Endings

This is a game about painful miscommunication. The divide between our two characters is represented visually by the screen being split in half—one of them speaks in black text on a white background, the other in white on black (I’ll use the colors of their respective backgrounds to refer to them—White and Black). From the beginning, their viewpoints are intentionally diametrically opposed. They offer contrasting perspectives on the same subject: from journaling to safety, they disagree on just about how everything is to be done.

White has hurt Black, and Black loves them anyway. Black helps White change into something that won’t hurt so much, but White chafes at the constriction. In the end, they even disagree about how to proceed with their relationship: to cement it into a future, or end it outright.

The prose is lush, the words carefully chosen for maximum impact. Every sentence brims with both affection and old, scabbed hurt. The melancholy that suffuses the piece is only heightened by the fact that we’re not invited to identify particularly strongly with either party. We experience and empathize with both of their perspectives at once, which only compounds the grief. Well done stuff.

One small note: there’s no scrollbar in the iframe, so if you’re not playing in full screen it’s possible for the text to disappear past the bottom and be inaccessible.