eerie music and atmosphere, the preparation of leaving your home to the store, rehearsing your social role/ques over and over again, then getting overwhelmed by your own thoughts and saying “I’m ready to burst into tears!” When I read those words I started crying a lot. It was that moment that I really felt like I was crying with this play, not at it. Which is an important distinction to me. The last time I felt this connection was playing Disco Elysium for the first time (and the other many many times..) in October, 2019.
Dissonance.
As hinted from the title, Milk inside a bag of milk is focused entirely on the internal conflicts and rambling of Null. Yet Inside a bag of milk still holds a level of dissonance, you have a name, she talks to you, asks you questions under her boundaries. The only time your name is said is if you’ve been nothing but disruptive and hurtful towards her, that’s when she gives up getting milk and you as well, hoping to find someone else for next time. Successfully helping her buy a bag of milk then leads to the beginning of Milk outside a bag of milk. Which then opens another level of dissonance where you can see her and she can see you, as if you’re really there, as if she trusts you.
In Disco Elysium, you play and interact with Harry Du Bois and his dissociative mind, you decide which thoughts come and go, his contradictions, his political beliefs, etc, in a matter of days. While the Milk plays have you as some form of entity projected by Null, it’s the only thing she has to not be alone, she doesn’t like the silence, she finds your presence to be “grateful” at times. By the words you choose to say, you can influence her emotions and lead her in directions in thoughts, causing either a level of understanding or a panic attack. This also influences the dream she will have when she finally goes to bed. The milk plays is an interactive dissociative experience, only witnessing a single day of Null’s life.
Medication.
”When I am under the influence of drugs, terrible and unpleasant melodies sound in my head. Mixing with the sounds of the world around me, they create a terrible dissonance in my head.”
Both entries also touch on a subject that I found to be lacking when talking about the experiences with mental illness, that would be the relationship with medication and its effects.
Null’s lifestyle is messy and unconventional, especially with her medication intake, either she takes none at all or more than she needs too, or just wastes them completely. She believes she can handle it without it until the “pain” comes back and she has to take her medication with defeat.
Psychiatry is what I would describe as a sensitive tread on wire in brain chemistry. It took me the twenty four years I’ve been alive for me to really internalize that the altering of chemicals in your mind can only do so much when everything else about your life fucking sucks. Of course, I thought I knew that enough to do a fine job during my psychology courses in college but it took a while for me to place that into my own life.
When I was growing up in my teens, all I did was sit in my room and feel bad about something, whether that would be something in my head or the effects of the medication. I mostly took antidepressants and amphetamines. I hated taking my meds, I hated how they made me feel, how it made the world feel, just all of it. At worst I felt awful, at best I felt nothing. But I took them because they were supposed to help me “function”, giving me this push to do labor which at the time was just school. I’ll let you know that I’ve dropped out of school multiple times. I dropped out of public high school because of a paranoia induced panic attack, I didn’t feel safe there, I couldn’t. I tried home schooling, I was too mentally disfigured at the time to really do it, my father tried to help but he just simply wasn’t patient enough. All I could hear when he tried to help me with algebra was how much I annoyed him. I would later get my GED which would feel like a drugged up trance, a lot of the details are very blurred to me when looking back. The medications I’ve had throughout my life have given me sprints of euphoria and long droughts of sedation.
I think one of the worst medications I’ve experienced was when I was put on Zoloft. It made the world spin and feel so slow, the voices I could hear at the time were slow, almost paul stretched whispers. I couldn’t understand them and for some reason that only angered me. I wanted to scream it all out of me but I couldn’t, just felt dazed instead. There’s an intense Thanksgiving story that’s very much about my episodes from the influence of Zoloft but ask me about it later. Speaking of medication induced episodes, did you know heavy use of amphetamines can cause episodes of psychosis? I sure learned that between the years of 2019 - 2020. I hate every medication I was put on! You name it. I hate Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Fluoxetine, and of course fuck Zoloft. I fucking hate Zoloft.
Ever since my last breakdown in early 2022, I’ve been clean from medications, I haven’t taken anything since. I’ve mostly been taking it easy and focusing on what I can do about how I live my life, to make it less suffering. I aim to be productive every day, to talk to someone, do literally anything but nothing. My episodes of psychosis have worked in conjunction with my long episodes of depression. If I learned anything last year, it’s “Inevitable depression when I do nothing.”. Of course, I’m not saying medication is just bad and that no one should take it, it can help, even save lives. But the relationship between one and their medication isn’t always as simple as taking a painkiller to make the pain go away. It’s complicated, it can hold pros and cons, like I said in the beginning of this: it’s a balancing act.
Repetition
“I do not repeat because I repress, I repress because I repeat.” - Guess who said this.
The repetition in Milk outside a bag of milk is miserable. The repetition of the same bad day, the same initial breakdown, over and over again. It’s just sometimes Null’s entity can influence her late night to be ok or worse. Don’t confuse this as me saying this is a “bad” thing about the play, on the contrary, this is fitting for the type of lifestyle she and many others live.
“So every thought would make a senseless and merciless circle in my head, destined to go back to where it started.”
Your conversations with her are nothing but circular thoughts that she's had before and will have again. She leaves everything in her room at their exact place to help her collect her thoughts, it supposedly helps her see. Whether that’s true or not, I am not sure. It is simply explaining an idea with another idea. Null’s lifestyle is nothing but repetition in disguise, interacting with these displaced objects of past and present. The synthesis of the past is tied to these objects in the present, this affects the synthesis of the real/present. Think of it like this, the objects you interact with are sets and inside the sets are elements of memory. (We’re going to talk more about this later.). Null desperately wants to forget her memories of the past but is still emotionally clung to these memories. The mind is constantly infatuated with the pure past, looking to understand its pure past. She doesn’t want to forget, you can’t forget, it’s about understanding. She begins to understand through reminiscence when interacting with these objects that contain the elements of memory, the objects in her room. You must collect all of her thoughts through this reminiscence for her to reach a greater understanding of herself.
-The book bag reveals that she hasn’t been in school for a long time, and how her last day of school was like. In addition, with prodding, you get a glance of what her relationship with her father was like, as well as detail that she was too old for her school curriculum at the time.
