sometimes a game just catches yr eye, or maybe two of yr fave youtubers covered it (shoutouts to errant signal and ragnorox), and u decide to have a fun spooky time before bed and the experience ends up getting to u so much that you're both too drained to write about it the night of and u still end up losing at least a bit of sleep over it. it would probably be unfair to say that the space between disturbed me on the level that the two OTHER works of horror that i've lost sleep over have (i have no mouth and i must scream/song of saya, if you're wondering), but it certainly hit some giant buttons for me.

a 45 minute or so first-person narrative that uses some stuff i recognize from indie games, like the extremely blurry lo-fi ps1 horror vibe reminds me of puppet combo's games, and the use of what are basically "cuts" and other traditionally film techniques reminds me of blendo games, but it also has some ideas i've never quite seen before, mostly in the dialogue. literally every writeup of the game i've seen has mentioned how the dialogue is handled, and there's really no way around it. it's all text, crawlingly slow, presented one line at a time, and the lines stay on screen far longer then it actually takes to read them. there's also no attribution, which means that in certain scenes there's no definitive way to know which character is speaking (most strikingly in the "i want to be closer" scene with the scissors). all this makes the dialogue both hard to follow AND impossible not to focus on, which is i think entirely to the game's benefit but, as all these writeups must also clarify, may drive u up the wall. it is a VERY slow game and you really need to be able to get on its wavelength to enjoy it

but jesus christ, what an atmosphere. some of the thematically focused dialogue (maybe all of it tbh) is too on the nose, but the more i think about that the more i like how it adds to the cold mechanical feeling of martin's interactions with clara. his interactions with his male friend(?) daniel are notably less so at least imo, and it definitely makes me suspicious that martin's intimacy issues, which are the focus of the game, are at least somewhat influenced by internalized homophobia, which certainly resonates

the game is very Not Subtle in its exploration of its themes, but the ambiguity of its final act means that they could pan out in a variety of ways depending on how you wanna take it. martin might have killed clara, dreading how close they were becoming, clara might have killed martin, validating his fears all along, or maybe neither of them should be viewed as literal people on any level. but regardless, it has one of the most engulfing atmospheres ive ever seen in a game, the pace was perfect for me, and the way it mixes horror and utter tragedy is something i think will stay with me for a long time