This review contains spoilers
As somebody who knows the dev behind this and how she is, I can't help but feel I was intruding on a private moment here. In this game, an analogue child of the narrator Curly, waltz around as they proclaim various sentiments on the parafictional world they inhabit.
The meat of it probably comes through both in the second half and on replay. The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them. In that sense the game touches into a specific insight of gender dysphoria often ignored. Yes, most peoples childhoods are miserable and filled with regret, but speaking from experience, trans people often have developed an often more jaded relationship with their past because of the trauma of not even being able to present or know the steps how to present the gender they often feel more aligned to. People often focus more on the dysphoria of the exact present moment, gender dysphoria as a concrete political panic and surviellance from hostile societus is beyond true, but the form of dysphoria through memory and the past, something you literally cant change if you wanted to, is much harder to conceptualize all at once. Because of repression, the relationship with memory is scarred by a smothering and haunting self loathing, if you have any understanding of the Proust effect, its basically based on those involuntary memory floods. Yet they can in turn threaten the present sense of mediocrity through their unpleasance and sense of comparative stagnation they tend to bring.
I feel like that's a fairly core concept for understanding the complexity that undergirds this sort of moment, the lamentations on your past and present inadequacies can intensify and clash into each other, unless you walk it through.
It's good the game ends on a sentiment of self forgiveness. Realizing in the past you didn't really know all that much better and was just trying her best, its so easy for us to cringe at our past selves to the point of it swallowing our current ones. The narrator may be a bit bitter with her childhood upbringing, but the silver lining is the rambunctious childlike passion for games shines bright through. That said, it still feels like I'm intruding on a private moment, so perhaps the name for this thing is more apt than a lot of people are giving credit.
Overall, this is a neat small little game made with a rather ubiquitous itchio engine used to tell these sort of minimalist one shots. But this is the meek quiet vulgar gamepoem, you should know just from looking at this sort of thing in the future whether or not it'll be something your patient with. That said there's one exception to those who want to see some of the most ambitious things this engine can do, if you want something really mindblowing, get your mind out of the gutter and check out Madotsuki's Closet. It's about an hour in length but it uses the limits of this engine as far as it can and is about a transgender pseudo-analysis/memoir on every internet dilettante's favorite indie darling gem, Yume Nikki.
Is it rude to plug a different game by the developer in the discussion around a separate work? Probably so, but I noticed there's only 1 review on the page of that one and its one of the best games I played last year. On top of that, any of the limitations, confusions, or irritations of lack are far more fulfilled by playing the much larger game she worked on just a pigeons walk to the birdbath 5 feet away from you!
Now, you could argue that I should have just made my overview on that game, and you might be right, but most of what I have to say in terms of trying to understand trans experience through game memories applies there, and in general I just have far less to say since its so thoroughly a memoir it can pretty much speak for itself.
The meat of it probably comes through both in the second half and on replay. The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them. In that sense the game touches into a specific insight of gender dysphoria often ignored. Yes, most peoples childhoods are miserable and filled with regret, but speaking from experience, trans people often have developed an often more jaded relationship with their past because of the trauma of not even being able to present or know the steps how to present the gender they often feel more aligned to. People often focus more on the dysphoria of the exact present moment, gender dysphoria as a concrete political panic and surviellance from hostile societus is beyond true, but the form of dysphoria through memory and the past, something you literally cant change if you wanted to, is much harder to conceptualize all at once. Because of repression, the relationship with memory is scarred by a smothering and haunting self loathing, if you have any understanding of the Proust effect, its basically based on those involuntary memory floods. Yet they can in turn threaten the present sense of mediocrity through their unpleasance and sense of comparative stagnation they tend to bring.
I feel like that's a fairly core concept for understanding the complexity that undergirds this sort of moment, the lamentations on your past and present inadequacies can intensify and clash into each other, unless you walk it through.
It's good the game ends on a sentiment of self forgiveness. Realizing in the past you didn't really know all that much better and was just trying her best, its so easy for us to cringe at our past selves to the point of it swallowing our current ones. The narrator may be a bit bitter with her childhood upbringing, but the silver lining is the rambunctious childlike passion for games shines bright through. That said, it still feels like I'm intruding on a private moment, so perhaps the name for this thing is more apt than a lot of people are giving credit.
Overall, this is a neat small little game made with a rather ubiquitous itchio engine used to tell these sort of minimalist one shots. But this is the meek quiet vulgar gamepoem, you should know just from looking at this sort of thing in the future whether or not it'll be something your patient with. That said there's one exception to those who want to see some of the most ambitious things this engine can do, if you want something really mindblowing, get your mind out of the gutter and check out Madotsuki's Closet. It's about an hour in length but it uses the limits of this engine as far as it can and is about a transgender pseudo-analysis/memoir on every internet dilettante's favorite indie darling gem, Yume Nikki.
Is it rude to plug a different game by the developer in the discussion around a separate work? Probably so, but I noticed there's only 1 review on the page of that one and its one of the best games I played last year. On top of that, any of the limitations, confusions, or irritations of lack are far more fulfilled by playing the much larger game she worked on just a pigeons walk to the birdbath 5 feet away from you!
Now, you could argue that I should have just made my overview on that game, and you might be right, but most of what I have to say in terms of trying to understand trans experience through game memories applies there, and in general I just have far less to say since its so thoroughly a memoir it can pretty much speak for itself.