blackberry bloodbath

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 30m two playthroughs

One point must be made clear from the very start. I am not now, nor ever have been, an adolescent girl. I raised one. I married one (well obviously not AS an adolescent, Jeebus). That feels a little like I’m saying “I watched Roots so I am an expert on racial issues,” which, be assured I very much am NOT saying. I am highlighting that I approach this work from a place of empathy, not sympathy.

With that framework established, know I immediately liked this work. The graphical design was very compelling and attractive: a low-resolution representation of early 90’s styling cuing both its recent-past setting and the concerns of the protagonist. Gameplay is basically navigating the protagonist’s online journal and IMs as she ages from 13 to 21. Almost always driven by her adolescent/young adult poetry.

“But reviewer, you famously despise poetry!” I hear you say, intimately familiar as you are with my inescapable cultural impact. Ok, ‘despise’ is strong, but yes, poetry’s appeal is more often lost on me than not. Here it serves a few purposes beyond its intrinsic wordplay, and does so magnificently. Firstly, it is used as shorthand for ‘adolescent yearning’ which strikes me as perfect. A hallmark of adolescence is struggling for relevance and truth while mimicking tools used to explore those goals absent mature understanding of them. Poetry is a pitch perfect and smashingly economical shorthand for that. Second, the rendition of that poetry is (almost) as revelatory as its presence. Now, these things are inevitably informed by personal biases, and as established boy do I have those. To me, as the protagonist’s journey progressed, I found the poetry progressively more effective, and less.. reach-escaping-grasp-y. I could feel the protagonist maturing, as reflected in maturing and more impactful poetry. Up until the final entry, which… I’ll get to in a few.

Established that I found the presentation and poetry conceits compelling and successful, lets talk plot a bit. This poor girl. Presented as a series of annual impactful collisions between newly-found puberty-spurred yearnings (often but not exclusively romantic) and real world complications, our protagonist struggles to reconcile the two. Yeah, that is a bland wash over what actually happens. With few (though critical) exceptions, her hopes and desires are pretty uniformly (Spoiler - click to show)crushed in the most dispiriting ways possible. We watch a ball of hope and expectation gradually and dramatically (Spoiler - click to show)reduced to a self-destructive shell of unfulfilled and presumably now unfulfillable aspirations. My first playthrough, I found this heart-rendingly successful as a tragedy, and a deeply sad indictment of the pressures on girlhood. The only off note of that first playthrough was that I felt the final, most mature round of poetry was not up to the standards of its evolving predecessors. I think it would have been a more impactful resonance if these final poems were the most accomplished, underlining the tragedy in the full bloom of maturity as a final repudiation of adolescent dreams. (And with something as difficult and personal as poetry, I totally get an author-note to ‘write better poetry’ is essentially useless.) But I think there is a generous read that allows for this as well: her journey has undermined even her most private aspirations to the point she just phones that in too.

In any case, warm in the glow of a dynamite, deeply affecting story I did something I regret. I played it again. Spoilers follow.

Here’s the thing. At several points you are given plot-redirecting choices. Entire swaths of narrative are bypassed and entirely new ones available to you. I mean, this is IF, that’s not really a surprising phenomenon. It is in fact an ENTICEMENT to replay. Thing is, the first time you played through, events sometimes blossom into horrific violence, emotional trauma and just plain misery. This leads inevitably and tragically to the very affecting endgame. This is clearly the dramatic aim of the piece, so the trick the author has to play is, without guiding the player’s direction, how do they ensure that arc lands via every branching path? The answer is they ensure EVERY choice has unique but equally (negatively) impactful consequences, all reconverging to the same absolutely justified ending.

This is where my limited empathy let me down, hard. What played in the first run as an extreme but not IMplausible scenario, on repetition became decreasingly effective. EVERY choice and aspiration explodes into the MOST extreme, dire outcome. It started to take on the tenor of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the increasingly implausible outcomes become almost comedic in their unremitting extremity. Ok, 'comedic' is a deeply tone-deaf word to use there. By enabling exploration of ‘alternate-universe’ sequences, and resulting in the same over-the-top outcomes, the meta-message is “this is girlhood. It will always break you.” It changes from a singularly tragic character study to (intended or not) a comment on ALL girlhood. No, no, no! I don’t want that for my wife and daughter! I have reason to believe that was not their sum experience. It would break my heart if they were hiding this from me!

Without benefit of sympathy, it is a dark and repellent thesis. Again, I do not presume to take on the ‘truth’ of this artistic statement, that is not mine to weigh in on. I am relating the impact on my empathic engagement, and how it corroded on replay. My very specific, very adjacent perspective is this: do yourself a favor. Savor a compelling narrative, expertly rendered and written. Savor it once. Repeat engagements require more empathy (or sympathy) than apparently I can summon.

Yes, that is definitely on me.

Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would be rightly excoriated for presuming to tell a story I am horrifically unqualified to tell. And undoubtedly would handle it really badly.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

The first thing that jumps out from this is the fantastic graphics: the online notepad and chat of a teenage girl in the late 90s/2000s. The computer interface is perfect, the colours warm and inviting, but helpfully show the passage of time, and the sidebar icons give different responses when you click on them in different chapters (I didn’t realise this until another reviewer mentioned it, and I replayed). The music on the CD player is a nice extra touch, too.

Each chapter is mostly written in the form of teenage-girl poetry, which sounds real and authentic. Although it’s only a short game, each chapter takes a different event from a different year in the protagonist’s life. When I played it first, it didn’t seem that there were that many branching points, but when I went back and replayed, I realised that there were plenty, and that they take the character off in a number of different directions. A sad, thoughtful, believable and visually appealing tale that does a lot in a short gameplay.

This game has great multimedia presentation. It fakes a desktop with music, notes, etc. and a cute cursor dripping purple particles. It has occasional images included as well, and it seems to have been written as part of an academic requirement, as it cites committee members.

The writing is more literary/poetic than genre-based. It depicts several vignettes from the life of a girl, from 13 to 21. All of them are dynamic and full of emotion, some strongly negative (there is attempted sexual assault and violence) while others are more thoughtful or melancholic.

Much of it seems pretty realistic. I work with kids and a lot of kids get into the occult or, worse, poetry at around 13-15, and talking to former students who graduated college, many of them do find it grueling and rough entering into the working world. I found this poignant overall.