I came her from the Sagan Hawkes video. I really like this game :) It captures something really earnest about being a young vulnerable person playing a game like wow. I'm going to ramble for several paragraphs down below, but I genuinely could've gone on for way longer. This game is short, maybe 15 min max, but I'm left with a lot of thoughts. It's definitely worth the price tag, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's experienced the particular kind of lonliness it simulates.
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I loved this games depiction of grooming. Hamer wasn't the traditional form of groomer, but his behaviour still feels so familiar to me. You're a young girl, increasingly aware of how fucked your home life is yet no one ever seems to react to your obvious suffering, desperately lonely and yearning for recognition. You're surrounded by older peers that you want to impress, that you want to cry to, that you want to be friends with, yet at best they are politely stand-offish and at worst they are actively cruel to you. You never seem to react right.
Then, all of the sudden, here comes a new guy. A fellow outsider, and one that is nice to you. He listens, he gifts you stuff, he spends time with you. Because you are desperate for someone to tell you: "Yes! The way you live is awful! You deserve better!", you tell him everything. He's barely real, after all, he's probably on the other side of the world. Only after he has intimate knowledge of your life, and only after he's dropped hints that you might not be safe with him, do you realize that he is close. That he might know where you live and that you're not safe.
Any time you push back on his behaviour, you are punished. You cause drama, you make him sad, etc. etc. So you don't push back. But you still keep spending time with him, because he is the only person that takes you seriously.
This game was really good. There's a part of it that feels like a vivid memory of some of the worst years of my life, just with the gravitas that gets lost when it's all just another day and more of the details kept in tact. The characters all feel grounded, all of them felt like they were working off of wrong assumptions and incomplete knowledge (That classic atmosphere where everyone tells each other horror stories about all the terrible stuff that could happen online, but still everyone thinks 'well surely it isn't happening here!'). Even those with ill intentions or those that acted cruelly never felt like they were just horror monsters. They're people. It almost feels like you failed him.