'Outer And Inner Before I Became You, You Became Me' is an existential story about stories. It tries to grapple with the paradox of how important stories can be to preserving memories and teaching lessons, but also how in crafting those stories, the actual people that those stories may be about become distorted and can be lost in the story itself. To craft a story is to file away all the unimportant details that makes a person a person, and crafts them into a character. In doing so, the character is no-longer a person and if that is the case, could a story truly ever capture the memory of what makes a person whole? It presents that people are merely stories crafted by others to identify them, so if there is no one around to tell your story, do you actually exist? Much is the mystery of conscience.
The story actually presented in this visual novel is actually a few layers deep. You have the personal story of the POV main character, a man wracked with grief after losing his mother to Alzheimer's and grappling with the complex emotions of seeing her forget him as a person, thus giving him a little bit of an existential identity crisis. He wanders into the woods where he meets a wolfman. Said wolfman, Cael, is infected by a parasite called FOLKLORE, that exists within the fragments of his mind and is slowly overwriting his thoughts to only be able to tell the story that FOLKLORE is, as if the story itself were a virus strain. I think that the story is actually three stories: the flowers and the bells, the reflective lake, and the threshold seller. Depending on the choices you make and the questions you ask, determine the outcome of the wolf, where you become the new story host, where you let the wolf be consumed by the story, one where you and the wolf share the burden, and I think a secret ending where the story becomes self aware and the parasite stops being infectious (these are my musings, so I might be wrong about the interpretation). I think what the story is trying to go for, is this sort of meta-narrative about stories, and trying to convey to the reader that they are now infected as well with this story.
The presentation is minimal and very much dependent on how susceptible the reader is to 'creepy-pasta'. There's only a few backgrounds and only a silhouette of a wolf sprite, leaving a lot of the visual detail of a visual novel to be left to the text. There is some really cool choices being made in how the menu is minimal and incorporates into the meta-narrative, with menu options like 'listen' and 'leave', very thematically poignant. The shifts from chapter to chapter interspersed with famous quotes from literary works was an interesting touch, trying to indicate which route you were on. Even small details like being unable to skip the 'stories' as they came up, having to click through them, if you've re-read the novel, even a special line if you replay the story to get a different ending, or the title screen change if you find the hidden ending, are fun ways to utilize the medium. That being said, it's a very hard sell in terms of appeal and flair, either on purpose or by lack of effort into it.
As such, a lot of the responsibility falls onto the writing quality itself. It's kind of crazy that this is, I believe, Chinese translated into English, because the prose is very purple and very descriptive. It waxes on about every little detail, while also not really saying anything. Obtuse, would be a way to describe it. It really begs the reader to work at what this story is trying to say, and tackle larger concepts than I think this medium is capable of doing. It almost borders on pretentious. The few times that it gets grounded in reality are nice, otherwise it seems to be about tirades of philosophical concepts that start to lose their impact, the more you realize that there's not really a conclusion that the story is going to be able to reach. It's one of those ambiguous endings, choose your own meaning, type of deals. I don't hate that it does that, and I appreciate the little Easter eggs in the game files for some meta-narrative and backstory, but for as much effort that I put into trying to understand it, left me unsatisfied with the 'prize' at the end.
From a folklore perspective, I get that this was a story about stories, but kind of misses the point of what folklore is. Folklore leans more into a communal and shared story tradition, while this visual novel prefers to focus on how stories are crafted by individuals, in order to 'infect' others with that story. The stories kind of touch on the folklore aspect, with the reflective lake being the most folklore-y of the bunch. I will say this is a strangely creative narrative, and I love the techniques used to make the meta-narrative.
This is a really high concept type of visual novel, and with that comes a lot of risk of it either going over people's heads, or it ending up verbose and exhaustive to read. Unfortunately, as cool as a concept as this seems to be, I don't know if the execution and final product is compelling enough to over come how not invested I was in the characters, outside of my initial curiosity. Funny enough, I wonder if the visual novel is aware of this, as the hidden ending seemed to have the nailed on the head, that one should be interested in the person behind the stories just as much as the story itself. I wanted to feel invested in the characters, but there's hardly anything to latch onto. I understand that its the point, but even so, it would be nice to get some resolution to that. I guess because there are options, it gives the illusion that there's a good path and a bad path, but ultimately, it feels like it's all the same path. That being said, it's really interesting getting a perspective from a Chinese background that I haven't read much from, and I wonder if that's reflective of this author's style of writing, or that's just how Chinese stories feel.