Policy

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In No One Can Ever know, you play as a depressed dysphoric, and overweight, closeted transgirl in 11th grade, and you go through the journey of a crucially important day in her otherwise normal life. In the process learning her dysfunctional family dynamics and becoming attuned with the various struggles and fears she has to deal with. It's a simplified 'dungeneering' survival game, which lets the text do most of the talking, the aesthetic is similar to old 1st person rudimentary DOS era adventure games, like Rogue. It's simple, and mainly uses text to express the imagery you would expect to see on screen. It's one of the best games I've played in a long time, but let's readjust the discussion to elephants in the room before I continue beating this ivory drum.

The main myth I want to dispel out the gate is the idea that trans people actually need to expose their own suffering/dysphoria/etc. to the world in order for their art and existence to be validated. I know on the surface everyone with any real sensibility 'agrees' with this initial premise, considering this is an incredibly LGBT friendly website with many of the top voices being quite open about their gender or sexuality (ex. Woodaba is the #1 most popular reviewer on here and they are trans). But we would be fools to think this matter 'goes without saying, in that in the rise of ghauling anti trans rhetoric and legislation, one of the primary ways in which people have bothered to interact with them is as traumatized victims, possibly even . Yet this is by design an exploitative and brutal way to gain sympathy with a minority group, anybody who is familiar with the term 'trauma porn' probably also knows that this sort of wound bearing can. When you have people running around using the most tragic young adult memoirs and the fear of young trans people, you run the risk of using them as trauma advertisements for rights not that much different from pushing famished african children on TV for a food drive where only like 30% go to feeding and the rest to 'raising awareness' (anybody remember KONY2012)? Therefore its better to treat the art as made by an artist rather than from an infantilized pat on the head of simple commandeering of emotional validity (which honestly just goes without saying anyway on matters like this). This is one of the reasons I stan Bagenzo's work as mentioned in my other review on the subject, her reflections are much softer and told through indie game nostalgia. In general I find it hard not to see trauma porn art is not that different from tourture porn, in fact all you have to do is look at something like the Saw series and see maybe they aren't so distinct.

So allow me to then say that even though the game itself is about the experience of being not out but trans in high school, it doesn't fall to the concerns of self exploitation I signposted before. The theme of the day here that carries why here, is paranoia.
In the Cave Story Review I said the following:

'The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them.'

If Cave Story Sex RPG is a short poem on self forgiveness, No One Can Ever Know is an arduous painful reflection on dysphoria as paranoia, on trying to forgive the present. They both share a genre of the 'memoir game' . Every line seeps with an internal dread that everyone would hate you and is out to get you, but there's a universal element to this point, most of peoples experiences with public high school was pretending to be something you arent and being paranoid that everyone will find out. Constant vies for status and personhood, but the worries that you don't really have friends or that if you changed a little nobody would care are consistent, because think about it, the purpose of schools are to assign roles to people. Not just in terms of intellectual capacity but socially and interpersonally. Of course youre not allowed in the girl's bathroom its not your social role, just as its not the social role of a cisgender woman to be a football player. This feeling of general paranoia is so strong due to the double life most people run on the internet now that it even further intensifies it as ubiquity to the point it became a major theme in the award winning film Eighth Grade).

The only difference between the LGBT form of role based paranoia and others is that trans people have incredibly justifiable reasons to feel persecuted and dehumanized for the potentialities. One line that really stuck with me was when reflecting on the few people she was out to that 'You told everyone you came out to to still refer to you with he/him pronouns'. The idea of pronouns as a form a function of self repression is a conversation people want to tread lightly usually, but I can't help but think for example of tory member Jamie Wallis coming out as trans, but then tweeting about how he's still figuring this stuff out and to remain using He/Him [for now] (https://twitter.com/JamieWallisMP/status/1509122636810440709 ). This is fine and all but it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to think 'hm, the reason he probably is using those pronouns is because his voter base would be even more uncomfortable with voting for a minister they might misgender, on top of that Boris Johnson who supported him would probably also feel more 'embarrassed' if he had to worry about actually misgendering Jamie. But note this is a voter base and a party who would for the most part want to lock out immigration from the UK and pursue tax cuts for the rich. Like Boris was actually straight up caught saying he doesn't care if the bodies start piling up from covid, at the same time attempting to embezzle public funds these are not people you should even be trying to appeal to in the first place. While this is true, I apologize for this wording here, but this doesn't mean that we should try and misgender Jamie with she/her pronouns in some attempt to territorialize Jamie's sense of gender for himself and/or ask him to take 'gender accountability for himself'. Ask him about the contradictory gender policies his cabinet pushes and hold him and the rest of his party accountable for the policies they enact. There's no reason to actually get bogged down in the Idpol in this particular way but my point is even if its not Jamie himself, we can very easily imagine the repressive element pronouns can play even for the person choosing them.

