I don’t know if I would describe myself as a FAN of the long-running CW monster hunting show Supernatural, but I DID watch roughly nine or ten seasons of it, MOSTLY because I had friends who were super into it and I liked to hang out in their Supernatural-themed discord. I hope they’re all doing well. I think about them a lot. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s about these two guys, younger brother Sam and older brother Dean Winchester, whose mother was killed by a demon when Dean was a little kid and Sam was but a wee babe, which set their dad down the path of Self-Destructive Monster Hunting and he dragged his baby boys into that life with him. The dynamic in the early show is that after their dad goes missing, Dean, who has always enjoyed The Life, drags Sam back after he had successfully gotten out, and now they drive around mostly the rural American Midwest and every week they stop in a place where something mysterious has happened and then kill a ghost or a werewolf or something. Over the course of the first five season the show finds its groove, s a story arc emerges and is cleanly resolved, everyone likes it, and then the show very divisively continues for eleven more years. This is, I think, the simplest way I can lay this out. I will not get into the nuances of Supernatural fandom that’s not what we’re here for we all know how deep that well is I’m not gonna crawl out of it today, but I will say I think it is GENERALLY AGREED UPON that the middle years of the show are seen as the weakest, where we’re kind of treading water every year between our clearly defined apocalyptic early arc and the inklings of ending of the latter seasons. BUT there were always one or two really good episodes hidden in those really rough middle seasons that I eventually quit watching the show in the middle of, even for a show I didn’t like all THAT much at its best.

One episode in season nine, or maybe ten, I dunno, involved Dean getting a call from a boy’s home he spent time at as a teen about some ghost or something idk and they have to go banish it or whatever. And Sam is like wait when were you ever at a boy’s home and Dean says “OH YEAH I had completely forgotten that you didn’t know about this.” So the truth was that one summer when dean was like sixteen and Sam was like ten or whatever, their dad left them to go do a hunt somewhere, and Dean lost all their money OR SOMETHING (these details don’t matter to this story I promise) and then got caught trying to shoplift food for them, and opted to go to a like, Boy’s Reform School for a few weeks rather than juvie, because as far as anyone could tell he was like, a destitute teenager with no dad, because his dad sucks shit dude.

So when this all got sorted out his dad concocted this story that Dean was also away on a hunt or something to spare Sam’s feelings I guess? This is important, they never really get into why their dad didn’t want Sam to know, exactly. We can probably make a good guess, but we don’t know because he didn’t tell anybody. Sam learns this and he’s like, y’know 30 now or whatever so he doesn’t really care but as they’re leaving he does stop Dean and say “hey, why didn’t you ever tell me this?” and Dean just kind of shrugs and says “I dunno. Dad told me not to, and then the story became the story. I was sixteen.” And that’s all he has to say about it, and that’s all he really CAN say about it, but it’s also all he has to say about it. I don’t know if, at the end of the day, I would call Supernatural a great show, worth the sum of its many, many parts, but I do think it does some things really well, and one thing it almost always nailed was the way people can be just absolutely twisted up by people they love and look up to, the way familial authority wields this incredible power and how harmful that can be when we’re careless with it. That one line from Dean says a lot with a little, and a lot of better written shows wish they could convey the complexity that this one did I think maybe by accident here. I would stop watching SPN pretty soon after this episode, I think, but I think about this moment a lot, and I was thinking about it a lot particularly when I was playing Another Code: Two Memories, a game that is also deeply concerned with the mutability of memory, the way time blends and blurs and confuses us, and how easy it is to take advantage of the people who want to love and trust us.

Ashley Mizuki Robins and her aunt Jessica, who raised her since her dad dropped Ashley off at the age of three mere days after her mother’s MYSTERIOUS MURDER, arrive at BLOOD EDWARD ISLAND on the eve of Ashley’s fourteenth birthday after receiving a mysterious communication from her dad informing them of his whereabouts. This all comes as something of a shock to Ashley because she had been under the impression that he was dead this whole time, and is understandably pissed that Jessica has been keeping the truth from her for her entire life just because her dad asked her to and things seemed vaguely dangerous at the time. When they arrive at the island Ashley’s father, Richard, is not present at the docks where he said he’d be, and Jessica immediately disappears frighteningly, leaving behind only a scream and her glasses, so now Ashley has to search the island which is primarily comprised of the grounds of an enormous mansion complex (once owned by the wealthy Edwards family, now fallen to disrepair since they all mysteriously died or disappeared in the 1950s, earning the island its BLOOD epithet) for both of her missing relations. Before she can really get started she meets the ghost (!) of a mysterious boy who goes by D, because he thinks maybe his name started with the letter, but he just can’t remember! And soon they’re teaming up to explore the mansion and achieve their goals, Ashley to find her family, and D to recover his memories in hopes of getting closure and moving on from this world.