-The notebook consists of early sketches that Null has done, while the rest are blank unused pages. She doesn’t want to use the rest of the notebook because that would mean she would be out of paper. Being out of paper means you have to get more, having to get more means you have to go outside, having to go outside means problems. You can suggest that she asks her mom for a new notebook, all she does is insult herself and her way of thinking in response. The wind blows, moving the pages. This causes her distress, she closes her eyes, preventing any engagement with her past drawings. You convince her to open her eyes, none of the pages moved, she hears the rustle of pages and closes her eyes again, but only reveal is a firefly, one of her thoughts.
- The “bizarre” laptop that she had for years. She used to have plenty of hobbies with the laptop until she encountered the web. Similarly to the book bag, you can prod to gain more information about her time with the web. This part was very interesting because here you get to learn how she sees the web and the people on it and what she considers is “friendship.”. Here she explains that people on the web aren’t actual real people, that in fact they are just like computing programing, nothing but numbers. Yet she is eager to be friends with these people on the web just based on similar interests. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know her, if they both like video games then they are friends. This isn’t that bizarre of a perspective on the internet, in fact, I’ve encountered plenty that were similar. Her idea of friendship isn’t fully developed because clearly she doesn’t have a lot of experience with different forms of friendship to reference on. Well that’s until she manages to form a deeper relationship with someone on the internet, this person convinces her that he’s real, in her words, he tricked her. He cyber bullied her with bots and put her information online, this results her to believe that there are people watching her, always. You learn that part of information if you go to the balcony which results in
Death
Null can die two times in Milk outside a bag of milk. It triggers during specific things you say/lead her to do as her thoughts. These are just glimpses of dissociation episodes of her experiencing her own death, whether that's strangulation or jumping off of a balcony. What I find interesting about this is that you can’t gain a deeper level of understanding of Null without having to experience these parts of the play. It’s a lot like experiencing your own episodes, it’s not a good time in the moment but to reach a level of understanding of yourself and your conditions you have to engage with why and how it happens in the first place. The episodes of death have a major impact with how the rest of the night will go for Null. It affects her dreams when she finally goes to sleep.
Dreams
“Imagining myself to be outside of my mortal shell, but at the same time still being me. Ridiculous, like milk outside a bag of milk.”
The dreams Null can experience vary and are based on a few things. How many thoughts you collected, which deaths did you experience if any at all, did you explore certain thoughts deeper, and did you pick up that phone number? The results always show which of the five dreams Null ends up experiencing.
The shop dream is the above quote taken to the most literal. Null is experiencing a re-contextualized perspective on the beginning of her day (Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk..). This said perspective is a projection of her negative thoughts towards herself. This is also influenced by how she believes everyone around her sees her. Treska (the boy she's helping go to the store.) interacts with a customer, asking for directions. This causes a bad interaction as the customer wanted nothing to do with Treska, as the boy stood there in fear. Treska causes a scene, disrupting the atmosphere of the store. This displeases everyone. The part that stands out is how everyone talks to Null, and refers to Treska as her son. (The cashier also calls Treska a very mean word!) Null pays for the milk (and outrageous fees) with anger and leaves with Treska. After Treska’s attempts at breaking the silence are ignored by Null, he begins walking away from Null, and says “It seems like you’re not helping me at all.” (This is what Null says to you when you do a bad job during Inside a bag of milk.). The thoughts I took away from this was perhaps this is also showing how it was like for her to go to the store with one of her parents. Also I think in attempts at a meta narrative, it’s displaying how people were feeling when exposed to Null and her neurodivergent behavior. It expresses the undeniable frustration that’s emoted from everyone involved in this specific context.
[Here's a note you can read!]
[ As we get closer to this topic (the social perspective on the neurodivergent) it gets more difficult not to express more of my thoughts on it. At best I believe people treat neurodivergent people as children and at worst, subhuman. Either way, it's a very frustrating thing to spectate and experience myself. The tone of discussions about it are always a mix between being condescending and accusatory. People get frustrated over others putting themselves down, thinking they can’t do said things because [insert flavor of neurodivergence here]. But never wonder why that’s the case? Why do they put themselves down? Perhaps, it’s because no one wants to help or no one wants to understand? Everyone is so indulged in their own selfishness, that anyone that's acting out of the social script is too much of an inconvenience to handle. It’s this ‘settle your own shit’ type of attitude that helps nothing! All these different flavors of the same discourse is nothing but just a meaningless cycle of psychic assaults. I realized that when expressing this whole paragraph made me realize that this could be applied to a lot of other different contexts of discrimination (because what I’m describing here is basically ableism). That’s because this shit is just a symptom of power in our current socio economic environment but I finally digress.]
The shop dream is, what I believe to be, the default dream. This is the dream you get on your first playthrough. Or at least you’re most likely to? (I learned from my girlfriend that she got the mirror ending on her first playthrough. I believe the shop dream is triggered based on the first death.) Remember that repetition? That sweet synthesis? It’s still here, and something that’s to be experienced to witness Null’s other dreams.
The mirror dream is probably the most simple one out of the five. Wake up everyday, feel the weirds again, look at the mirror, my face is dumb, repeat. Her face changes all sorts of ways, shit you would see on a piccrew- no offense. Anyways, it’s a weird feeling, that’s the best I can describe it. It’s a little humorful out of all the dreams, which makes sense. It is easy to make fun of your own appearance. It’s really easy. Trust me.
The next two dreams are interesting because they are more like nightmares in comparison to the other last mentioned dreams. It makes sense that they’re more intense because they are triggered if you let Null go to bed without collecting all of her thoughts. Which nightmare you get seems to dictate whether you decided to learn more about her history on the web (that includes going to the balcony.).
The room and field dream is a suffocating, paranoia induced nightmare. Everything about this dream is completely influenced by her thinking deeply about her time on the internet, everything that happened, and being on the balcony. It’s the common moment in a dream where you physically fail to do one task in every way that’s possible, it tends to feel slow and clutching to me. In the context of this dream, it’s opening a door while being trapped in a dark silent room. The sounds that play during this dream are noteworthy here, the beginning is nothing but these rapid wooden staccato taps and quiet droning in the background, while the field section is a louder drone with whispering wind. The dream consists of running from the uncertain darkness, then the slow dread in the fields with a looming presence of, you guess it, dark uncertainty! Null screams questions of Who are you? What do you want? Just for this presence to explode into darkness, looping back to the beginning of the dream- she wakes up.