I would know because I do this, on here I insist on she/her pronouns (and 3rd person occasional they/them) but at the University I'm so deeply separated from my gendered flesh and mixed perceptions I just ask for they/them. That way I can still retain a small trans identity while ultimately not revealing a pandora's box of truth in how I actually want to be seen that due to my incapacities to perform the gender I feel I'd never be able to get back. People would be calling me she/her pronouns while I have scrappy facial hair that day, and in that moment I would feel far worse.

At least..thats the theory. The game allows a more honest conversation that can begin to be processed, do I use these pronouns because they make me slightly more comfortable or is it to avoid the ire and shame from everyone else? Am I playing a substantial role in my own repression because I think I haven't 'earned' my gender or is it more complicated a paranoia than that? Personally at least it feels like people always have to fucking grovel after they misgender you, theres something a little funny about it if it wasn't so irritating and alienating about it, because it feels like really what they are doing is apologizing for the social wall they just kind of put up. I don't have any friends at this university, I don't have many meatspace friends in general aside from 1 family in the suburbs I'm not out to, and 1 childhood friend after a few years of fallout I still haven't met in person. See, paranoia is a complex emotional animal. Hopefully this reflects even just an incredibly small moment of how impactful that theme has been.

By the way, that's not even the most brutal antagonism and distrust I have with social order, I'll leave that for another review in the future, you know, stay tuned for more in the life of my glowing torments.

Also yes, I'm transgender to, anybody who read my biography. Or if your particularly attentive to strange authority im speaking with on this subject matter, you probably picked up on it, it's not really a huge reveal because my most popular review is the Cave Story Sex RPG on also being trans and I don't exactly have the audience to be 'leading people on' that I'm somebody or not, you kind of need a large following for it to be a reveal in the first place. However, I didn't outright state 'Im a transgirl so I can say this' in the opening line. And, as of the time of writing this, I dont have the trans flag emoji next to my name, I dont have my comments for any of my insights turned on, I don't have a cute/cool girl as my profile picture but a writhing mass of lovecraftian squidflesh.

Originally I was going to be antagonistic towards the reader at the point, asking them 'why do you think I'm like this'. But that's not on you, its not on you to quietly motivate me away from my own vulnerabilities when you dont even know me and for me to make you do that would be hideously parasocial and self loathing to ask that of you. Instead I'll explain why to the best of my ability, I do it because by not making my identity a clear subject, I'm not asking the reader to understand what I'm saying through the journey of my origins. They can agree or disagree with me without feeling like in the process the reason why is something core to do with my identity. This subject is so hefty and complicated it threatens to collapse in on me, but I'm not going to sit here and bullshit to you some amount of repression or extremely questionable set of motives doesn't play into this. Repression is not something you simply 'overcome' you know, its a set of interlocking things you do to try and contain and share your thoughts without feeling like a burden. In a less fundamentally unhealthy world we wouldn't do that, and I certainly think there's quite a lot of people on her that actually are better at not having self repression issues. Overtime as I get more comfortable with this place I might try and express those other parts of myself and not hide them, for now though a distancing effect has provided some stability for speaking as boldly as I do. My point of mentioning this is that there's a very unconscious aspect to the desire to conceal certain things, the trick is in figuring out personally how justified or not they are.

