itch.io

this is an incredibly special game. i had been meaning to get around to playing it, with it being the primary tyvnj2 game on my radar (due to being delightfully surprised that another team also wrote a deleuze-influenced game about a dying world that has achieved immortality, metatextually intertwined with real interpersonal experience) i cried playing this game. i cried reading the postmortems. it hit me intensely with silhouettes of just-familiar just-foreign experience and conjured forth feelings of longing and resentment that felt like resurfacing phantoms i could not help but crumble in the face of. it is an intensely sad story to me, with pockets of an intense and melancholic sweetness. i feel this aching heart-breaking sympathy for every girl and every disorganized reorganized configuration they find themselves growing, decaying, being forced, and forcing themselves into over the course of the narrative. i wanted to give Girl a hug so bad. but so did f_n, when all she wanted was to return to the soil, didn't she? i'm going to think about this game for as long as i remain as anything close to the vague shape of myself - and even if i were to change into something unrecognizable i would hope the feeling and memory of this story would stay somewhere inside my heart, something to keep me mindful. reminding me to strive for a love that does not constrict and restrain the beautiful, that understands the malleable transience of love and seeks to nurture it.

unspeakably touching. god i loved it so much.

i read this game together with my girlfriend and we were lingering on every other line to gush over the way this game builds up "lily's" entire existence. from the facial-recognition-esque sprites to the very unique description of artificial memory storage to every minutiae of how iris speaks to her so affably-nightmarishly. a lot of the writing in here is just extremely tight in how it slowly swells with melancholia and tension. i do think that some of that tension slips or misses just one step at the end just a little bit in how it resolves and is presented tone-wise but i only want to offer that critique because of how intensely i loved the way the first three quarters of this game constructed lily's world, it made my heart ache extremely good ♥

utterly in love with the feelings dripping out of this game. quite literally crushing - just reducing everything down into this rigid delirious deleterious tension that makes you feel like you're witnessing something you're not supposed to understand, that you can't understand (while your ability to understand anything deteriorates)

really wonderful, insidiously urgent and nauseous and my own little moment of realizing-what-the-game-was-about sotospeak elicited an audible "oh god" from me

my favorite submission so far and something that im sure to return to and something that is sure to inspire my work moving forward, so incredibly strong for how compact it is, love love love it