The stairs ending is awful. It’s nothing but degrading, numbing, and despair. This is absolutely the dream she gets when you don’t even fucking try to help! Everything visual and sonically about this dream is abrasive and cold like metal. The giant concrete structures with stairways even look like drill bits to me. It reminded me of a recurring dissociation I would experience where I felt paralyzed and someone was drilling a hole in my head. Funnily enough there’s something about this dream that reminds me of Cruelty Squad. It’s most likely the abrasiveness and the flashing abstract smiling face. Also it quotes Wozzeck out of nowhere. Which speaking of which what the hell? (It explains the whole blood moon sky that’s going on in this play.) This dream is insanity inducing because it’s exactly what it’s like. Am I recovering? Am I making progress? Where am I going? Does it matter? Is it all meaningless? Do I have control? No, I don't have control. I cannot move my body, I cannot say what I want to say, I am trapped in my own head. There’s no thoughts, it's just words. Everyone is looking but not talking. There isn’t actually anyone, there is no me either. Everything is empty yet everything is heavy as well. I WANT TO SCREAM UNTIL MY EARS RING, I HATE DOING NOTHING, I HATE BEING NOTHING.
“I DON’T DOUBT THAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH SOME HARD TIMES. BUT YOU HAVE TO MAKE SACRIFICES. GROW UP. ONLY THEN YOU’LL BE ABLE TO OBTAIN THE MEANING OF LIFE. DO YOU GET IT? TRY THAT IF YOU FIND IT IMPORTANT. EVERY PASSING DAY IS A PRECIOUS GIFT.”
“IF YOU SHARE A PIECE OF THAT GIFT WITH THE WORLD EVEN ONCE, IT’LL SEEM LIKE A SPECK OF DUST. DO YOU GET IT? NO, I’M SORRY. I WON’T GET THAT, THEN. DO YOU GET IT?”
“DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? YES, EVEN YOU GET IT. WHEN YOU NOTICE HOW PEOPLE LOOK AT THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN REFLECTION AND REALIZE THAT IT EXISTS IN REALITY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW EXACTLY IT EXISTS?”
“I WEEP”
“YOU ARE A ROTTEN HUSK”
“YOU OVERFLOW WITH BOUNDLESS POWER.”
“YOU HAVE THE SOUL OF AN EMPEROR”
“SACRIFICIAL HERO. BLESSED BY PRIMORDIAL LUCK.”
“YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN HELL YET YOU SMILE.”
“ONLY GOOD THINGS WILL COME TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU”
“SET GOALS. HAVE A TEN YEAR PLAN. INVEST. WAKE UP EARLY. CEO MINDSET.”
“GOOD LUCK”
The Last Dream and The Empty Set
“This is how the story of time ends: by undoing its too well centered natural or physical circle and forming a straight line which then, led by its own length, reconstitutes an eternally decentered circle.” - Guess who said this.
Before I move on to the last dream. Let’s talk about her sweatshirt or specifically the symbol on her sweatshirt. The symbol is referred to as the Null sign. I’ve been referring to her as Null this entire time because I feel like she truly identifies with this symbol. She goes on the whole mathematical rant about people on the internet not being real, and explains things with number binaries.
“If I lose something and then find it, it’s just going back to the starting point. No changes at all. A zero sum.”
The Null sign is the mathematical notation of “the empty set”, nothing resides within the empty set, there cannot be multiple empty sets, hence the name the empty set. It is a void but it is not nothing. No, a set is something. It is an empty bag.
The last dream requires a collection of all her thoughts, don’t trigger any deaths, and lastly to pick up a small thing on the ground. Some people say this is her phone, it’s probably that (or the phone number to the pizzeria.). Visually, this is the most mundane of her dreams, it’s the closest you’re gonna get to reality in this play. It starts with her sitting on a balcony with her phone, then throughout the dream she roams around the city. She’s mainly expressing all of her thoughts through texts on her phone.
“I’m all alone, but at the same time it feels like I’m not. There’s a lot of thoughts in my head, they always keep me entertained. I can create a whole world with them. I’m sure it’ll be able to fill the void around me if I try hard enough!”
If it wasn’t obvious enough, this dream is just thoughts about emptiness, she feels neither sad nor happy, but the places she finds herself to be are safe. She feels the world is empty around her, like a void. A lot of the thoughts displayed here are very circular, here’s an idea, she responds to it with another idea. If her presence is a waste of time, is there a point to it? Is she just part of the void instead of containing it? If the place I’m in feels nothing, then how come I can warm myself with warm thoughts? I can fill the void around me with my thoughts! Wait a minute. I’m still here even though there’s nothing around me? Ah. The world ain’t so empty after all.
waooww
omg you people can’t do anything
we don’t talk enough about how stressful buying milk is for the bpd community
we don’t talk enough about how stressful buying milk is for the bpd community
watched my friend play this, but it's a vn so that basically means i played it
overall it was quite a dreadful, pathetic experience. came off to me as serial experiments lain but without any of the interesting stuff and catered solely to people with profound mental illness. alas, the extent of my """neurodivergence""" is playing shmups, so i'm afraid there's nothing but pity for me to feel in response to the author's traumadumping.
would highly recommend if hanging around the venting channel in a Falcom discord sounds like fun to you. MC was cute though; I could fix her.
overall it was quite a dreadful, pathetic experience. came off to me as serial experiments lain but without any of the interesting stuff and catered solely to people with profound mental illness. alas, the extent of my """neurodivergence""" is playing shmups, so i'm afraid there's nothing but pity for me to feel in response to the author's traumadumping.
would highly recommend if hanging around the venting channel in a Falcom discord sounds like fun to you. MC was cute though; I could fix her.
Oh yeah, it's schizo timeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Seeing people turn this into another “uwu quirky mental illness relatable protag with severe issues” type of thing causes me physical pain.
definitely feels like a Fully Realized Vision compared to the first game. obviously longer, much higher production value. i think this one is better, as it expands upon the character and narrative in ways that really work. more so than the first, i feel like this one i should really replay at some point. it really got to me at points! with that being said, i guess if i had one complaint it would be that when compared to the first i really enjoyed the sort of Abstraction that game had. the character design here is great, but i do kinda feel it hits harder when we don't really know what the main character looks like? but i dunno, minor complaint really. this is very well done.
nikita making game of the year at the very last second
O jogo que supera muito o original, todo o drama da personagem aqui se volta contra ela e a gente pode entender mais as motivações e os traumas da protagonista
tecnicamente o jogo é impecavel, um estilo de arte fantastico e uma trilha sonora maravilhosa, ainda nao fiz todos os finais, mas quero muito fazer pra fazer 100% desse jogo
simplesmente amei todos esses 2 jogos, queria muito que tivesse outro explorando mais ainda a mente dessa menina, é de fato uma viagem e tanto os pensamentos dela, fazem a gente perder horas querendo saber mais e mais dela, acho legal ter opções que só podem ser revistas em outra run, isso com certeza deixa o jogo menos chato
achei tão bom como o primeiro, melhor tecnicamente, mas a história é tão impactante como, é bom ver que os problemas dela não se resolveram magicamente no fim do jogo, afinal, não somos o herói dessa história, apenas espectadores de uma mente perturbada.
