All the pleading emoticons

The game opens with the player-character on the cusp of harming themselves. This is not a moment of impulse, not a “call for attention”. This is a culmination of seconds upon seconds, years of keenly feeling one’s lack of agency, in social situations and intimate ones.

What was slightly unusual was the mixing of divine and profane imagery and language, which portrayed the player-character’s action or inaction as a sort of reckoning with a faceless, unknown force.

Games like this are easily dismissed for their “navel-gazing”, but are well worth considering for what are often first-person, personal narratives of mental illness, discrimination and/or marginalisation. Games in a similar vein include Tapes, by Jenni Vedenoja, or All I do is Dream, by Megan Stevens.