Not just addresses and government names, but the divulging of total perspectives and familiarities with the audience. Do I tell you my politics, my eating habits, what experiential details threaten to get in the way? I had my twitter up on here linked for a bit but then took it down because I realized people knowing who I am there might threaten the pathos of my arguments here. Paranoia is not always justified or mentally stable, but hopefully you can see what I mean when I say sometimes it is.

One other way paranoia is reflected is the brutal difficulty of the mechanics. See, in the game you constantly have to deal with the dysphoria status effect through the use of music from your phone to block the bad thoughts out, having a voice speak that isn't your own helps to disembody you from the prison of your racing mind. But the game seems incredibly intent on making you work for the experience. At the very beginning of the game, if you examine your own bed your character will literally decide to sleep for 10 minutes. The 2nd level alone is you having to wander around in school, but you have to wait for the classes to start. You don't know which rooms the classes are because you have to walk into a door to find out what the room is, you have to last 4 different class periods in a row with the dysphoria attacks happening randomly and no reliable way to 'savescum' since it takes 10% of your battery life to even save the game. It's not so much survival horror so much as survival tedium. Seriously, this games difficulty is way higher than it lets on, even though the mechanics are simple there's a deceptive amount of focus needed to get through the labyrinthine 2nd level. The game actively stands in the way of your progression through it, is the text itself not paranoid of you? I couldn't help thinking for example how an easy and simple way to make the 2nd level easier would be by having the names of the rooms you go towards marked on the minimap, instead you just have to wander the halls a lot and get your bearings, fumbling with doors to figuring out whats inside. The game even lampshades this at some point when you try and open the photography room the narrator goes something along the lines of 'This is the photography room, or is it? You don't even know anymore.'

Of course it doesn't take a scientist to see how this sort of difficulty functions as a narrative enhancement, yall are smart and are familiar with games like Pathologic, you get this part. But it's still worth pointing out how minimalism actually becomes a new type of threat to player experience. At the same time despite the game engaging in such openly cruel design traps, it functionally causes the player to feel some kind of 'reward' for making it through the shit, we were able to make it through the next checkpoint so we get another lore dump of experience by the author, more character context. We are becoming an ally in support of her paranoid concerns, regardless of our own identity. And seeing as there's a precise simplicity to everything being said we are allowed to dwell more on the taboo thoughts themselves rather than trying to untangle what the game is saying.

The other reason this game can be identified as non exploitative, is through humor, via the reflection of objects and their placement, despite this game being nothing but halls of walls and doors with text boxes, a lot of focus is given on object representation, early on in the adventure the protagonist mentions how there are 6 placemats on the table despite there being on average only 2 people. Throughout the journey, it seems just as much focus is given to objects as people: guitars, computers, lord of the rings, etc. This care given for object placement fills in each room without you actually needing to visually see it. Which is why its themes on grief work so well, the game primes you for a conversation with loss through these observations as for example you have the family photo or the guitar, objects with clear memory. But also knows objects exist primarily to be fiddled with, your character plays a pinball machine for funny highscores, or playing notes on a random grand piano.

Theres a serious chance of what I'm going to refer to as 'observational runaway effect' happening, when you want to be so comprehensive about a work that touched you personally you scramble to speak about every small nuance or theme you can muster, and as much as I really try not to care about doing that sort of thing, there's two reasons I should probably think twice on doing that:
1. I do actually want people to try the game and read this essay, and the more loquacious I get the less likely people will do either. (Hell I probably already failed, but still..)

2. I think the game again 'speaks for itself' in a lot of ways on the subject matter and trying to reprocess the grief comes off voyeuristic after a certain point. Sure I can start listing off psychological terms or read into the authors voice but its a bit prying.

So instead I'll just focus on 2 other design touches I find substantial to the overall experience. For one, you have the retro font. The font used in this game is from research called MultiType Pixel, an all caps font intended to call back to arcade games of the past. With all the focus given to gaming throughout the piece it makes sense, but this is a story heavy game so this nostalgia actually accentuates the experience as a sort of scar. The text will go on for unbroken paragraphs at a time as giant brutal text crawls, an assault on the eyes and the mind. It takes the process of memory and makes it as exhausting as humanly possible by twisting something intended for arcade glamor, and personally I think it's such a cool thing to do! After a while, you can sort of get used to and be charmed by the font itself and as you can see it's designed in such a way it only really feels overwhelming during the chapter portions.

