Succor

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/21/25
Playtime: 1hr, Demon Hunter(2), Healthy Appetite(1); 2 playthroughs

If there is a category of reviews I struggle with, it is for trauma- or therapy-based IF. Don’t get me wrong, IF is a TREMENDOUS tool to use to build empathy, sympathy, and commiseration for people that can probably use a bit of daylight in their lives. It’s just, if I am not afflicted with the particular concerns of the work, my takes are always a bit suspect. The BEST I can do is approach from an empathy perspective, and even then, I am subject to debilitating blind spots in my engagement.

This is a work whose protagonist struggles with crippling, depressive self-doubt compounded with emotional family trauma. The nature of the work is to explore the protagonist’s apartment, struggle to accomplish daily tasks against a backdrop of near-insurmountable motivation gaps, and experience shadowed flashbacks when considering takeout menus. Ok, rereading that last sentence, that is way more glib than I intended. Food and food preparation are integral touchstones for the protagonist, so the conceit is not unjustified.

Moment by moment it works pretty well. The ‘marketing’ descriptions on the menus are particularly well done, and the contrast between them and their less idealized memories is wryly impactful. If you probe the menus deeply enough you are confronted with representative (Spoiler - click to show)mental demons that are evocative, nicely metaphorical and attractively illustrated. These are all very strong aspects of the work.

The interactivity is where I could feel my blind spots encroaching. On the one hand, atop the screen are three attributes that seem to gauge the player’s effectiveness and mental state. Not only did I not detect an impact to those, I did not seem to be able to modify them in a predictable way. In particular, if I deliberately chose the most (Spoiler - click to show)unhealthy responses, the stats remained resolutely unchanged. Nor did that seem to influence future possible choices.

Further, there was little to no back pressure when selecting the most (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic, constructive choices. Given the dramatic language of the inner monologue, this felt.. too easy? This culminated in gameplay that unveiled (Spoiler - click to show)more food menus if you just kept cleaning, well beyond a threshold even nominally healthy me would be capable of!

Another dissonant tone for me was the breadth of the menus (not all of which I encountered during one playthrough!). A wide variety of ethnicities is represented in restaurants. All of which can trigger childhood memories of family preparation? That is a VERY cosmopolitan family! The language used to describe this SEEMED to lean into handed-down legacies, but were so broadly applied I went from experiencing a SPECIFIC family story to a muddied, ‘wait, what is their heritage now?’

So, all of these things kept me at a bit of an arm’s length, until I considered it in retrospect. What if this was NOT intended to be a rigorous recreation of mental struggles? What if, instead, this was a determinedly encouraging work, aimed at players commiserating with the protagonist? The message was not ‘this is what it feels like’ but ‘you CAN do this, even if it doesn’t feel like it.’ ‘No matter how bad your past choices, you can make a different choice next time.’ The work was simultaneously acknowledging that life experiences can suck and put nearly unsustainable pressures on us, while offering that it is still in our power to grapple with it. We need not be defeated even when it feels like we have been. What I initially read as ‘reductively easy problem solutions’ became instead a cheerleading of some kind, offering hope. And maybe even a bit of wish fulfillment to sweeten the pot.

The blurb for the work seems to echo this take for me, and elevated the whole thing beyond my clinical ‘realism’ knee jerk. The fact that a work of subtle optimism and support can be wrapped in (and punch through!) a graphical package of such evocative darkness is kind of… wonderful.

Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Wrestling Demons
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would be forced to acknowledge that I was pretty unprepared to engage this subject matter. I would focus, then, on maybe sharpening the protagonist’s ethnic heritage a bit. Pick a few each runthrough to center a family experience on and steer other menus to a different, less immediate shading. I say this in the full acknowledgement that it could double the word count!

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