xenomorpharkham
1 review liked by xenomorpharkham
No One Can Ever Know
2019
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.
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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.