Cheree: Remembering My Murder

Cheree: Remembering My Murder is definitely something I want to give a boost to during ParserComp. It's got AI-based dialogue, and the interface may scare some people away. And some may find it a bit long. I was able to get through it in one sitting, perhaps slightly guilty I'd dropped the ball on actually testing it when the author asked. (It wound up getting tested more than well enough!)

It feels like the sort of entry a lot of people want to play, but they never quite make time to, as there are risks it might be too unpleasant. But it navigates several flavors of unpleasantness well for me. I wound up playing it twice over one weekend. I'd like to explain fully why, but at the same time, I don't really want to spoil anything that might lessen the impact of the ending.

It's not the author's first try at this. It's similar to their first, Thanatophobia, where someone comes to you with a recurring image they just can't work out, and you talk it through. Here it seems more accidental and less clinical--you haven't met Cheree before, and she's actually trying to remember huge chunks she just forgot. And, oh yes, she's a ghost who was murdered in 1891, at the age of 16. But in each case, you talk with the AI to try to get to know them, as they look back and try to understand their life.

And before I go further, I want to offer a spoiler as to what CRMM is not, as certain possibilities may open up early on that stop people from playing: (Spoiler - click to show)there are no major crimes other than murder.

Cheree's rather more emotional than her predecessor--while you have the option to just hit return and plow all the way through, that changes her mood to misunderstood or neglected. So there's a bit of humoring her. Which is understandable, given you're talking to a 16-year-old. It was tough for me to make small talk, because I'm not good at that in real life, but it's kind of odd. Going through those motions, it was actually a boost to go and (re-)touch base with some other people, or just ask for things I hadn't. She has a lot of questions, which isn't really surprising for someone her age, but it is surprising that she wasn't able to answer them by, say, visiting her family. Of course, she can't, any more, and the more you learn about them, the more you see they were insular without being particularly close.

So how does this mix with the supernatural stuff? That's a rail I don't want to touch without spoiler tags, but it's pretty clear that being dead has given Cheree a certain amount of freedom. She is able to Astravel any place she wants, which simply means to teleport anywhere on Earth and give you an image of what is there. You can't touch anything, but you can and should ask questions. Ask the right one, and a trust bar on the right goes up. Ask enough, and in the right places, Cheree realizes a clue. It's actually a cipher, which might seem like busy work. But I found that busy work to be emotional relief and something easy to solve. The UI is neat--you can use arrows and just type the letter. And often you'll have recently been discussing one proper noun (a person or place name) or just a very long word, which gives you a great key to get started. These seem to get shorter with each clue, which makes for a difficulty curve. This is the sort of puzzle that's easy to find or generate now on the Internet, but it must have seemed very novel indeed back in 1890, so it makes sense Cheree is clueless about it. Also, she can't exactly use pen and paper!

There are four such clues to open up the main game, and they appear quickly, within the first ten locations or so. Then there are five more. They appear somewhere among forty more locations. You don't have to visit them all, and you may be able to guess which are most likely to have a clue. For instance, Cheree has never been to the Great Barrier Reef, so you can use process of elimination there. Sometimes she opens up a few new areas that don't give clues. But I think this is reasonable--often when I try to remember something, I can't work too hard at it, and I need to take a step back. But I don't know where. So I shuffle through some more pleasant memories and maybe even sleep on it. At one point on replay, I wound up hitting my head where I knew there was a clue--and taking my own break helped me. (I saw it quickly once I had Cheree astravel away and back, which reset the prompts she gave me. But, in a way, this dead-end sort of justified why Cheree took me all sorts of places and reminded me it can be futile to run into a wall trying to remember stuff.)

Cheree doesn't seem to have sleep. She's certainly trying hard to impress you, though. Nothing skeevy, just -- hey, would you like to see the Alps? The Rocky Mountains? A waterfall on the Argentina/Brazil border? So you have to filter through what she wants to see for its own sake and what might provide clues, and you need to humor her and her trivia questions and her small talk, and after a bit you gain her confidence. This sounds harsh on her, though to be fair, the scenarios are interesting and it fits her character well. She never got the chance to see much, and often when she brings up something from her past, there's a reason she does and doesn't want to be there. For instance, the place where she grew up is overrun with wildlife, now. Then you find where they left her body.

And seeing places from when she was alive, you realize her parents certainly never prepared her for anything approaching a normal life. Her mother was a medium, and she has the gift, too, maybe even stronger than her mother. Her father disapproved of that stuff, and he only beat Cheree when he was angry. (This was not a red flag in the nineteenth century.) There's one place in Wales where Cheree astravels, to see a well-known medium. She and her mother went there and quickly came back, and she'd have liked to enjoy it more. Cheree seems to have a lot of euphoric recall, which was probably needed to keep her sane. Her father neglected her at best, and her mother railroaded her into a life she maybe didn't want. And her two older siblings seem a bit jealous of the attention she gets, even though said attention is empty. They go on to live longer, less abnormal lives. You visit where she was buried, and a tombstone mentioned she was just the sweetest person ever, though nobody told her that in life. You'd expect there to be a clue for how she died, but no. And, well, the full explanation can't exactly fit on a tombstone.