The other one may cause a bit of quibble but there's the design choice of what music to choose. The game opens up with a quote of a popular Death Grips song 'I break mirrors with my face in the united states'. Theres constant talk of absolutely blasting noise-punk of the highest caliber. Strumming on guitars, making noise with your friends, using ear destroying music to 'tune out' the dysphoria. So to have this be so ingeniously juxtaposed with the ambient pieces from various albums by Patricia Taxxon is a brilliant decision. For one, it allows you on a literal level to just focus on what the game is telling you but also adds an eerie melancholy, you can understand this memory, but this is a facsimile of the experience, the real thing is the rambunctious youthful outbursts almost nobody can handle for too awful long. It's also a smart choice because of the fact Patricia Taxxon is a copywrite abolitionist and just tells people to use her variety of tracks wherever and however, to monetize, remix, whatever. Patricia Taxxon herself is a bit smug about this abolitionism, putting herself in the line of fire of doing unabashed remixes of pop music, writing manifestos against it, and once quite literally putting her name on a song she literally just took from another band to show that even title name changes is all it takes to make something transformative. Again, I refuse to play diplomat, this is fucking awesome and I'm also a copywright abolitionist, down with intellectual property rights. Yadda yadda. But beyond just making logical sense, Patricia also gave a gigantic gift to the world by doing this, every song in this game is from a different album. The girl puts out a shitload of music it enhanced the musical 'creative commons' by an absurd amount, for example this banger by Summoning Salt in a lot of his speedrun videos, you probably heard it before, the girl has a shitload of genre variety in her music. Bless her.

Still, there's a degree where from a practical perspective airing on the side of caution and also having good music to boot takes a degree of self preservation and while I dont expect people to recognize this and add it directly into the interpretation of the text, nor am I doing so. I think it's a charming thing to do. For one it literally is external music you might have heard before reinforcing the musical theme, its from a trans musician, and it operates as a useful 'recycling' of the external world. No need to hire a big band orchestra if you have an MP3 file already that gets the job done and arguably sends a stronger message in the process. These are also really good uses of the music in themselves because the ambience used gives the game an empty atmosphere and allows me to actually focus on the words. I don't know about anybody else but I have a peculiar tick where hearing music and trying to read clash with each other distracting me from what I'm reading especially if the songs have long verbal ballads. So from just a physiological position it allows me to feel more focus and confidence in reading which is absolutely necessary if you're going to use music as a cooling mechanic. If the music was giving me more anxiety then I would feel far too divorced from the experience of the character doing it.

The creator has written her own post on the game here. I've tried not to source that too much in this insight, because making empty appeals to the authorial reasoning is not particularly stellar writing. But even at the time of writing this, this point she made is still unambiguously true:

'Plus I think it's extremely funny to post it here considering I'm the only person who's actually rated the game on this site. It's not called No One Can Ever Know for nothing'.

Until today, when I decided to publish this. You've got Known. But why am I the only one? Despite the game being free, on itchio, and having a fond endorsement by the author even after 2 years of making it read by 2 and a half dozen people, it seems nobody else on the website has admitted openly to playing the game. I don't see literally any reason for that to all remain the case XD

But there is one thing I should warn you about, towards the end of the game the author mentions using computer games as an unhealthy coping mechanism 'Games are great at taking the pain away. But their ability to keep that pain from coming back leaves a lot to be desired.' More then anything else this game seems to exist as a manifesto to the opposite, its an incredibly upsetting and distressing experience. As far as a rush back of pain goes, I've been off hormones for ever since covid originally broke out, this is one of the few times I could think of where I was successfully physiologically brought to tears, a part of my femininity on hormones I miss dearly. I think it's an incredibly effective replication of pain processing, but make sure you're in an emotionally safe enough situation to break open this game, really I think that is the more important point than any sort of set of content warnings. This game is painful and vulnerable in a way you really can't find elsewhere, and on the other hand makes a very clear argument through its own production that we should have more of this sort of experience in games. Only more brilliant is the fact that this game was built with such a minimalism and simplicity that it rebukes the sentiment you 'need to know' how to draw or animate in order to design an emotionally compelling experience. While the main ending of the game is ineffably brutal, this is the silver lining, there is a possibility for expression that doesn't require you to overcome every inadequacy all at once. There's a double meaning there for me because just like in developing works of art developing one's expression of gender is similar. Sometimes you can feel so crushed and burdened down by your incompleteness and inadequacy that it barely even makes sense to try, hell I know I'm dealing with that just in the process of trying to write about games but there's still hope merely just in pushing forward and taking the first step anyway. At the end of the day self forgiveness can't just happen in the past, it has to happen in the present to…

