Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one was intriguing from the get-go—we start in media res with our narrator, Monica, inhabiting someone else’s body, saying that she’s temporarily borrowed it, which immediately raised so many questions. What happened to Monica’s own body? Why did she need/want this? How did she come to this agreement with the body’s owner?

These questions are all answered eventually, but having my curiosity satisfied quickly paled in importance next to the emotional arcs of the two main characters. In that first scene, the “agreement” Monica has with her host quickly falls apart as she wants more time, time that the host does not want to give—and the host is the one with the power, able to wrest control and push her out. We then shift POVs to a woman named Lisa, who after blacking out at her desk for three days finds herself with two heartbeats and a left hand that’s taken on a mind of its own. Lisa is entirely incurious about this phenomenon, though, either simply ignoring it or rationalizing it away.

We switch between the two, Monica in the past in her borrowed body, Lisa in the present, losing control of hers. There’s plenty of horror simply in this, in your body not being fully your own, not being fully under your control, reminiscent of some real-life disabilities. But the horror is doubled here because this isn’t just a single person losing control. If you haven’t played the game and it isn’t clear already, Monica’s borrowed body and Lisa’s misbehaving body are one and the same, and in the present-day scenes they’re fighting for control, fighting for who gets to claim not just the body but the life that goes with it.

We learn why this is happening in one of the past, Monica-POV scenes, when the concept of changelings is introduced. In this story, a changeling is a detached soul who inhabits someone else’s body and slowly takes over. In one of her brief period’s at the body’s helm, Monica learns about this phenomenon and comes to the horrifying realization that she is in fact a changeling.

Instinctively wanting to take sides in the conflict, I found myself rooting for Lisa—it’s her body, after all; Monica is an invader! But Monica still remained a deeply sympathetic character. We see her meet and bond with a woman named Vivienne in the brief space of existence she has, and we see her longing for more time to be allowed to live. And when she has her terrible revelation, it’s clear she genuinely didn’t know what was going on; she wasn’t actively trying to take over someone else’s life. And once she knows that her continued existence would come at Lisa’s expense, she makes the choice to let go, letting herself fade away.

But. In the present, Lisa-POV scenes, Monica has returned after being dormant for seven years and is desperately trying to take back control. And it’s because she wasn’t the changeling after all; it was her body all along, and Lisa is the invader. She so successfully took control that Monica forgot it was her body to begin with.

When Monica finds out what she thinks is the truth, that she is the changeling, she wishes she hadn’t: “Not knowing is always the best option. No questions mean no answers that you don’t want to hear. The only way to avoid consequences is to do nothing - to be nothing. You can always forget. Let it dissolve. Let it fade away.” This is exactly what Lisa has done—she doesn’t think about the truth, won’t admit it to herself, pretends it isn’t real. Living in denial as the only way to live with herself.

By this point, my sympathies had fully flipped—I wanted Monica to get her body back and have the life she’d been denied for so long. The player gets to choose at the end who wins, and it was gratifying to be able to give that to Monica, and see an epilogue scene showing her getting to share a life with Vivienne. An incredibly compelling story.

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one bills itself as “A short story about the day before Halloween”, and that is exactly what it is, but with layers to it—over the course of the story we see four different days before Halloween over nine years in the life of the main character, starting in 2024 and traveling backwards, the protagonist de-aging as the story goes on. The descriptions are evocative and lovely, and the first-person prose has a slow quietness to it, asking to be savored. We see scenes and moments, but the connecting tissue is left for the reader to fill in, which I found very effective as I slowly put together an understanding of both what happened in between the vignettes and the significance of the cottonwood tree under which the story begins.

“I like this tree quite a bit,” the protagonist says in the first scene. “I remember coming here last year and thinking the same thing. The curl of its branches and the smoothness of its bark. That’s why I like it.” But the story builds to a moment, nine years before, that completely recontextualizes this claim. On that day, dressed in a princess costume, the protagonist travels with her parents to a corn maze where she anticipates finding “my kingdom, my castle, my home.” And in her child’s imagination, that’s exactly what happens, traveling through the maze and reaching the castle, then ultimately, “Finding a nice spot at the edge of the kingdom. A tree that could pierce the clouds. A funny kind of curl to its branches as it waves hello. Sitting against it, its smooth bark holding me upright. My throne.”

This scene is the first time we’ve seen the protagonist’s mother; something happened to her after this, and all the days-before-Halloween in the future are colored by this memory, of magic and wonder and the mother’s presence, contrasted with the loss of it all. On that longest-ago day, the protagonist relates, “Mom told me that today I’d become a princess. […] Looking out from the highest perch of the balcony at the furthest points of the kingdom, as far as the eye can see, the world with me at its center.” But this scene ends with the line, “I was a princess again the next day, but not for much longer after that.” With the loss of her mother, the idea that she is at the center of the world and nothing can go wrong for her is shattered.

In the scenes that take place over the intervening years, the day before Halloween is cold, costumes disappoint, the protagonist’s father is disengaged, and an incident at school taints even dressing up as a princess. Finally, in the present, we see the protagonist refusing to acknowledge the meaning the cottonwood tree has for her. When she takes a photo of it, she derides herself as “Too sentimental for my own good”. Her holding back from describing the emotions she feels about her mother’s death/absence leaves readers to fill them in, which is exactly what I did, feeling for myself everything the protagonist isn’t saying, and I found that very powerful. After getting to the end of the story the first time, I immediately replayed in order to experience it again through the lens of my new understanding, and by the time I reached the ending the second time I was tearing up. A beautiful, melancholy, understated piece.