itch.io

I'm a big fan of the visuals already!! The title screen pulled me right in, it's all really well-designed - love the colors!

I really like Fioretta’s prayer in the beginning being recontextualized and settling in place in the timeline as Apollonia becomes the answer to it. I'm curious how Fioretta crossed paths with her again, and how much of her deification of the woman has stayed through the years.

Come the full release, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for Apollo’s relationship to her mixed identity, as it's definitely one of the most immediately interesting things on display to me; the scene with the dolls and her mother has me so curious about what's up in that head of hers.

Can’t wait for the full version!!

Okay i absolutely loved this one thank you to the friend who sent me this, I had to take a day long break from it at the midpoint but it was completely worth it. I also have no idea how to use itch so ahah here we go, spoilers ahead obviously lol

The way bitekiosk describes the most intense and intimate scenes in the game, while deeply uncomfortable, still feels respectful; if anything, it feels more respectful than most modern CSA portrayals. With stigmatized topics like these, authors often feel the need to "shake their head so the audience knows this is wrong," so to speak; often by, as a friend noted, having children innately recognize what is happening to them is wrong despite lacking the experiential toolkit to do so. I can't possibly articulate to you, then, how valuable it is that bitekiosk fully takes C---'s perspective including her morality through even the most discomforting scenes in the VN, forcing you as the audience to recognize that C--- does not perceive this as wrong; she enjoys and wants more of what we understand to be sexual abuse. It's a uniquely distressing feeling where you feel almost like an uninvited voyeur foisting your horror and fear onto someone who is feeling neither of those things, defining her experience for her (even knowing that these acts were and are wrong to commit). That's one of the most powerful feelings in fiction, I think: not shock factor, but the conflict between your assessment of a situation and the person experiencing it.

I love the mundanity, for lack of a better term, in C---'s assessment of her experiences. The days are filled less with the apprehension we come to expect from these narratives and more with love for the people she knows to love. You get familiar with the two of them as you do with any story; the changes in text color as Rose and C--- switch between parts are helpful, but become almost unnecessary as you start catching onto shifts in their diction and behavior.

On the topic of parts, bitekiosk's portrayal of complex dissociative disorders is one of the most understanding I've seen. Most stories I've read engaging earnestly with CDDs tend to lose themselves in the weeds of a person's infinite internal complexity at the cost of pacing and coherency, all the while appealing to a "standard" experience of fragmentation with poor generalizability. Alternatively, the CDD becomes a poor weight for the morality actions of a person; either their traumatic past becomes an excuse for their actions, or it is irrelevant and they are what most portrayals of abusers can be reduced to: a hollow, malevolent actor. Bernadette makes neither of these mistakes. While it makes you more than aware that both Rose and C--- have parts, the division between identities becomes a more covert process easy to overlook from the perspective of other characters. You are forced to engage with Rose as a human being - even through the coerced prostitution, the bathtub sex scenes, and all the other instances where C---'s consent is out of the question. This is scary to most of us for obvious reasons: we take pains to separate ourselves from the people we see performing seemingly irredeemable acts, to assure ourselves we share no commonality with them. By forcing you to engage with the humanity of Rose and the real financial struggle she faces, you can see the line of causality leading to C---'s prostitution and see a glimpse of pragmatic, rational thinking, no matter how abhorrent the act itself; a rationality that, naturally, you share as an audience member. It's scary to understand how similar you are to the people that hurt you, but it's one of my favorite emotions fiction can coax out, and one that I find most applicable to stories like these. This humanity is acknowledged at the end, where C--- denies the opportunity to use both their own and Rose's CDD as a reason to place them into simple roles of abuser and hopeless victim. I can't put into words how much I love love love the aside at the end where C--- questions the reason and value of putting out the story of experiences like these to the world; what it really does; how it narrativizes experiences too complex to convey all the nuances of.  It's a question I've had to ask myself every time my past worms itself into something I write: is this a work worthy of carrying this weight? Have I taken something fundamental to my experience of the world and turned it trite? Personally, I think Bernadette succeeds at everything it sets out to do. It tells the story it aims to tell, and I come out understanding of the enormity of Rose's actions but nonetheless unable to hate her or any of her constituent parts. Thank you for making this.

I've not yet gotten to read the letters, but I'll be back to add my thoughts when I do!! Sorry if this was wordy or winding :,D