It's not a subtle plot, but it’s a strong hook, and that willingness to forgo an attempt at tact does lead to an incredible thematic tightness. Every single bit of this game traces back to the core themes of the reliability and importance of memory and the precarious strength of familial bonds. As they make their way through this goofy resident evil puzzle mansion, they don’t just uncover the tragedy of D’s death and his father’s, but also the greater tragedy of his family in generations both past and future, a bloodline simply haunted by an inability to make it work, thwarted from being good to each other by disease, by war, by stubbornness, always on the verge of doing right by each other until the choice is taken from them at the last moment and everyone suffers for it, but always the least deserving get it the worst.

In the present, Ashley’s parents were scientists working on some sort of government research into human memories, and it becomes clear over the course of the game that not only did this involve a machine capable of reading memories and eventually creating false ones, but that her mother’s murder was directly tied to it. Ashley was the only witness to the murder, supposedly, a memory she has deeply suppressed, and throughout the game as she digs into D’s past and her father’s work she begins to remember what happened that night, bit by bit, maybe.

Because this is the thing, right? She was three years old when this happened. Even if she hadn’t actively punched this traumatic memory down, time erodes that stuff, inevitably, always. AND everyone in her family, everyone she talks to in this game, is lying to her, or has lied to her about her entire history. Even Jessica, her de facto parent whom she loves unconditionally and whose safety is the primary driving call to action for the first half of the game, is untrustworthy. It’s a lonely place to be, and the only real way to find comfort is via D, an entirely external non-participant in this drama. These kids occupy this kind of gently supportive niche for each other, unable to truly do anything but Be There, which is the best thing they can do anyway. So as her memory starts to unravel into something maybe coherent, and maybe revelatory, and the events of the game become a lot more intimate to Ashley’s family history than she was expecting, the question becomes whether she really wants to know. D asserts that knowing is always better, and y’know, he’s been Not Knowing his own shit for something like 60 years by his own estimation, so he says this with conviction, but Ashley’s version of knowing is suspect at best. It’s a complicated question and I think the game is admirable for letting characters’ anxiety inform the tone of the work almost right up through to the end of the thing even though the actual mysteries of What Happened in both timelines have answers that are EXTREMELY obvious as soon as you have enough pieces to put a picture together.

Because the truth, as far as Another Code is concerned, is that D is right, of course, and you want to hold onto this shit. Ashley may be shaky on her distant past but she wants to hold onto the present. Even the gruff, “I don’t want to hear about it but also I am a wise man in my simplicity here’s some candy” boat captain who takes her to the island at the beginning of the game knows that we hold onto the stuff that matters to us, if we can. Throughout the game, at the chapter breaks, you go through little recap sections where Ashley prompts you with questions about all the stuff you just did to help you keep the mysteries straight in two timelines, but it’s framed as her repeating these things because she doesn’t want to forget again. These things are important to her. The deeper things go in this plot the less certainty there is to be found, and even when concrete answers reveal themselves to both characters at the end, the lesson Ashley takes away isn’t that the answers were there all along; she thinks to herself “I am holding dad’s hand in mine. My grip is tight. His hand is warm.” She’s happy to have found her answers but most of all she wants to remember the feeling. The thing that was missing or lost from both protagonists across a century. It got me pretty good.

I guess I’ll talk about the play of this game? Because in some ways it is the most incongruous thing. This game came out in 2005, and you can tell it was one of those early DS Every Part Of The System Gee Whiz sort of games but this is true of Another Code to a comical degree. You’re not JUST blowing into the microphone, you’re not JUST closing the clam shell to solve puzzles, it’s like, pulling system information from your DS profile to generate Ashley’s in-game birthday, it’s incredible.

It’s hard to be certain how much this game is intended to be like, For Kids, with that in mind. MAYBE it’s so straightforward and easy because of the novelty of the features, but there is certainly a very light touch to the puzzles in general once you get past the unique control scheme. The game also talks around a lot of its DARKEST stuff but it’s still a bloody, emotionally intense affair, enough to earn a T rating in America. I always wanted to play this game as a kid, enraptured by a trailer for it on a Nintendo Power preview disc that I borrowed from a friend, and I think I could handle the content, but I don’t know how much I would have had patience for the double mystery, the past stuff, maybe the degree to which the heavy stuff is implied vs shown would have made it go over my head a bit. It’s hard to say. I think we often don’t give kids credit for what they can handle. It’s so hard to inhabit the headspace of a kid. Memory erodes, right? That’s just time, bay bee.

Hey if anyone wants to mail me a European wii and this game’s sequel uhhhhhhh hit me up my laptop can’t handle emulating lol