This review is dedicated to not only Heather's' great work and the many excellent insights shes contributed to my growth, but to the many wonderful outspoken and passionate dolls of Backloggd whose insights inspire me everyday:
The warm and compassionate [Whom], (https://www.backloggd.com/u/Whom/)
The horror enthusiast with a voice of gold Venus ThighTrap
The lovely indie landfill surveyor AlexaLily ,
The coolly persuasive Squigglydot
And of course, my stalker gamedev GF BloodMachine who made an account pretty much just to stalk me but gives so much insight behind the scenes on games and life. Also big ups Woodaba, buccaneer nb ready to take on the world, not everything they say spurs me on, but I'm glad they stick to their guns and put pressure on the flames, plus an anodyne 2 enjoyer is just a sign of somebody who knows impeccable taste.

There are probably another half dozen others I'm following. I could celebrate here, but I don't want to out anybody who doesn't wear it as a badge of honor via either their linked twitter or probably don't desire the unwanted attention. Thank you all for inspiring me so much and helping me get through life one day at a time, and thank you for all the great game recommendations in the process.

I probably didn’t need to add a full hour of playtime to this one hour game just grinding at the arena, but listen, what was I supposed to do? LET Doose hurt small businesses through his monster summoning, in some pathetic hunt for tourism? If Star Hollow falls, Lorelai would have to move back in with Emily and that be trapped in that abusive house all over again! Besides, getting Rory leveled up enough to use the game’s only master seal is the experience she needs if she’s gonna get to Harvard.

I’ve never watched Gilmore Girls. This was fun.

In 2022, a skeleton appears on the Shijima estate, prompting a mystery author to investigate their strange family history.

In 1972, a hostess tries to protect a singer from murderous threats,

In 1922, a young heiress tries to retrieve her family’s treasure and survive the murder and manipulation from enemies who want it for themselves.

The infamous “Fruit of Life” pops up in all these stories and its promise of immortality leaves violence and betrayal in its wake…

FMV games are strange beasts. They’re often inherently stilted, making long pauses while the actors wait for the player to cooperate and equipped with some actors of questionable quality. But I’d argue that, if you know what you’re getting into, those are features instead of bugs. It's always going to be an interesting balancing act between the constraints of real life filmmaking and creating exciting gameplay. Most of the game is split into two major sections. The investigation phase mostly involves watching a movie and watching the emotional soap drama play out. The game tries to add a sense of player agency by creating time based little button prompts to highlight a clue the characters are discussing, but you’ll receive all the clues at the end of the phase anyway. It's sort of a cheap way to trick players into forgetting how long its been since they pressed a button. The more useful feature, I think, is the suspect/evidence button. This lets you open up some notes while the movie is still playing and review the facts without stopping the ongoing action. It feels like you’re checking your notes with the detectives, and its just a little feature I appreciated.

This was first announced at a Japan-only Nintendo direct and I was 1000% positive this would never receive any kind of English translation. So it was a welcome surprise to see it get the support of an English sub/dub. I experimented with both audio formats a few times, which is relatively easy to change. While I wasn’t expecting too much, I think the English dub is just really unpolished, with voice acting that really contradicts how the actual actors spoke those lines. For example, early in the game, the two main characters are talking about their mutual friend. Haruka says “Are you just here to flirt with her?” The English dub makes her sound accusing, or even jealous. But when I revisited the scene in Japanese, the actor sounds like she’s just playfully teasing. It's the sort of thing that makes you reflect on the art of dubbing and how it works with live action performances. There’s nuances there that feel like they weren’t taken into account.