9/10
tecnicamente o jogo é impecavel, um estilo de arte fantastico e uma trilha sonora maravilhosa, ainda nao fiz todos os finais, mas quero muito fazer pra fazer 100% desse jogo
simplesmente amei todos esses 2 jogos, queria muito que tivesse outro explorando mais ainda a mente dessa menina, é de fato uma viagem e tanto os pensamentos dela, fazem a gente perder horas querendo saber mais e mais dela, acho legal ter opções que só podem ser revistas em outra run, isso com certeza deixa o jogo menos chato
achei tão bom como o primeiro, melhor tecnicamente, mas a história é tão impactante como, é bom ver que os problemas dela não se resolveram magicamente no fim do jogo, afinal, não somos o herói dessa história, apenas espectadores de uma mente perturbada.
9/10
it's really hard to articulate how this game made me feel, but by god did it make me feel a lot of things..!!
as with most things of this nature, it's such an inherently personal experience that its hard to just.. rate it, but both games in the milk series are ones that i love deeply, regardless of rating
as with most things of this nature, it's such an inherently personal experience that its hard to just.. rate it, but both games in the milk series are ones that i love deeply, regardless of rating
This happened to my friend Carla
Est. Reading Time 20 minutes.
CW: Ableism, Mental Illness, Drug Addiction
There are some mild 'plot spoilers' but I don't spoil the ending of the game, and most of what I do spoil is incredibly mundane, so feel free to read with that in mind.
Policy
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Milk outside is a sequel psychological horror short VN, where you explore the apartment bedroom of a schizophrenic young girl and attempt to assist her over the course of the night in her dirty room, in making sense of her mind as a disembodied part of her own brain. The game is a short VN, in part riffing on the dating genre with an point and click adventure portion wedged within. With compelling visual animations and sound work to boot.
Lets be honest here, Null (I choose to refer to her as Null because of her shirt) is very difficult to chat with. Shes incredibly self loathing and tedious to deal with, there's even an achievement you get from pestering her about her last day of school called 'youre annoying' which from outside reading I did seems to imply her dad said that... What I find so beautiful about this portrayal is it talks to something real about neurodivergence or in the disorderly cases mental illness: It kind of makes you come off like an insensitive jerk.
First I want to mention something about Null I don't think people picked up on, I think this text reflects a less 'well masked' form of autism than what people are used to seeing. It's easy to read the speaking repetitions for instance or the non desire to clean her room as just 'quirky' if you don't recognize these as legitimate life complications autistic people deal with. Echolalia, stimming, unusual organizational strategies, its all there. I don't know if I am personally autistic but I know people who've exhibited those traits who are.
On another note we discover, yet not right away, her room being a right fucking mess. It's very relatable. Even from a matter of logistics, there's often a problem for neurodivergent people, where more stuff is imported into the domestic space, primarily trash, than exported. This goes beyond just neurodivergence into a bigger issue for anybody who is being socially shamed by their society. The beat writer and opium addict William Burroughs played with this idea of 'junk'¹ in this way to drawing on his own experiences with addiction
""Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk in a big industry. ""
While I couldn't find a direct quotation and depiction, Burroughs himself also lived surrounded by piles and bags of trash going to the ceilings. All while alienated from his friends during his time in Morrocco. Compare the aggressive quote with the physical junk in the room, and the fact its maintained by milk packets blocking her off and you find a stunning picture and perhaps you can see what I'm saying.
This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray. Even her perception of time is exaggerated and all she can think about is the many ways she can die. Once you get into a point of frankly rather valid persecution and neglect its hard to pull yourself out on your own, if not impossible. Just as the inability to export trash reflects social neglect, so to does psychological self shaming reflect an inability to export violence done upon someone. One point about this I thought was particularly revealing is not only in the parental neglect surrounding her, but also in smaller moments like how when she was having issues in school other kids would call her a 'schizo'. Pretty much using ableist insults of non normative action to ostracize people and put them down.
This is also extremely relatable for me, and, I would imagine a lot of people. Even if you are able to function for the most part you've probably had your thoughts and actions dismissed as 'crazy' or 'spergy' before. Recently I found a very compelling dictionary on reverting from ableist language², here's what it has to say on 'schizo'
""This is ableist when used as a substitute for "switching rapidly" or "acting without regard for others" or otherwise implying a person seems mentally ill simply because they are unpredictable or make someone uncomfortable. The words "schizophrenic," "schizoaffective," and "schizotypal" are not ableist when actually referring to a person with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizotypal personality disorder.
Consider instead: wild, confusing, unpredictable, impulsive, reckless, fearless, lives on the edge, thrill-seeker, risk-taker, out of control, scary, lacks empathy, toxic, manipulative, egotistical, abusive, unpredictable""
It's a useful tool, but the fact of the matter is imagining these alternative phrases being used in public school, at least when I used to go, seems highly utopian. On top of this there's a lot of mockery around this as 'language policing' which is sad because in reality it means people are trying to ignore the potential pains of their callous speaking norms as 'freeing' when the very opposite is the case. People used to use the word 'retard' all the time in school and in gaming communities in the 2010s, but its very much out of vogue and offensive now. That being said I think the text of Milk Outside balances this well by pointing out the many other ways language can perpetuate it outlined in this dictionary as well. For example, early on you can tell her to 'act normal' which has to be a phrase almost everyone's frustrated parents have said at least once. It's one of the reasons I recommend giving this source a read.
The primary issue is using almost any phrase as a matter of derision but also as a matter of intentionality to be so. It's the 'schizo's job to 'stop being a schizo' and its their fault when they fail. As somebody who has screwed up a lot due to panic attacks and then had the people get upset at me for it, its something I deeply relate to. People often see when I panic and leave places and yell that people don't understand me as me being toxic, and of course its not something I desire to do, but in reality I have about as much control of it as a fish out of water once its gotten to that point, most of the time it can only be controlled by preventative measures in advance. Once they happen, its already too late. We can similarly read mental hangups like this a similar issue of that import/export analogy, if you have more negative perspective coming in than positive self perceptions (often encouraged by others) going out, the mind will become a junkyard of self loathing. Ultimately, you can't really control how you feel, at best you can nudge it a little. Ligotti describes this well in his deeply discomforting text Conspiracy Against the Human Race
"But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did
have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads."³
So then it follows well that the 'protagonist' does not have all that much control or feel like they are piercing the 'heart' of the problems shes dealing with. It's supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to be frustrated by it. Instead neurodivergence is repaired by a series of, often quite tiring upkeep of negotiations and preventative care. Not just with others but with yourself as well.
