Gameplay and art are very nice, the character designs are great, especially Yumi, the backgrounds are good, love the movement system and as somone who has dealt with both severe mental struggles and abuse in the past the cycle of strategic retreating and charging to manage mental energy is actually really well done and captures the feeling of fighting back against it, it's balanced very well too, and it has really good music.
I come at this game from I think a different angle than most since I have a massive phobia of mind control and mental manipulation, (I know those are content flagged, which I greatly appreciate, but I was in the headspace to deal with it and the description of it being about resisting the control rather than giving in compelled me) but being able to resist it in the way this game provides actually feels rather freeing, and I was really enjoying myself until it started to feel like the writing actually expects me to feel compassion towards the rapist which... that does really squick me out to be honest.
It feels extremely manipulative and victim-blamey to try to make the player feel sympathetic towards Erx because they suffered in the past, facing abuse and desperation, knowing how it feels, only to turn around and do similar, even worse things to another for your own benefit, is horrific beyond words. And then all of that gets orders of magnitude worse when having Yumi stay with Erx is presented as an actual option. Maybe it's intended as one last layer of control Yumi must get free of? But it seemed like the implication was that after the fight all of the control was broken completely so I don't know.
I get that there have to be options for giving in on purpose for the sake of the fantasy, and that Erx is trying to use sympathy as a weapon, but I guess my input is that the idea that leaving is somehow wrong should be more clearly the narrative being pushed "by Erx" not by the writing itself.
Honestly the most disturbing part for me is the large number other comments actually debating which ending is ethically correct, even going so far as to call Yumi "evil" for not staying with her captor and torturer. People are quick to say "it's just fiction" about this sort of thing but stories have always been how people have communicated emotions and values, and again if it was just "I have a mind control kink and think this is hot as a fantasy but horrific if it was real" that would be fine, but that's not what's happening. People are actually positing as an ethical standpoint that Yumi is evil for not staying with the person who abducted her, imprisoned her, violated her mind, her core self, and was planning on doing things to her mind and body that I really don't even want to think about in detail right now. Because... she was forced to appeal to their compassion to escape?!
Fantasy is not reality but when people take the fictional abuser's side in their real life opinions of what's right and wrong it's enraging and terrifying, I don't even know if it's actually any of the writing's fault, or just people being awful.
I do very much hope that the author keeps making games and art in general, and hope that my feedback about the implications of the writing aren't taken as accusations aimed towards them. I wish it wasn't somthing people had to be so careful about.
I don't know how to wrap this up really... I just needed to get my thoughts expressed, and the author did explicitly ask for feedback on the tone in the author's notes at the end.
I appreciate your detailed and thought-out response. I really feel I ought to have maybe made the content warnings more detailed and specific in future. Yeah, the mixed messaging is a problem stemming from me going back and forth in the “writing process” (2 weeks of mind wandering) and then having to cut out a lot of things that made sense leading to a weird stitched-together narrative that had one concept of a character doing a monstrous thing and another concept of the same character with a sympathetic background just not really clicking.
I have to be honest, more people were accepting of this than I expected, and I think when it comes to things like these people interact with a different headspace than reality. I don’t really want anyone to come away from this with a takeaway that I condone actual abuse of people, and this was in fact one of my biggest fears publishing this at all, uh, whoops
Again, as I think I’ve said before either on this page or in the jam submission page, so much of this would have been resolved if I had had any dialogue choices or other player influence over the ending beyond a simple win-loss condition in time for the deadline, but that was just not how things worked out, ugh.
I’m sorry this was harmful, though. I definitely need more specific content warnings in future.
You submitted a game to an adult game jam that had a hypnosis theme and got a comment from someone who stated to have a massive phobia of the theme of the game they very deliberately chose to play and got angry at people who enjoy the game.
I'm really sorry to butt in here but this guy is talking about me specifically and I do not appreciate the mischaracterization.
Your only "mistake" was to try and make a little bit more than just porn.
Even if this game was giving us an unhealthy perspective,
whoever comes to an adult game and thinks that the content should first and foremost be psychologically educational does not have the maturity to play such a game.
There are games that go out of their way to show us the perspective of actual villains and even justify and glorify their motives and that is OKAY, we are not supposed to assemble our personality out of a variety of fictional characters we read about, such works are there to challenge our thinking.
Nobody will walk away from this game thinking "Oh, I really should have more empathy with my abusers, they surely have a good reason."
It's good to tell people exactly what they're getting into if you upload a game with sensitive content, but please don't let comments like this stifle you in the future.
Oh no to be perfectly clear I didn't think for a second that you were condoning actual abuse. I know this was made in a time limit and deals with really sensitive stuff. Like I said the main thing that shook me was the takeaways in some of the other comments but while the writing wasn't perfect about making it clear that Erx's situation doesn't make what they're doing any better and that Yumi's guilt about leaving is *hers* and not... the narrative's, if that makes any sense, it really shouldn't have to be.
I need to stress that apart from that I think that this was actually really well done, and that I never got the feeling that those mixed messages were intentional.
I wanted to get things down while my emotions and thoughts were still fresh and then I tried to cap it off with clarification that I wasn't upset with you or accusing you of anything and more just pointing out an unfortunate way the writing could be read that I was afraid some others may have gone with. I think that I probably should have gone back and interspersed some more assurances of that throughout though and I apologize for not doing so.
It’s really nice to see a developed reponse like that! I love when people genuily engage intellectually with erotic media; kinks are a fun way to gain occasionally surprisingly deep insight into biology, and it’s quite frustrating to see how often people refuse to genuily engage due to something trying to create arousal, or let it affect their judgement rather than considering it seriously when they do. Also similarly pretty confused at the amount of sympathy with erx, their motive isn’t even that cool, and the “we used sympathy” argument is like saying you shouldn’t damage someone’s legs if you beat them via leg swipes