The deduction phase proper involves piecing together different clues to form your hypothesis. The game dumps dozens of clues on you and encourages you to connect them all. Most of them will probably connect to a bad hypothesis, which could lead you off track, but it also helps narrow down useless clues that you want to get rid of and connect more relevant facts. Its not a perfect system, but among the “put all the pieces together” mechanics that mystery games try to pull off, I can’t find much to really complain about in it.

Honestly, the real highlight of the game is how the whole cast works to pull off this huge narrative. Each actor plays a different character in different eras, which means you get to see how far these actors can stretch their performances. A shy little bookworm in the 2020s is a bitter playboy in the 1970s. A hyper competent assistant becomes a flirtatious mean girl, followed by a nervous, naive singer in another. It's just really fun to see these actors have fun.

Its huge time skipping narrative also means it gets to do really exciting things with recontextualizing characters. In the 2020s, Ryoei Shijima is depicted as a bitter old man who is potentially hogging the Fruit of Life for himself. His son Eiji theorizes that, if this immortality granting fruit exists, Ryoei is selfishly hoarding it from the needy or the scientists that could use it for good. This image of his selfish father extrapolates in Eiji’s mind and convinces him that Ryoei is happily letting innocents die for his own power.

But in the 1970s, we get to see Ryoei in his prime and how his own history shaped his life. He’s introduced explaining how he was outvoted by the other Shijimas. They want to give the fruit to a poor and needy soul… so that they can kidnap that person and experiment on them through generations. When Ryoei hears Eiji talk about using this mythical fruit to give to the needy, he thinks of immoral, violent acts in pursuit of personal wealth.

Both Ryoei and Eiji are motivated by helping others, but they both have different contexts for what that involves. Ryoei sees helping others as doing everything you can to give a person peace. Eiji sees it as doing everything you can to give a person life. That conflict and how they can’t communicate those distinctions to each other makes for some delicious, subtle drama. And its something this game excels at in its lengthy narrative. And its in these storylines where the game excels. These little micro tragedies throughout history are where the game’s at its best.

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Now here’s a confession, I wrote all of that before I hit the finale, because I was so jazzed on the game I thought I could spew all my thoughts then and there and be ready to post with only minor edits once I was done.

But the finale is… frustrating. For a lot of reasons. I won’t go too deep into spoilers, but here’s a quick layout of the pause menu. Right in the center is a text box labeled “Rules of Reasoning.” Two of the rules are as follow:

There is only one killer in each case, no accomplice

Superhuman abilities or paranormal activities should be ruled out

The final case just kind of ignores those rules right out the gate and just expects you to follow along without any question. And don’t get me wrong, I was all for the game swerving into weird shit. But I also just don’t think a mystery game should… lie? Part of the final case also retroactively reveals that one of your previous successful cases was a frame job. Maybe its ridiculous to be annoyed by that, but when a game steers you directly towards a wrong answer just to reveal how wrong you were for completing the only way to complete the game… It's frustrating. It works in something like Spec Ops the Line, because that game is trying to tell a story about military expansionism and how it justifies itself. But in a mystery game you’ve just dedicated ten hours to… you want the mystery to be fair. Something you can feel accomplished for solving.

Also the epilogue involves a back to back “oh it was gay!” to “oh its When Marnie Was There” and I just despise that shit.

Still, its a really fun experience in spite of how frustrated I got towards the end. Special highlight to chapter 5. Just as the routine of cutscene/gameplay is wearing thin, the game transforms into a first person escape room. It's those creative choices that help me want to forgive this game in the end. You can tell how much fun these people had creating these mysteries, even if they were making things harder for themselves. And it's nice to see Square Enix fund these kinds of projects with that hot FF14 money. With things like this and the Live A Live remake, I hope more of these strange little productions come through the woodwork.