Let's talk about how well this works as a sequel. It's important to play the prior game first to get yourself acquainted with some important pieces of information, like for example her dad committing suicide. In fact I would say a better relationship with the character would be playing them back to back. This is meant to be a sort of meditational space away from the terrifying and blunt messaging in the first game, within which she can unwind and try and think about the difficulties of her life. The point being mental illness is not always something so easy for people on the outside to follow or sympathize with. Sometimes it consists of hard to untangle phrasing, and difficult moments of trying and failing to connect with them. It would be absolutely foolish to think this game didn't do its research either, because the main symbol on her shirt is the null symbol from Lacan used to explain the concept of the big other.
This game is a literary work which means you really have to play with it and be patient in order to appreciate it if you don't have these experiences. But trust me this is not a bad or 'toxic' reflection of mental illness. The neurodivergent require respect, accommodation, and patience. Through what you can pick up, this girl has been robbed of all of those. We all express being on edge in different ways, whether you find them endearing enough or you want to be closer to them, or want nothing to do with someone like this, fine. But this is a completely legitimate reflection of the stigmatization of mental illness and how they produce traumas the victims try to ignore. Ironically everyone referring to her as a lain clone or 'Milk Girl' is, I believe, missing that very point. After playing this game, if you have difficulty unraveling the complexity of its psychological portrayal check out this plot synopsis inquiry and this insight on the academic psychoanalysis work. Needless to say there's a lot of literary and technical depth in the game, especially in comparison to a lot of other VN's who are just going to show their characters at their most chipper with you and only get upset with you during the bad ending. This text throws those sort of dichotomies out the window.
I would urge my fellow gamers to not play games they in advance think they wont like. And not to publicly talk haven't been patient with, if you just kept fast clicking through all the dialogue prompts and reading as fast as possible then your inexperience will be negative out of impatience. I haven't continued to play Omori because of the dichotomous segmentation of 'pleasant fantasy worlds' vs. 'horrific apartment' and how much I felt locked off from the personality of my main character. But I'm not out to shit on it because I literally have not interacted with the text deeply enough to try and explain any sort of opinion on it, nor do I know where it goes. I'm not going to feel comfortable just saying 'bad vibes' on a text that is bearing such difficult and painful trauma like this. It's telling however that other people are so willing to do so. I think in a way this game made a brilliant commentary on a type of gaming experience that gets dismissed and ignored without even having to resort to meta. Intense word heavy games (VNs, Interactive fiction, etc) that discuss rough subject matter more pessimistically have been the laughing stock of gamers for a good while now.
That said, I do think there's legitimate reasons not to like this game. Even if its as simple as 'this just reminds me of how bad the intersection of poverty and mental illness is and makes me sad' or 'I sympathize with the character but the despondency doesn't make for a great game experience'. Or even more technical issues like the lack of skip or save functions (which for me don't matter at all and as I've laid out in my No One Can Ever Know writeup can actually enhance an experience for me). These disconnects are perfectly fine, but throwing the game away for its annoying aesthetics and circuitous dialogue is I think more than a little dismissive, and as a result playing exactly into the hands of the ableist prejudice it so accurately critiques.
That all being said, I feel like I haven't yet addressed any of the specifics. Most of my insight is more on other people's prejudices and an explanation of mental health, rather than highlighting why I enjoy this game so much. So here's a few more specific reasons I like it:
-The game was gifted to me by a girl who is incredibly similar to this character, who deals with a lot of ambiguous mental hurdles, and is also just starting to come to terms with her 'plurality' recently. This is something I'll speak about more in another text soon, but all that means for the moment is she, just like this girl, has personality issues that she is just starting to unravel. The similarities between her and this girl are to such an extent it goes beyond just a vacuous representation. In my experience there are people like this, and despite being difficult to speak to sometimes they have truly brilliant minds. It's funny because the masculine version of this type of character is found in the movie A Beautiful Mind, which I found insufferable to watch. That was because I couldn't really feel like I was 'interacting' with the paranoid delusions so much as being a specter. It made it seem like people really don't even try to intervene, this text makes it clear: they do but poorly. A lot of the mathematical fixations between her, for example squaring pyramids and such, seems similar to John Nash's thinking patterns.
-The music OST is 4 hours long apparently, most of it to do with the radio you can put on. This is longer than the expected length of a playthrough game, this is crazy considering most of the tracks seemed pretty good, if only about Yume Nikki length (like a minute long).
-The color palettes are soothing, using reds to display a sort of mistlike feeling, moving away from the oppressive use of purples and such in the first game.
-The text doesn't try to get you to 'date' the character but puts your protagonist in a similar engagement of inquiry you would find in those dating VNs. This is in itself a sort of micro genre, there's a list on this very site about it. However, its a microgenre that i'm fond of, since I see the ubiquity of the visual novel as a 'dating simulation' unfortunately. It also feels like a nod to how if it had been a more 'moe' human relationship with the character, it would have been more vapid and possibly offensive.
-The sound effect work on this one is just as brilliant as the visuals. Those little 'dings' whenever it's your turn to speak feels very satisfying and prevent you from accidentally hitting a choice on the screen without meaning to.
-I always love this eastern European architecture. It's so stalwart and gloomy, yet functional. I love how it makes the room look disorganized but not immediately 'gross' since its through her perception this stuff is happening.
-The opening with the horrific creature giving her a shot was incredibly well written and shows the text is not choosing more airy 'obnoxious' dialogue out of inability.
-A lot of the visual representations throughout the game have a mystical quality to them, falling down a hole or looking in a twisted funhouse mirror. A lot of the quiet visual representations are killer, wallpaper worthy, and absolutely worth the price of entry.
