I'll put it this way; a heavy dose of coral-tinted hauntology and a retelling of Clarice Lispector for young adults who haven't yet googled Mark Fisher is what I always appreciate but it wasn't what I expected to see, since I just knew this was a game about building relationships with animals drawn in vector graphics. But eventually it... turned out to be a better abstract horror story than those of Nick Land, the author of the term? Actually, there's a whole list of things this game was better than something personally for me.
It did a better portrayal of bonding through disenchantment in modern America for me than Generation X by Douglas Coupland. It seems there is a certain tradition in the American media to show the most interesting things in the world through the eyes of complete idiots. Holden Caulfield, or the snobby rigid busybodies from Generation X, or those parts of On the Road I've made it through, or a teenage cat who thinks her life is a 2010s webcomic and is friends with a bipolar fox and they ramble like your classmates in Discord the whole goddamn time, geez dude -- they are a challenge to sympathize with, although the less smug one is in a priority for me, and Mae is the less smug one. But everything they all see around them is thrilling. Despite having never been to America, I can never have enough of these stories about ghost towns and lost futures, and guess what? This game is also better than Twin Peaks at being about the wyrdness of the rural USA (Lynch can do camp, but in this particular title it's so forced I feel suffocated) and it's also substantially, substantially better at being about people than whatever the hell the authors of Life is Strange think people and psychology and the world are (my personal lost future is of those hours I've spent on watching let's plays of Before the Storm and the LiS2 — can't refund time).
Finally, it did a better job at being an eerie/weird/Gothic/etc etc story about dying places and absences and ecology and moving backwards (here, you move to the left all the time and I love it) for me than Disco Elysium no less. I think it has to do with the degree of the estrangement. They handle the same topics here — ghosts of the society and despising vile conservatives and making you think about the working class. Still, in one case you observe the story through the eyes of delinquent teenagers who, after listening to adults' stories about their life and town, barely think anything more than "damn dude acab, geez", and in another case, you play as an ageing alcoholic who exchanges millions of words with other ageing alcoholics... and these words tell everything. Every character, including the voices in your head, has a position and a moral to derive and a theory to support it and they will momentarily deliver it to you the wordiest way possible.
Now, DE does have good writing, and its catchphrases are on top, but where do you have more to figure out for yourself? Sometimes, emptiness is a tool, because it becomes your job to fulfil it. Another story about the American ghost towns, the movie Virgin Suicides, handles emptiness like no one else — no interpretations given, only the consequences. Go figure.
(Or maybe I'm being like this purely because Kim is so much worse than Mae. I can handle her being my player character but not him being shoved down my throat by both the narrative and the fandom. Being insufferable is an art, and everyone does it their own way.)
Dreams are the worst though. Could she hurry just a bit? And what's with the band? They could've at least kicked me out for not having any reaction whatsoever and gaining no pleasure from the mini-game, and that'd be a relief. Buuut I will not let my personal disdain for the annoying dialogues and the way too clean graphics affect the ultimate rating. After all, the tabula rasa, the openness, the void, the blank shapes -- all of them can be tools, and here, they are being put to good use.
It did a better portrayal of bonding through disenchantment in modern America for me than Generation X by Douglas Coupland. It seems there is a certain tradition in the American media to show the most interesting things in the world through the eyes of complete idiots. Holden Caulfield, or the snobby rigid busybodies from Generation X, or those parts of On the Road I've made it through, or a teenage cat who thinks her life is a 2010s webcomic and is friends with a bipolar fox and they ramble like your classmates in Discord the whole goddamn time, geez dude -- they are a challenge to sympathize with, although the less smug one is in a priority for me, and Mae is the less smug one. But everything they all see around them is thrilling. Despite having never been to America, I can never have enough of these stories about ghost towns and lost futures, and guess what? This game is also better than Twin Peaks at being about the wyrdness of the rural USA (Lynch can do camp, but in this particular title it's so forced I feel suffocated) and it's also substantially, substantially better at being about people than whatever the hell the authors of Life is Strange think people and psychology and the world are (my personal lost future is of those hours I've spent on watching let's plays of Before the Storm and the LiS2 — can't refund time).
Finally, it did a better job at being an eerie/weird/Gothic/etc etc story about dying places and absences and ecology and moving backwards (here, you move to the left all the time and I love it) for me than Disco Elysium no less. I think it has to do with the degree of the estrangement. They handle the same topics here — ghosts of the society and despising vile conservatives and making you think about the working class. Still, in one case you observe the story through the eyes of delinquent teenagers who, after listening to adults' stories about their life and town, barely think anything more than "damn dude acab, geez", and in another case, you play as an ageing alcoholic who exchanges millions of words with other ageing alcoholics... and these words tell everything. Every character, including the voices in your head, has a position and a moral to derive and a theory to support it and they will momentarily deliver it to you the wordiest way possible.
Now, DE does have good writing, and its catchphrases are on top, but where do you have more to figure out for yourself? Sometimes, emptiness is a tool, because it becomes your job to fulfil it. Another story about the American ghost towns, the movie Virgin Suicides, handles emptiness like no one else — no interpretations given, only the consequences. Go figure.
(Or maybe I'm being like this purely because Kim is so much worse than Mae. I can handle her being my player character but not him being shoved down my throat by both the narrative and the fandom. Being insufferable is an art, and everyone does it their own way.)
Dreams are the worst though. Could she hurry just a bit? And what's with the band? They could've at least kicked me out for not having any reaction whatsoever and gaining no pleasure from the mini-game, and that'd be a relief. Buuut I will not let my personal disdain for the annoying dialogues and the way too clean graphics affect the ultimate rating. After all, the tabula rasa, the openness, the void, the blank shapes -- all of them can be tools, and here, they are being put to good use.