Welcome to Elk is a game I picked up from the Kotaku "games you might have missed" list and i'm glad I did because it's pretty special. It's a small, colorful adventure game with minigames about a carpenter from the city moving to a small island, but really it's about storytelling and the way stories connect people and allow us to remember happy and painful things. The stories that form the core of the game are based on true stories (and the original stories are presented in the game as well) and the way they're presented through the gameplay is often pretty powerful. There's one particular thing that would absolutely be my "Moment of the Year" if I were Giant Bomb. Do read the game's content warning - it deals with some heavy stuff - and I think depending on your taste you may find the ending unsatisfying (I like it a lot), but if you like emotional games and you like stories, I can't recommend Welcome to Elk enough.

There’s a deep seeded vulnerability to every significant character in The House of Fata Morgana, a vulnerability that is festering behind a thin shield of various defense mechanisms and a facade of the person they purport to be among others. “You instinctively accept as truth the events unfolding before you”, the title crawl declares. This could be taken at face value of course, one must accept the magical element of the story for it to hold any weight, but I also took it as a challenge of premise. The game entreats the reader to investigate the real people trapping themselves behind this fata morgana (a term for a type of mirage I embarrassingly only learned about after completing the game so if you also didn’t know, well, there you go) and observe them for the holistic human beings they are, beyond what they want or are compelled to portray themselves to be. Beyond this, I can say that narratively the game succeeds at interrogating themes of victimhood, cyclical abuse, vengeance, hatred, and personal identity with strokes of deftness and occasionally nuance as needed and that is the greatest praise I could shoulder upon it. Light spoilers for The House in Fata Morgana follow so if you're interested in reading this VN completely blind, be warned.

Now I just said that Fata Morgana’s thematic strength in relation to its fully realized characters is its greatest strength but I can’t help but contradict myself just to express how enthusiastically I have to celebrate its character art, background art, and music. These components alone are what I imagine most immediately captures every person who even mildly likes this VN so I cannot stress enough how much I would understand the argument that these are its greatest accomplishments. Every piece of background art, at least for the PC version, expresses these rough impressionistic outlines of indoor and outdoor environments that can be equally as crude and grimy and stark in visual texture and color as they can be soft and dream-like and enigmatic. There's an appreciable contrast between these dappled, almost amorphous background shapes and the beautifully detailed, porcelain-like character art realized by Moyataro. In the landscape of visual novels the character art is immediately distinct, sure, but even more than that it often allows for the oft-unsettling atmosphere to permeate through characters such as The Maid, The White Haired Girl, the Beast, and the Witch whose entire physical existences reek of uncanniness or horror or both. The CGs must bear mention here as well because the painterly quality of the facially expressive character art as well as their posing and framing within stark backgrounds is unforgettable.

Now, perhaps the most pivotal element in contributing to Fata Morgana’s atmosphere, which is equal parts dour, chaotic, dreadful, ethereal and occasionally euphoric, is the music. It's also the aspect of the game I was immediately enamored by the moment the eponymous title track coincided with the opening title crawl. The most apparent strength of the soundtrack of this VN is its willingness to let the reader steep in despairing moods accompanied with discordant tracks that can at times grate against the ear or overwhelm with a sense of discomfort and eeriness. Not every song is appreciable outside of its game context but given the eclectic variety and the distinct place that every song has in the soundtrack, I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is an abundance of vocal tracks, most of which are sung in Portuguese by Japanese singers, with different affects and vocal effects placed on them. This is certainly an oddity within the space of VNs as I understand it, but it's one I welcome given the sheer ability of the singer(s) in every song. Speaking of song placement, I cannot neglect to mention that in the case of the first half of the game wherein the reader explores four different doors in varying locations and time periods, the soundtrack is curated in a way that each door to each setting also opens a portal to a distinct sonic palate that makes each one have a greater sense of identity both within the world and in my memory. Altogether, the entire soundtrack is worthwhile and one of my new favorites in a game; I revisit at least a portion of it nearly every day.