-On top of the clear literary thoughtfulness and understanding of psychology mentioned earlier. I'm impressed that the dev was able to construct a text with a convincing female lead. Even if he had to use a patriarchal gaze through the players role in order to connect. The dev here is Nikita Kryukov, who dons large gauges, a baseball cap, and a seemingly quiet demeanor and social presence. Primarily focused on appreciating the fan art put out and talking about various stuff around the game. From my cursory glance he's not even a comparatively active or political twitter user which is honestly quite rare and appreciated. And so, for a demure Russian dude, who you would probably seem more at home on the front of a nu-jazz record to so effectively write a vibrant story about the ableist oppression of women as it relates to imperial countries. It fills me with hope. For me, it means that if you try hard enough you can escape the biases of your own positionality to write about what you arent and capture the heart of that pain. This is a struggle and insecurity that plagues a lot of writers, with it being so in vogue for academics to tear apart 'poor representation'.
This all works to convince me the text has added something fundamentally unique to add to the VN form. I think perhaps my own experiences with girls that act like this and aren't doing it as a 'tumblr core' thing makes me a bit more sympathetic to them. But regardless, there's enough going on here for it to actually touch people who aren't on the inside of these struggles.
Mostly I felt I should just let people know there's more going on here. And on the charge of any sort of 'ableism' I will note that the people who call her 'Milk-chan' are also doing a huge disservice and seeing right past the character as well. So ultimately its not just the naysayers that are at fault here. Milk Outside asks us all to be more patient across the board and for that I consider it a masterwork of the visual novel short story. Quite honestly, it seems to me a lot of yall just got filtered by a Visual Novel, and thats pretty damn funny to me.
-----
1. DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness.
2. Ableism/Language
3. p.15, not for the faint of heart. I found a copy of it on Libgen but I wont link it here for obvious reasons.
CW: Ableism, Mental Illness, Drug Addiction
There are some mild 'plot spoilers' but I don't spoil the ending of the game, and most of what I do spoil is incredibly mundane, so feel free to read with that in mind.
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
Milk outside is a sequel psychological horror short VN, where you explore the apartment bedroom of a schizophrenic young girl and attempt to assist her over the course of the night in her dirty room, in making sense of her mind as a disembodied part of her own brain. The game is a short VN, in part riffing on the dating genre with an point and click adventure portion wedged within. With compelling visual animations and sound work to boot.
Lets be honest here, Null (I choose to refer to her as Null because of her shirt) is very difficult to chat with. Shes incredibly self loathing and tedious to deal with, there's even an achievement you get from pestering her about her last day of school called 'youre annoying' which from outside reading I did seems to imply her dad said that... What I find so beautiful about this portrayal is it talks to something real about neurodivergence or in the disorderly cases mental illness: It kind of makes you come off like an insensitive jerk.
First I want to mention something about Null I don't think people picked up on, I think this text reflects a less 'well masked' form of autism than what people are used to seeing. It's easy to read the speaking repetitions for instance or the non desire to clean her room as just 'quirky' if you don't recognize these as legitimate life complications autistic people deal with. Echolalia, stimming, unusual organizational strategies, its all there. I don't know if I am personally autistic but I know people who've exhibited those traits who are.
On another note we discover, yet not right away, her room being a right fucking mess. It's very relatable. Even from a matter of logistics, there's often a problem for neurodivergent people, where more stuff is imported into the domestic space, primarily trash, than exported. This goes beyond just neurodivergence into a bigger issue for anybody who is being socially shamed by their society. The beat writer and opium addict William Burroughs played with this idea of 'junk'¹ in this way to drawing on his own experiences with addiction
""Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk in a big industry. ""
While I couldn't find a direct quotation and depiction, Burroughs himself also lived surrounded by piles and bags of trash going to the ceilings. All while alienated from his friends during his time in Morrocco. Compare the aggressive quote with the physical junk in the room, and the fact its maintained by milk packets blocking her off and you find a stunning picture and perhaps you can see what I'm saying.
This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray. Even her perception of time is exaggerated and all she can think about is the many ways she can die. Once you get into a point of frankly rather valid persecution and neglect its hard to pull yourself out on your own, if not impossible. Just as the inability to export trash reflects social neglect, so to does psychological self shaming reflect an inability to export violence done upon someone. One point about this I thought was particularly revealing is not only in the parental neglect surrounding her, but also in smaller moments like how when she was having issues in school other kids would call her a 'schizo'. Pretty much using ableist insults of non normative action to ostracize people and put them down.
This is also extremely relatable for me, and, I would imagine a lot of people. Even if you are able to function for the most part you've probably had your thoughts and actions dismissed as 'crazy' or 'spergy' before. Recently I found a very compelling dictionary on reverting from ableist language², here's what it has to say on 'schizo'
""This is ableist when used as a substitute for "switching rapidly" or "acting without regard for others" or otherwise implying a person seems mentally ill simply because they are unpredictable or make someone uncomfortable. The words "schizophrenic," "schizoaffective," and "schizotypal" are not ableist when actually referring to a person with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizotypal personality disorder.
Consider instead: wild, confusing, unpredictable, impulsive, reckless, fearless, lives on the edge, thrill-seeker, risk-taker, out of control, scary, lacks empathy, toxic, manipulative, egotistical, abusive, unpredictable""
It's a useful tool, but the fact of the matter is imagining these alternative phrases being used in public school, at least when I used to go, seems highly utopian. On top of this there's a lot of mockery around this as 'language policing' which is sad because in reality it means people are trying to ignore the potential pains of their callous speaking norms as 'freeing' when the very opposite is the case. People used to use the word 'retard' all the time in school and in gaming communities in the 2010s, but its very much out of vogue and offensive now. That being said I think the text of Milk Outside balances this well by pointing out the many other ways language can perpetuate it outlined in this dictionary as well. For example, early on you can tell her to 'act normal' which has to be a phrase almost everyone's frustrated parents have said at least once. It's one of the reasons I recommend giving this source a read.
The primary issue is using almost any phrase as a matter of derision but also as a matter of intentionality to be so. It's the 'schizo's job to 'stop being a schizo' and its their fault when they fail. As somebody who has screwed up a lot due to panic attacks and then had the people get upset at me for it, its something I deeply relate to. People often see when I panic and leave places and yell that people don't understand me as me being toxic, and of course its not something I desire to do, but in reality I have about as much control of it as a fish out of water once its gotten to that point, most of the time it can only be controlled by preventative measures in advance. Once they happen, its already too late. We can similarly read mental hangups like this a similar issue of that import/export analogy, if you have more negative perspective coming in than positive self perceptions (often encouraged by others) going out, the mind will become a junkyard of self loathing. Ultimately, you can't really control how you feel, at best you can nudge it a little. Ligotti describes this well in his deeply discomforting text Conspiracy Against the Human Race
"But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did
have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads."³
So then it follows well that the 'protagonist' does not have all that much control or feel like they are piercing the 'heart' of the problems shes dealing with. It's supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to be frustrated by it. Instead neurodivergence is repaired by a series of, often quite tiring upkeep of negotiations and preventative care. Not just with others but with yourself as well.
