i do not understand what LISA is trying to say. i mean this both in the literal sense in that characters and their motivations come and go with the fickleness of a windy day in chicago, but also in that, when you look at the text of LISA, it is inane. i wanted to like this game, and, at times, i did. in spite of all that i'm about to say, there are moments in this game that genuinely amuse me. and some of the character stuff comes very close to landing with me, but it completely falls apart upon any level of scrutiny. i played this game in 2019 and only finally got around to finishing this game (3 full playthroughs, one on pain). yet, for a very long time, i've known that i dislike this game, and the biggest hurdle for this review was assessing how much i disliked it, how much was irredeemable, and how i'd be able to properly communicate the certainy i feel in that opinion to any reader.

any time my brain tries to analyze LISA, it goes immediately, as if drawn by a lighthouse on a stormy night, to the scene where brad kills marty. i am one of the few people on earth who seemingly played LISA the first before LISA the painful, so having context for not only marty's mistreatment of lisa as well as brad, i find it extremely difficult to side against brad, as the game wants me to here. marty is implied to have sexually abused lisa, was verbally and physically abusive to brad, and this is just what the player is shown. i not only understand, but endorse the violent murder of marty at brad's hands, especially knowing he's trying to groom buddy. sure, wanton murder isn't exactly moral, but this comes at the tail end of a game where it has forced death upon you with no alternative. in the grand scheme of things, killing marty should not be such a big deal. brad has killed at least a hundred guys by this point, probably more. it's telling that marty claims to have changed, yet one of the very actions he can do when brad fights him is to throw a glass bottle at him, just like in his childhood. but no, you kill marty, and in doing so, physically abuse buddy, and you are absolutely railroaded into this conclusion.

the first time i saw this scene, i assumed it was a heavy-handed hallucination/nightmare on brad's part because something this on the nose is not only poorly written, but poorly executed. why is marty here suddenly? how did he know about buddy? why is buddy so attached to him despite very likely barely getting to know him between the last time we saw buddy and now? to be fair, i'm going to take a good faith interpretation of this moment and say that, okay, sure, marty DID reform and WAS actually a changed man who was going to be a good influence on buddy (despite the game giving no evidence to believe this claim), unlike brad. but what does that say about the events that follow? if that is what was intended by the scene, then what does that say about brad and abuse victims? the only way to complete that moment is to knowingly and intentionally harm buddy, your surrogate daughter, someone the narrative has hammered home is the most important person to brad (and likely the player by this point). is this a metaphor about hurting those you love to protect them? if so, it's clumsy at best. instead, it feels as though the game cums over itself and the armchair psychology textbook it's reading from to go "abuse victims perpetuate the cycle of abuse whether they intend to or not". this is a DSM III type scene attempting to be some big emotional climax of brad's relationship with buddy, and it completely fucking sucks.

i'm all for sad and challenging narratives, but this isn't meaningful, this is just deterministic cynicism at best. brad was always doomed to harm buddy and realistically shouldn't have been anywhere near her. why? because he was never going to accept her personhood or agency and instead was set on using her for his own vindication. the text of LISA is pretty plain and direct in stating this, and it does so with the justification that lisa's suicide on top of marty's abuse forever fucked him in a way he could never recover from. this isn't dark, this is. . . boring! this is a boring read of abuse and how it functions. a narrative that says "a victim of abuse is going to be broken forever and incapable of loving themselves and those around them in a healthy way" is a very standard plot point that we've seen since something as early as 1960's Psycho. this is a standard unconscious social belief. there are bigger plot twists in "everybody poops". if you're going to choose such a standard and unremarkable theme to base your game on, at least do it well.

you can very easily take the perspective that looking at the events like this is results-oriented and that, ultimately, the events that happen in LISA are not meant to be extrapolated into universal applicability and events. i find this to be a cowardly way of viewing art, as art is not made or presented in a vacuum. there is, like it or not, baggage associated with the idea of a cycle of abuse being perpetuated by victims. if you want to use that in your narrative, there are going to be implications and inferrences. this is just how storytelling works. you can divorce yourself from the themes, but you can't deny them. LISA's problem is that it wants to be about nothing, it wants to present this shocking and grotesque world without any real-world grounding just to use shock value black humor. oh man, you made a joke about orphans getting set on fire? let me tell you this really funny dead baby joke while you're at it.

ultimately my root problem with LISA is that i detest what little of austin jorgensen i can find in his work. i do not know the man nor have i ever spoken with him, so i am not going to assert that he is this villain that needs to be taken down. i am, however, someone who has invested a significant amount of time into a game that he largely made on his own (as i understand it, outside of the music, it was a solo endeavor). it's hard to not gleam some fairly repugnant viewpoints from him based on how he portrays sexual violence, gender, and masculinity.

here, let's start with the real winner of the show: Male Rape and how epically funny it is. early in the game you're told there's a woman that exists and is real and is at a location. you go to the location where she is guarded by a fairly difficult boss encounter. you beat the boss, enter the door, and then SURPRISE lmfao the """woman""" was an man!! and it gets funnie because he cries about how they still raped him despite him having a mustache and saying he was a man XDDD and then after meeting him you get an achievement on steam titled Violated Guy, because sexual violence is teh epic pwnage. lastly, if you were unclear as to how serious he is treating the concept of rape, he names this character Fardy. because it sounds like fart. he has brothers named Shardy, Lardy, and Tardy. in-game text states that all his peers hate him.