There’s an anthological vignette structure to the first half of the narrative that is ostensibly only loosely tied by the mystery of the player character’s identity. It’s within this framework that I think Fata Morgana is most consistently impressive in its effective creation of small period pieces reflecting on sort of tangential themes like class disparity, avarice, relationships and their need for communication, the nature of man, race and gender identity. Many of these themes, while carrying over between vignettes, don’t exactly get fully realized explorations unfortunately (such as class disparity and race), but they do serve to unflatteringly portray the blemishes of the people and period in a manner that is coherent and establishes societal systems as being quite influential in the production of discriminatory and heinous acts that take place later in the story. The second door that explores the reality of a nebulous and foreboding beast that the Maid is catering to in 1707 was an immediate highlight following a tonally and atmospherically successful first vignette that played a little too close into reader expectations without much characterization of the brother and sister beyond their roles as tragic figures. This is a criticism I have of the first door, albeit one that did not impede my enjoyment of the first few hours, but it's also a purposeful trend in the first four vignettes (called doors) that pays off fantastically by the end of the fourth door as the realization that these tales curated by the Maid with tragic tones and cruel ends and all too poetic finales serve a dual purpose in punishing the characters within and obfuscating the truth from the player character.

Around the halfway mark of the narrative, the game asks the player to make an almost superficial, inevitable choice, one with a much deeper emotional resonance that I only realized much later. Without leveraging spoilers to entice any potential future readers of The House in Fata Morgana, I want to make it explicitly clear that this game is queer. I obviously cannot speak for the writer themselves, but Fata Morgana itself is a story very much predicated on the experience and themes of gender nonconformity that speaks in equal parts to intersex people and transgender people; the narrative crux pivots around this as a core element and it can’t be ignored, especially because of how empathetic and surprisingly delicately the writer handles the topic. The distinction has to be made, of course, between intersex and transgender people but with the understanding that intersex people can also be transgender, it is through this lens that Fata Morgana explores gender identity and it acknowledges this difference. There is of course some discussion to be had about the portrayal of intersex and transgender peoples in situations of despair and suffering and oppression in media, and I as neither cannot speak to it genuinely so I leave that in the hands of actual intersex and transgender people to unpack. In my limited judgement though, I think Fata Morgana takes a few missteps of language and drags out some sequences of suffering in a way that mirrors some sluggish pacing in the second half of the story in general, but ultimately affirms and celebrates these identities in a way that is some of the most respectful I have seen in media.

Briefly, I want to touch on the core themes of abuse, victimhood, hatred, and forgiveness. These are all inextricably tied together but what I found most compelling about their implementation in Fata Morgana, specifically near the end, is that the game never relents to a strict “cycles of abuse perpetuate hatred and violence and ill will and thus everyone is equally culpable and in the end nobody is really at fault(or everybody is at fault)” sort of mentality. Many of the characters in the game are fully realized in ways that often don't make them agreeable or even tangentially good people by the game’s judgement. The reader is asked to accept these characters not for their cumulative goodness or likeability, but for the human beings who have done good, bad, and everything in between that they are. All that being said, the VN also makes sure to emphasize that it is always in the hands of the victim to weigh the heinousness of the acts done upon them and determine whether they can forgive or cast off their abuser entirely. Several characters offer several different perspectives and decisions when presented with this query but it never creates a situation wherein the victim is beholden to meet their abuser(s) halfway. I can’t speak for others obviously but this was an intensely gratifying stance to me that the game reinforced constantly.

A lot of the elements of the game were similarly gratifying to me in a way that coalesced into a whole that consistently affected me. Yes, I teared up and cried on more than one occasion. I have some minor misgivings with the pacing and overly grave tone of the second half of the story, the relatively safe ending even though I somewhat made peace with it, underutilization of several key characters who could have used more fleshing out, and with some details of its exploration of gender and sexuality. All that being said, none of these came together in a way that meaningfully detracted from The House In Fata Morgana’s messaging, its characters or thematic weight. Perhaps the biggest tragedy surrounding The House in Fata Morgana, despite its notoriety in visual novel circles, is how little its merits and (relatively minor, in my view) failings are discussed or dissected, even among those who have played it, outside of overt characteristics like its art and music. Considering that I produced this review as a passionate, spoiler-skirting entreaty to play this visual novel, I am perhaps no one to talk as well. Maybe this will foster more discussion from new and old readers, maybe it won’t. So long as I contribute to the dialogue and even one person picks up this wonderful game, I can’t really complain.