Let's talk about how well this works as a sequel. It's important to play the prior game first to get yourself acquainted with some important pieces of information, like for example her dad committing suicide. In fact I would say a better relationship with the character would be playing them back to back. This is meant to be a sort of meditational space away from the terrifying and blunt messaging in the first game, within which she can unwind and try and think about the difficulties of her life. The point being mental illness is not always something so easy for people on the outside to follow or sympathize with. Sometimes it consists of hard to untangle phrasing, and difficult moments of trying and failing to connect with them. It would be absolutely foolish to think this game didn't do its research either, because the main symbol on her shirt is the null symbol from Lacan used to explain the concept of the big other.
This game is a literary work which means you really have to play with it and be patient in order to appreciate it if you don't have these experiences. But trust me this is not a bad or 'toxic' reflection of mental illness. The neurodivergent require respect, accommodation, and patience. Through what you can pick up, this girl has been robbed of all of those. We all express being on edge in different ways, whether you find them endearing enough or you want to be closer to them, or want nothing to do with someone like this, fine. But this is a completely legitimate reflection of the stigmatization of mental illness and how they produce traumas the victims try to ignore. Ironically everyone referring to her as a lain clone or 'Milk Girl' is, I believe, missing that very point. After playing this game, if you have difficulty unraveling the complexity of its psychological portrayal check out this plot synopsis inquiry and this insight on the academic psychoanalysis work. Needless to say there's a lot of literary and technical depth in the game, especially in comparison to a lot of other VN's who are just going to show their characters at their most chipper with you and only get upset with you during the bad ending. This text throws those sort of dichotomies out the window.
I would urge my fellow gamers to not play games they in advance think they wont like. And not to publicly talk haven't been patient with, if you just kept fast clicking through all the dialogue prompts and reading as fast as possible then your inexperience will be negative out of impatience. I haven't continued to play Omori because of the dichotomous segmentation of 'pleasant fantasy worlds' vs. 'horrific apartment' and how much I felt locked off from the personality of my main character. But I'm not out to shit on it because I literally have not interacted with the text deeply enough to try and explain any sort of opinion on it, nor do I know where it goes. I'm not going to feel comfortable just saying 'bad vibes' on a text that is bearing such difficult and painful trauma like this. It's telling however that other people are so willing to do so. I think in a way this game made a brilliant commentary on a type of gaming experience that gets dismissed and ignored without even having to resort to meta. Intense word heavy games (VNs, Interactive fiction, etc) that discuss rough subject matter more pessimistically have been the laughing stock of gamers for a good while now.
That said, I do think there's legitimate reasons not to like this game. Even if its as simple as 'this just reminds me of how bad the intersection of poverty and mental illness is and makes me sad' or 'I sympathize with the character but the despondency doesn't make for a great game experience'. Or even more technical issues like the lack of skip or save functions (which for me don't matter at all and as I've laid out in my No One Can Ever Know writeup can actually enhance an experience for me). These disconnects are perfectly fine, but throwing the game away for its annoying aesthetics and circuitous dialogue is I think more than a little dismissive, and as a result playing exactly into the hands of the ableist prejudice it so accurately critiques.
That all being said, I feel like I haven't yet addressed any of the specifics. Most of my insight is more on other people's prejudices and an explanation of mental health, rather than highlighting why I enjoy this game so much. So here's a few more specific reasons I like it:
-The game was gifted to me by a girl who is incredibly similar to this character, who deals with a lot of ambiguous mental hurdles, and is also just starting to come to terms with her 'plurality' recently. This is something I'll speak about more in another text soon, but all that means for the moment is she, just like this girl, has personality issues that she is just starting to unravel. The similarities between her and this girl are to such an extent it goes beyond just a vacuous representation. In my experience there are people like this, and despite being difficult to speak to sometimes they have truly brilliant minds. It's funny because the masculine version of this type of character is found in the movie A Beautiful Mind, which I found insufferable to watch. That was because I couldn't really feel like I was 'interacting' with the paranoid delusions so much as being a specter. It made it seem like people really don't even try to intervene, this text makes it clear: they do but poorly. A lot of the mathematical fixations between her, for example squaring pyramids and such, seems similar to John Nash's thinking patterns.
-The music OST is 4 hours long apparently, most of it to do with the radio you can put on. This is longer than the expected length of a playthrough game, this is crazy considering most of the tracks seemed pretty good, if only about Yume Nikki length (like a minute long).
-The color palettes are soothing, using reds to display a sort of mistlike feeling, moving away from the oppressive use of purples and such in the first game.
-The text doesn't try to get you to 'date' the character but puts your protagonist in a similar engagement of inquiry you would find in those dating VNs. This is in itself a sort of micro genre, there's a list on this very site about it. However, its a microgenre that i'm fond of, since I see the ubiquity of the visual novel as a 'dating simulation' unfortunately. It also feels like a nod to how if it had been a more 'moe' human relationship with the character, it would have been more vapid and possibly offensive.
-The sound effect work on this one is just as brilliant as the visuals. Those little 'dings' whenever it's your turn to speak feels very satisfying and prevent you from accidentally hitting a choice on the screen without meaning to.
-I always love this eastern European architecture. It's so stalwart and gloomy, yet functional. I love how it makes the room look disorganized but not immediately 'gross' since its through her perception this stuff is happening.
-The opening with the horrific creature giving her a shot was incredibly well written and shows the text is not choosing more airy 'obnoxious' dialogue out of inability.
-A lot of the visual representations throughout the game have a mystical quality to them, falling down a hole or looking in a twisted funhouse mirror. A lot of the quiet visual representations are killer, wallpaper worthy, and absolutely worth the price of entry.
