Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone

The basic mechanic of this game is fascinating. There's an infinite number of "pages", some pages have text, and you can only change which page you are on by clicking a plus or minus button. No flipping ahead, and importantly, no way of telling when you're done. Is there more? Should you continue on? Is it worth continuing on?

That last question is crucial, since this game is also, as the description indicates, about suicide. The symbolism is inherent in the gameplay. To even reach the first bits of text, you need to first click through many pages of darkness. There's a lot of black space, and moments where you're alone with your own feelings, uncertain, clicking a button over and over again without knowing if you should really keep trying. The game itself comments on this.

This is the game.

...

It's fucking boring.

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Don't tell me it gets better.

The repetition reminds me of Skulljhabit, another one of Porpentine's games, which also makes use of dull routine broken up by startling encounters with the new. But the format is highly unique, like nothing I've seen before, and I'm not sure how to describe it. Does this count as "location-based"? Is each page a location? In which case this world must be a dead one, containing as much emptiness as it does.

Some pages contain excerpts of news articles, some contain fragmented essays or diary entries, and some contain elegies for people who are long gone. Some describe surreal and fantastical environments. Some have suicide notes.

A few excerpts:

Dark apartment room. Smells like rotting food. The stain of a woman on the wall, grease patterns frozen in contortions of great pain.

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Acceptable delusions for trapped people:
-tested by God
-emitting pheromone that marks oneself for cruelty
-cursed
-no one would treat a human being this way therefore i am not human
-i deserved to be treated this way

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It began late last year while Rebecca was attending Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland

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For more than a year...15 middle-school children...urged her to kill herself

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Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide.

...

She then changed her online username from Rebecca to “That Dead Girl” and left her phone on her bed.

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We cut ourselves, starve ourselves, blame ourselves, kill ourselves.

Oppression removes its fingerprints by forcing us to use the knife on ourselves. Self-harm is harm.

...

They try to explain away our pain with vague gestures at mental illness, hysteria, some magical disease we acquired that couldn't possibly be explained by the fact that you dehumanizedrapedabusedharassedgaslitostracizedliedbeattorturedmutilated us.

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Creating the circumstances by which one is forced to contemplate their own death is a form of violence.

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When you see a person, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is least human and 10 is most human.

...

You already do that anyways.

The end result is a hybrid of fiction, game, and memoir.

There are times when the basic rules change, which further complicates the "linear" structure. Certain links will jump you to a specific page, for example, and these links aren't always two-way.

One section told me I wasn't allowed to breathe until I reached its end. I remember that panicky, trapped feeling.

The game went a long time on this site without reviews. Today I decided to replay it after months and write the first review. I found it affecting.