Ratings and Reviews by MostImmortalSnail

I really liked the 3D look of this Bitsy game, which was easier to parse and interpret than most Bitsy games. I also liked how arrow keys indicate choices. I don't know how new these innovations are, but as someone who doesn't play many Bitsy games, they charmed me.

The story is melancholic and thoughtful. Short, about ten minutes, so it doesn't have much depth, unless I missed something big. I just went in, talked to everyone, and left. But the sense of place, and the nostalgia for what that place was, is palpable. You get the feeling that the protagonist has lived a full and interesting life, even if you don't get to see everything and everyone they know.

I'm still surprised that the creator of this game is over 40. Playing a game where the main character is presumably also a 40-something adult who can reminisce about past human connections is different from my usual fare, in a refreshing way.

This is a silly frog raising simulator vaguely reminiscent of Tamagotchi. No matter what you do, your frog grows up, goes low contact with you and becomes (Spoiler - click to show)an award winning novelist. The analogues to parenthood and child-raising are clear, though not all of us are as lucky, or unlucky, enough to have an (Spoiler - click to show)award winning novelist as a kid.

As IF, this story is completely linear and has no choices. Reviews on IFDB are mixed. How someone responds to this story will depend on their tolerance for linear, kinetic IF, and whether they could connect to it on some level.

I liked this story for a personal reason, which is that I knew a trans girl who had to leave her home as a teenager like Pisti does.

That girl is dead now.

I wasn't close enough to her to help. I only learned she left in the first place because the school we went to called my family, asking if I knew where she might be and if she had told me anything about her plans. She hadn't. There were a lot of things unclear to me, at the time, that I only realized in retrospect once she died and I could piece together a narrative from what I remembered. There are things I'll never know about what she went through that haunt me.

Even if she had asked me for help, I couldn't have provided her with a place to live, the way Laina can. I wonder to what extent this story is wish fulfillment. Or fantasy. The fantasy that at your lowest point, there actually will be someone out there who can provide for you, who will love you and give you a place to live. Unlike real life, where there's nothing. Where people just die and you can't do anything about it.

I find a lot to relate to in Laina, who's seen her share of this world and become tired of it.

Meanwhile, I just sit at home all day. It's not like I want to go anywhere. I've had my fair share of trying to go out like that. It got boring real fast. It's way more fun just not going anywhere. Never ever.

But when she meets Pisti, they warm up to each other and quickly fall in love. This story is about two people who need each other, find each other, love each other despite their issues, and develop a relationship that solves both their problems. It's what we want to have happened instead of what actually happened.

"I'm so happy I ended up meeting you."

"Me too! I feel like these past few days have been a dream or something. Too good to be true."

The writing isn't perfect, but people who dismiss this story out of hand may want to consider why so many others liked it.

"Pisti... I enjoy spending time with you so much. I don't know how I can ever function without you anymore-" Wait, shit. I probably shouldn't be over sharing like this... Laina, at least try to keep it cool--

"You don't need to worry about that, 'cause I'm not leaving. I enjoy it just as much as you do."

This may sound crazy, but I actually enjoyed the situation presented here at the beginning, where you're an office worker who keeps getting emails for tasks that should be someone else's responsibility, and the conceit of the game is delegating to the correct person by forwarding the emails. The pacing of the game makes it so that you do this all day and the actual work is skimmed over. I haven't done too much delegation in my life, but I thought it was charming and demonstrated the ideal of working in an environment where everyone has their appropriate tasks, knows what the other people are doing, and can delegate properly.

Apparently a lot of other people thought the start of this game was a nightmare about spending all your time delegating and not doing what you were hired for, so I could be naive or stupid. I always fantasized about working in an office when I was a kid. Yes, I was a boring kid.

I'm thinking about a blog post or internet comment I read years ago, title long forgotten, that was about how communication was completely essential in any organization larger than three or so people. The complexity of communication ramps up exponentially as an organization grows linearly, so any sufficiently large organization with a thousand or more people in it will require everyone to do a non-insignificant amount of communication and delegation to operate most efficiently, and will need special sub-organizations dedicated solely to managing communication and managing people in general. Maybe I'm deranged for enjoying the idea of this, the concept of being a cell in a larger body whose job is to communicate to other cells. I've been thinking a lot lately about how large organizations are like organisms, and organisms themselves are comprised of microorganisms, the patterns of life repeating themselves recursively. I find a certain appeal in the idea of being an eternal organelle in a fluid macroorganism, stripped of individuality, reduced to delegating bits of information between nodes, having no purpose of my own besides pure efficiency... but this is becoming irrelevant to the game, so we'll stop here before I really start digging into it.

Back to the story. The situation goes awry when (Spoiler - click to show)your coworkers start disappearing and their tasks are retroactively assigned to you as if they were never there in the first place. In-game, the disappearances are associated with Copilot, and represent how many businesses have been doing mass layoffs of workers in part due to AI. This is the horror part. If the first part of this game is meant to represent a relatively tolerable state of competent organization and management, this is meant to represent the dark side, when you realize the organism has no reason to care about the individual microorganisms comprising it and will eagerly overwork and abuse them as long as it's advantageous, sometimes even if it's not. Your boss assigns more and more work while insisting you can do it all yourself, and you're forced to accept it because what else can you do, lose your job? In this economy?

The horror is subtle but effective. There are people trapped in situations like this all over the world, stuck doing tasks for organizations that may have once been functional but are now dysfunctional and abusive, unable to leave for a variety of reasons. This game appears to be autobiographical to some degree, so I hope the author's doing alright, along with all the other current and prospective employees out there.

I'm impressed this game was made in 4 hours, because there's a lot of branching content and different endings. The subject matter is incisive and completely realistic, which makes it worse because real people have gone through this struggle and self-abuse. The supernatural elements are subtle. Rather, this game is about the horror of self-doubt and self-hatred, (Spoiler - click to show) particularly from a trans perspective: the inability to accept your identity and accept yourself as you are, which cuts the protagonist to the core.

There's a reason messages like "you need to have lived in these specific ways, or you're not really a member of Group X", and "all members of Group X have lived in these specific ways", no matter how unintentionally they may be presented, have never sat well with me.

A final note: (Spoiler - click to show)It's interesting that you can never get into a lasting relationship with Molly. It could represent how as long as you're hiding from yourself out of shame and self-hatred, you won't be able to find a relationship that will truly satisfy you. Depressing message, but this game is a depressing one.