"Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk" was a game I stumbled upon back in December '20, I forget if it was through Steam's discover queue or whatever but it looked like my kind of thing and it turned out to be that and a good deal more.
It gave me vivid flashbacks of when I was made to go grocery shopping for milk when I was like 6-7, just forced out there on my own with a bill of what would be roughly 10 USD. I was still too shy and nervous to know how most of the outside world worked so I just ran out in a panic when the clerk tried giving me my change back.
I live about as north as you can get on the earth's hemisphere and I'm pretty sure it was winter so it was pitch dark despite it being like 4-5 PM, I was raised on land where complete darkness is a constant for half of the year, it fucks with your head.
It's odd too because it sounds like the kind of thing that would scare a kid but I was just used to it at this point, most of my memories back then took place at night, the sun might as well have not existed in my mind.
Apparently it only took me 15 mins but it stuck with me hard, it felt like a conversation with someone that sincerely understood and it just kept mentally replaying and I was just so grateful to have had it.
Nowadays I feel kind of ambivalent towards how open to be with being into niche indie psychological horror(?) about mental illness, particularly considering how closely it is to the whole "lain/asukapilled" NEET idealization shit but it is still an incredibly important part of why I go through any of this stuff to begin with. It's hard to not be drawn to it when you feel like you get it and the struggle of being a person that has to exist and take space and resources. I also loved how it uses its blood red and violet palette along with pixelated imagery of places that feel like they might exist (cuz I mean, they kinda do).
So naturally I was really eager to see what a follow-up would be like, I figured it'd be bigger in a very straight-forward Sequel sort of way and it kind of is but it's still really damn good. The plot of the first game gets animated as an opening to this one (which looks really good btw, seriously good direction) and it jumps about an hour from where it left off.
There's a noticeable uptick in graphical fidelity but the color palette is still minimized, this time to slightly more vibrant reds and shades of black due to the change in location and the way the protag navigates it through mental memory alone.
It becomes a bit more of a traditional VN than the last game given the portraits and facial animations but it works, it gives a lot more emphasis on the actual back-and-forth going on. I'll probably write more about it proper and I really didn't mean for this to turn into more about the last game than the one I'm actually going through but I guess it helps I'm using this more as a freeform writing thing than giving myself the burden of writing complete essays.
If you haven't played through Milk Inside, I'd say check it out, Milk Outside is a continuation in the most bluntly direct ways possible but if either of them look cool to you, you aren't losing much time or money with the first one. Not sure what else I can say, shit's just cool.
It gave me vivid flashbacks of when I was made to go grocery shopping for milk when I was like 6-7, just forced out there on my own with a bill of what would be roughly 10 USD. I was still too shy and nervous to know how most of the outside world worked so I just ran out in a panic when the clerk tried giving me my change back.
I live about as north as you can get on the earth's hemisphere and I'm pretty sure it was winter so it was pitch dark despite it being like 4-5 PM, I was raised on land where complete darkness is a constant for half of the year, it fucks with your head.
It's odd too because it sounds like the kind of thing that would scare a kid but I was just used to it at this point, most of my memories back then took place at night, the sun might as well have not existed in my mind.
Apparently it only took me 15 mins but it stuck with me hard, it felt like a conversation with someone that sincerely understood and it just kept mentally replaying and I was just so grateful to have had it.
Nowadays I feel kind of ambivalent towards how open to be with being into niche indie psychological horror(?) about mental illness, particularly considering how closely it is to the whole "lain/asukapilled" NEET idealization shit but it is still an incredibly important part of why I go through any of this stuff to begin with. It's hard to not be drawn to it when you feel like you get it and the struggle of being a person that has to exist and take space and resources. I also loved how it uses its blood red and violet palette along with pixelated imagery of places that feel like they might exist (cuz I mean, they kinda do).
So naturally I was really eager to see what a follow-up would be like, I figured it'd be bigger in a very straight-forward Sequel sort of way and it kind of is but it's still really damn good. The plot of the first game gets animated as an opening to this one (which looks really good btw, seriously good direction) and it jumps about an hour from where it left off.
There's a noticeable uptick in graphical fidelity but the color palette is still minimized, this time to slightly more vibrant reds and shades of black due to the change in location and the way the protag navigates it through mental memory alone.
It becomes a bit more of a traditional VN than the last game given the portraits and facial animations but it works, it gives a lot more emphasis on the actual back-and-forth going on. I'll probably write more about it proper and I really didn't mean for this to turn into more about the last game than the one I'm actually going through but I guess it helps I'm using this more as a freeform writing thing than giving myself the burden of writing complete essays.
If you haven't played through Milk Inside, I'd say check it out, Milk Outside is a continuation in the most bluntly direct ways possible but if either of them look cool to you, you aren't losing much time or money with the first one. Not sure what else I can say, shit's just cool.