accuse me of being a huge joyless unfun sjw all you want, i really don't care. i just want to know: what is the point of this character? rofl male rape victims are weak and when they get raped it's funny? compare this to the implied rape (via grooming) of buddy by sticky. the game at least passingly treats this as more serious and worthy of sympathy. it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but by brad's reaction and the extremely subtle dialogue with sticky afterwards ("she wanted it", "she needed to be educated", etc. etc.), you're given very little room to interpret any alternative. to be fucking blunt, if you're going to have sexual violence in your work and handle it with the shittiest most clumsy portrayal possible, do everyone a favor and just omit it. it's personally offensive to me to see jorgensen point and laugh at a male rape victim and go out of his way to let you know that not only was a man raped, but it's extremely funny and we should be finding this inherently comedic. it's legitimately evil shit to put in your game and it's astonishing to see something so mask off get so little criticism.

i'll jump back and try to be a little more charitable. LISA is a game about the post-apocalypse and what would happen if all the women on earth suddenly disappeared or died or whatever. ok, well what does this world look like? surely infrastructure still exists, it's not like BOMBS fell or anything, right? NOPE, it's mad max out here and men are completely dysfunctional in all meaningful ways without women. i do believe a societal shift and potentially even collapse would occur with the total removal of women. but there's nothing to go off of what happened to cause this beyond "women no longer exist so naturally everything's fucked". like, you're telling me no one's trying to do some IVF or something? maybe trying to do some dolly-esque cloning to make a female? does some of this fall out of the scope of the game? of course, i'm not going to deny that this could come off as pedantic. but so much of this setting is cutting corners just to get to the meat of the narrative, which is men doing heinous and awful things to each other, often in gangs. i need at least something to work with to believe that civilized society could go so poorly so quickly.

but no, men without women to temper their barbarous spirits will naturally form sadistic gangs that seek out nothing but wanton destruction and suffering, as you do. again, this is such a fucking dull take on gender politics. you have an interesting premise and you completely shit the bed just to go into gender essentialism that's existed for centuries. yeah, of course, without women, men will use pornography magazines as currency. sure, that makes sense. there's such a drought of actual gay and trans men in this work too that it makes jorgensen come off as sheltered and telling on himself. did you really not consider what a gay/trans/etc. man would do in this situation or how they would fit into this new world? jorgensen comes off as someone who just wanted to tell a story that begins and ends at "men are inherently violent, women are inherently caregivers, and without one, the other goes wildly out of control."

by the way, this is a video game. i know you might have been confused considering i've said sweet fuck all about the actual gameplay of this video game that i played. and here is my opinion: it has amateur design. i know that's almost a nothing statement considering that jorgensen IS an amateur, but i want to call a spade a spade. he seems to really value and want this aura of "this game is going to make you have to REALLY choose things and it's going to be really difficult to deal with it", but he completely fumbles the execution. oh no, buzzo showed up and wants to cut off your arm or kill the first party member in your team. instead of giving him your arm, you can just reload your most recent save (which is approximately 5 minutes away from this choice), put a character you either don't ever use or outright dislike in that slot, and just kill them that way. you can spend the night at campfires but OH NO sometimes bad things can happen to you like you get poisoned or one of your party members gets held hostage. but, there's a save point near almost every major one, so you can just reload if that happens. or, even better, you can just stay at an inn that charges a measly 10 mags for guaranteed safety. how about when you're forced to do russian roullette? yep, you can just save reload until you get through flawlessly. this is a viable and applicable strategy even on the supposed "pain" mode that was intended to curb this type of behavior. these choices ultimately just end up being unnecessary inconveniences that add nothing to the game. they're speedbumps that you can detour around masquerading as some dark soulsian punishment.

i now want to talk about the part of the game that infuriated me more than any other singular part: the road scholars. for anyone unfamiliar or forgetful, the road scholars are a trap boss fight you will encounter early in the game. you go to a side path and find a small town with no way to heal, and nothing much of note in it. just one way in, one way out. no place to grind for item or money. just. that's it. still, there's a save point, so unless you're playing on pain mode, you're almost certainly going to save. and so you try to leave and suddenly you're accosted by a gang who wants either 100 mags (a significant amount of money by this point in the game) or they're going to destroy the town you just left. i want to stress that there is very little of value in this town in the first place, so this choice from a metagame standpoint doesn't even particularly matter, and thus fails to be "hard". yet, you've likely just saved and you're locked into this worst-case scenario. but, here's the thing: i'm an asshole. i hate when games try to gotcha me like this. i say no, eat shit, i'm fighting you. and i fight them. and i lose. several times. because this fight is very clearly heavily stacked against the player. it's a gotcha, but it's also a trap. you made me make a choice i didn't know i was making then tried to point and laugh at me for the choice i didn't know i made having consequences. these types of things can be done well, and oftentimes having a game react to something you did that you didn't expect it to acknowledge can be some of the best type of stimuli-reaction you can get out of the medium. but this is just a gotcha, an attempt to make me feel as though i should've been more careful when there was no way i could have possibly predicted this outcome would occur. it's not clever, it doesn't elevate the gameplay in any way, and it ultimately just burned goodwill i would've had for the game.

in a sad way i want to give points for effort and heart here, because while i think jorgensen largely missed the mark and likely has a personality i would find repellant, i genuinely respect the authorial stamp he put on this game. it is uniquely and creatively his own, probably for the worse. i still can't quite wrap my mind around the positive reception this game has garnered. this is considered an indie classic and it's frankly baffling to me how it earned such accolades. this game is mechanically unengaging, thematically cretinous, and overall an extreme disappointment considering the mountains of praise that i have seen from both strangers and friends. i can only hope that games we love in 2024 age better than the ones we loved in 2014.