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The length taken to get closure..., November 22, 2023 My Brother; The Parasite is a raw horror highly stylised kinetic piece, which you are a woman looking for closure after her brother’s passing. Given a second change to talk to him thanks to a parasitic procedure, this speculative piece of fiction explore family trauma and processing grief.
This game is intense. It is incredibly emotionally charged, not just from the gruesomeness of the brother’s death or the description of its corpse coming back to life, but through the hints of unprocessed past trauma (between both siblings, and their mother). The story told through minimal descriptions and bare dialogue punches your gut at every turn. What is supposed to be a tool to process grief and find closure becomes another knife plunged and twisted into the wound. It hurts, but you can’t take it out or you’d die. It hurts, but if you look away and don’t confront it, you’d never find peace.
You have a feel that something is not quite right from the beginning, but it is hard to say whether it is due to the character feeling grief or something bleaker is afoot. The visuals are graining, with most of their colours washed out; some are slightly animated, with tears falling down their face, or the slight breathing movement of the corpse, or the uninterruptable thoughts glitching in the background, or the slight changes in portraits between passages… every element on the page has a purpose - which is to keep your eye on the screen until it’s all over.
Something that struck me with this entry was how the tension built from the start. It kept building and building as you go through the game, leaving you little reprieve or a moment to catch your breath. If the game could send scent, it would try to overwhelm all your senses. And the tension starts small, with a little bit of uh, something feels weird… but becomes uncomfortable, with confronting the corpse of your loved one, confronting harsh truths… and quite bleak, with the realisations of your past, of your present, of your future… and honestly quite creepy if you think too long about about it… and then oh no, oh god, everything is going wrong, are we going to die?!?!?
Though I understand the stylistic choices made in this game, and was warned with the eyestrain in the blurb, I found the font size and low-contrast colours text (especially the greys) quite hard to read. It required a little bit of changing the size on my browser and zooming in to be able to read comfortably.
would be lovely if it was a tad more accessible.
There were also some instances were the timed text and images made me wonder whether I forgot to click on something or whether my internet wasn’t working right. I didn’t mind it when the game would use a “loading” passage to change the background, but was quite confusing with the drawer bit (I also couldn’t see the 4th object in that passage, clicked at random on the page…). Maybe a bit of a shorter length for the timed text…