Something in our heart

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 25m

Visual novels are clubbed in with IF pretty routinely, but my experience of them is usually quite different. Ok, I COULD at this point develop an elaborate multi-axis schema whereby works are placed on a continuum of interactivity/graphical flare/narrative pacing. I could further build to the stunning revelation that NO! Everything is in fact a spectrum! To this crowd, I could as easily spend my time diving into light physics and confirming that YES! Our human eyes perceive the sky as BLUE!!!

What that spectrum analysis asserts is definitely true, but it kind of white washes that different points on the spectrum ARE IN FACT DIFFERENT. Purple is not red! SIOH does something new here, to my experience. It manages a quantum superposition at TWO discrete points on this continuum. In gameplay this is a visual novel. Clicking pretty universally means ‘advance story.’ UI-wise though, it is an interactive epistolary work. The reader is navigating a variety of computer interactions, the input simulating encountering the story at your keyboard. It is a neat trick. Without offering choice or agency to the player, the work nevertheless envelopes the reader in interactivity, and by such transforms them from consumer to participant. It is a very specific kind of keyboard trick, but uniqueness is not an INDICTMENT of art, is it?

Man did that specific trick work like gangbusters on me. From its opening screen, a wry 8-bit-era click-thru license agreement, we are ushered into a… hmm. Ok, I’m going to need to create some vocabulary, bear with me. Steampunk as a genre takes the tech-wonder sensibilities of cyberpunk (usually jettisoning its deep cynicism), and re-imagines its technologies in anachronistic gears and hydraulics. Retro-future does the same thing (kind of) with a 1950’s Middle American sensibility. How about the 80s/90s? What is a term for anachronistic sci-fi tech grafted to the last millennium’s computer interfaces? Leg-Warmer Punk? 8-bit Futurism? CyberGrunge? I kinda like that last one, let’s go with that.

Ok, this is a CyberGrunge story of body mods, (Spoiler - click to show)aggressive AI and emergent terror. All with a Win3.1 feel to it. As a reader/player you are shadowing a member of an online body-mod community whose hacker ethos takes the protagonist DEEP into a rabbit hole. Let me just say outright I loved everything about this work. Its graphical language is an inspired take on the past’s design sensibilities, especially when things get really WEIRD for the protagonist. Its interactivity is immersive and engaging, propelling the story via an amazing variety of computer (and not-so-digital) interactions. The story itself has a LOT of concerns and twists, any one of which could support a full narrative of its own. This is not to say any of its elements are SHORT-CHANGED. Not at all! Its twists steam forward, loop on themselves and are increasingly outre’ and dramatic and it all just WORKS SO WELL.

I am loathe to dive too deeply into the plot, as its surprises are bonkers and really well executed and deserve to be encountered fresh. How those surprises are communicated in its 8-bit vernacular are, if anything, MORE inventive and delightful. There is one flourish where the overwhelmed protagonist’s thoughts are rendered in barely readable background that was just amazing in its narrative inventiveness. I am unabashedly gushing over my appreciation for this thing. Were I rating these works to my IFCOMP scale (which, per my R-A-T tradition I DO NOT) it would earn a ‘Transcendent’ rating from me, a rating which as of summer 2026 I have conferred fewer than 5 times.

The more I go on, the more likely I am to spoil things for all of us. Instead let me close by highlighting a minor detail whose pithy perfection I will assert is a microcosm of the entire work. I have, in the past, revealed that Ren & Stimpy’s Big Red Button spoke directly to young me’s psyche in a way I was previously unaware that art could. (This is totally relevant, I swear.) There is a line in this work that captures that same perilous fascination at least as well: “I’m on the edge of something irreversible I’d rather have someone push me off of it” Despite its DEEP sci-fi conceits, the work grounds itself in recognizable human impulses and dissatisfactions and does not skimp on consequences or danger. Or, improbably, hope too.

This one is great. Play it with a soundtrack of telephone-modem squeals. Or not, just damn well PLAY IT.