Familiar

Familiar is a short Twine game, a sort of dating-sim sequel to Computerfriend, where you go back to Godfield, Louisiana, years later, meeting C by chance (?) on the street. Following an impromptu date, you are given two paths.

There’s always something off about Kit’s games, in a way that it is always both confusing and comforting. It hits all the melancholic and nostalgic points, leering you in with the sense of familiarity and those bittersweet feelings of “coming home but it doesn’t feel like home”… but always keeping you at bay, unable to see behind the veil, put off by the visceral descriptions and the unsaid. There’s also an interesting between-the-line discussion of what it is to be human, with C being an AI in a part-machine-part-flesh body and you who don’t seem to feel quite alive (that probably gave me extra existential dread…). I also really liked the discussion in the movie theatre about those Soviet movie and the point of it all.

This wasn’t really what I imagined a Computerfriend dating-sim would be like, but it even better.