-On top of the clear literary thoughtfulness and understanding of psychology mentioned earlier. I'm impressed that the dev was able to construct a text with a convincing female lead. Even if he had to use a patriarchal gaze through the players role in order to connect. The dev here is Nikita Kryukov, who dons large gauges, a baseball cap, and a seemingly quiet demeanor and social presence. Primarily focused on appreciating the fan art put out and talking about various stuff around the game. From my cursory glance he's not even a comparatively active or political twitter user which is honestly quite rare and appreciated. And so, for a demure Russian dude, who you would probably seem more at home on the front of a nu-jazz record to so effectively write a vibrant story about the ableist oppression of women as it relates to imperial countries. It fills me with hope. For me, it means that if you try hard enough you can escape the biases of your own positionality to write about what you arent and capture the heart of that pain. This is a struggle and insecurity that plagues a lot of writers, with it being so in vogue for academics to tear apart 'poor representation'.
This all works to convince me the text has added something fundamentally unique to add to the VN form. I think perhaps my own experiences with girls that act like this and aren't doing it as a 'tumblr core' thing makes me a bit more sympathetic to them. But regardless, there's enough going on here for it to actually touch people who aren't on the inside of these struggles.
Mostly I felt I should just let people know there's more going on here. And on the charge of any sort of 'ableism' I will note that the people who call her 'Milk-chan' are also doing a huge disservice and seeing right past the character as well. So ultimately its not just the naysayers that are at fault here. Milk Outside asks us all to be more patient across the board and for that I consider it a masterwork of the visual novel short story. Quite honestly, it seems to me a lot of yall just got filtered by a Visual Novel, and thats pretty damn funny to me.
-----
1. DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness.
2. Ableism/Language
3. p.15, not for the faint of heart. I found a copy of it on Libgen but I wont link it here for obvious reasons.
Hey there reference to the first game did you like reference to the first game here's 10 minutes of dialogue abstracting reference to the first game.
Bored of reading in a vn? Don't worry, here's an anime AMV depressed lofi beats to study and reference to the first game.
Bored of reading in a vn? Don't worry, here's an anime AMV depressed lofi beats to study and reference to the first game.
The way I see it, the bag is surrounded. What's outside the bag of milk? That's right, more milk.
"I'll make a game with multiple endings so players can replay it to gain different perspectives... But I won't let them skip the credits AHAHAHAAHAHAHA"
A joker's joke
A joker's joke
i love serial experiments lain
It would require me a ton of paragraphs to talk about everything I want so say of this game, but I'll be brief, as I don't want to spoil anything: It's an agonizing experience, in the best of ways: a haunting work of art, one I'll never forget.
A short but fascinating experience, definitely a step up from the first game in every noticeable way. Loved the way it handled it's narrative and I like how it doesn't just seek to answer the questions from the first game, yet builds and expands upon them in such a way that a lot more left is for interpretation. Really liked the writing style as well, and if you're a fan of this game I highly recommend The Silver Case, which tells it's narrative in a similar fashion.
This happened to my buddy Tetsuya Nomura
not only did the voices remain she fumbled a dominos order it's joever
she doesnt look as femcel as she should yknow? are my beauty standards too low? me personally i would not look remotely lookable
she doesnt look as femcel as she should yknow? are my beauty standards too low? me personally i would not look remotely lookable
probably the most realistic portrayal i've seen of someone who's truly steeped in heavy mental anguish, and it avoids a lot of the romanticization of trauma that works like this can often fall into. i do miss some of the subtlety of the first game, but i understand the purpose of making the subtext text, as a response to criticism of milk inside...
I have no idea how I feel about this 'game' and what it's attempting to say. I guess the visuals are improved, but it's rather bland when compared to the unique look of it's predecessor.
This barely even feels like a game. You mostly just push a single button and read text.
Also the ending made zero goddamn sense. So I guess you could say that this game is neither good nor bad.
This barely even feels like a game. You mostly just push a single button and read text.
Also the ending made zero goddamn sense. So I guess you could say that this game is neither good nor bad.
Isso acabou sendo uma experiência bem pessoal e eu não tava esperando por isso, então não pretendo fazer uma review complexa ou maior dessa visual novel, mas eu terminei isso aqui genuinamente assustado do quanto eu me identifiquei comcom essa menina e seus problemas.
De qualquer forma gostei muito, é uma puta evolução em praticamente todos os quesitos em relação a primeira visual novel
De qualquer forma gostei muito, é uma puta evolução em praticamente todos os quesitos em relação a primeira visual novel
The game is a definite improvement over the first one in terms of art style, music, and audio design. This time it also included some point-and-click elements, which, at least for me, didn't feel like they added anything to the experience, but didn't detract from it either.
Without going into too many spoilers, the story takes place shortly after the end of the first game and explores the psyche and struggles of the main character with far more depth.
The game is pretty short and there are 5 different endings, but getting them didn't feel very intuitive, at least in my opinion.
Without going into too many spoilers, the story takes place shortly after the end of the first game and explores the psyche and struggles of the main character with far more depth.
The game is pretty short and there are 5 different endings, but getting them didn't feel very intuitive, at least in my opinion.
Another masterpiece from Nikita.
This game continues the story from the first one (Milk inside a bag of milk....), going even deeper inside the mind of our protagonist. There are way clearer nods to depression, suicidal thoughts and descending into madness than the prior, with very, very clever lines of dialog, showing that who wrote the script did actually went through some tough times.
This is not a game for everyone, as it puts you inside a very dark and twisted spiral, something that will only worsen already sensible or mentaly-ill people.
At the end, I was just in shock on how much more respect I've gathered towards people with mental disorders, "experiencing" it in a way that I've never had before. It's a tortuous, lonely and painful journey for those who can't trust their own minds.
This is a master-class when it comes to storytelling, music and visuals. This is what makes my passion for these kinds of games never fade out. Thanks a lot for this.
This game continues the story from the first one (Milk inside a bag of milk....), going even deeper inside the mind of our protagonist. There are way clearer nods to depression, suicidal thoughts and descending into madness than the prior, with very, very clever lines of dialog, showing that who wrote the script did actually went through some tough times.
This is not a game for everyone, as it puts you inside a very dark and twisted spiral, something that will only worsen already sensible or mentaly-ill people.
At the end, I was just in shock on how much more respect I've gathered towards people with mental disorders, "experiencing" it in a way that I've never had before. It's a tortuous, lonely and painful journey for those who can't trust their own minds.
This is a master-class when it comes to storytelling, music and visuals. This is what makes my passion for these kinds of games never fade out. Thanks a lot for this.
Definitely well-worth keeping an eye on Nikita Kryukov after this heckuva worthy successor to Milk1. Very excited to see what's next from them, I came across their games by happenstance earlier this year and what I found is what I believe to be an up-and-coming indie writer for this sort of game. Don't get to see that everyday!