The middlegame may feel like it's not going anywhere for a while, and I admit I cheated a bit with some of Cheree's trivia questions to gain her trust without having to engage in too much small talk. She does feel a bit clingy, but that makes sense, and not just because of her family. She later notes that most ghosts transcend from her state after a year or two, but she hasn't, and she needs to fix something out of balance. The question is, what? That fits into the story title, and at one point she notes, either people fix their balance or they become devils. So she has motivation to search high and low for clues. Plus she is just a genuinely curious sixteen-year-old whose parents didn't exactly let her see the world.

Fortunately moving between places is pretty easy. You have a pull-down map and can even type in numbers of locations, so I just had a post-it note where I wrote down new numbers and crossed them off. I used several such modern conveniences I took for granted to help the ghost from before 1900, and it made me chuckle. The first time you play, you may just need to run through them all, but the second time, when you're better at saying what she wants to hear, it goes more smoothly. (I made the choice to replay once I realized that some things she said early on were, in fact, clues as to what would happen. So I had to balance the mechanics of empathy with getting stuff done. It felt a bit cold. I never wanted to be the sort of adult who absent-mindedly says "yes I see" all while making clear I'd heard that stuff before, but for a couple hours, well, I was. I remembered adults both well-intentioned and not who said "Hmm, I see" in the process. I hope I fell in the first group.) I also was left feeling a bit of emotional blackmail, once I learned she found it hard to say no to her parents, and I in turn found it hard to turn her down. Who else would say yes to her? This went outside the context of, hey, let's just try to get through all the games for ParserComp!

So there's a good deal of translating what Sheree says about her parents, and more precisely, what she leaves out. A seance goes wrong, and it wasn't until I completed the game that I realized her mother had been horribly negligent both then and after. Cheree was her meal ticket--her mother rubbed elbows with the police and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! The Whitechapel murders are mentioned, but here, it's clear this is something different. And there's an argument between parents. The father, financially successful in business and detached and very religious (much like businesspeople who praise God more than you do, and that's why they're successful, right?) isn't home much, but that also feels like not much of a loss. The mother, who would prefer fame, and who even hangs around an initially charming police officer. And you suspect they frame the arguments not in terms of what Cheree wants and needs but in terms of what God says, or what each emotionally deserves. There's a theme of not being able to tell adults no. Cheree never explicitly says she was displeased with her gift, though she does mention friends who she grew away from because of it. So you sort of feel bad for her and play along with her games.

Oh, wait. I've left one person out. She has a friend, still alive, called Mel, who's a bit of a smart-aleck and the same age as her. How they tie together is interesting, but they both seem to find you very smart. The fawning's not too much and I never feel it is romantic (thank goodness) but it reminded me of people under eighteen who were quite impressed at what I had gotten used to doing. I remember on Roblox (Bee Swarm simulator) other players were quite sure I had a job. I must be OLD! Why, I might even be twenty-five! So I sort of felt that responsibility when people with less life experience placed trust in me. But Mel provides a foil to Cheree, as she's quite clearly pushed back more against her parents, and she also makes clever snarky comments about modern technology to confuse Cheree. (Heck, Wifi confused me when it came out!)

I blew off a lot of clues the first time through. But I had the chance to replay them with a clearer head, unlike Cheree. And it reminded me of how, well, in some situations where I was sixteen, I either put stuff off to the side, or just questioned if it really happened, or I just figured it was something natural. I even let people younger tell me it couldn't have happened like that! But I had people help me along the way, maybe someone who wrote a book, or even someone who made an off-hand comment or who pushed back on someone who was being a clever jerk. Or someone who fought for a social cause, especially/even if their personal lives were flawed.

CRMM reminds me a bit of GK Chesterton's story The Man Who Wasn't there. Certain parts of my life, I wondered about once, but then took for granted. Or I crossed some people off too quickly as potential bad actors. I never really noticed who was steering me towards a life. Not "drugs are cool, man," but over-caution or jealousy or whatever. I could picture them now, catching me playing something like CRMM, saying "What the hell are you doing with your life?" I've carried around a lot of their criticisms, ones they've forgotten about. Some have died. They're hardly evil incarnate, but it certainly hurts to remember one more thing they said which seems obviously wrong now that I assumed was true, especially if they quoted George Carlin's anti-authority rants. Even though I was smart back then, I let it slide. There was nothing illegal. Cheree, too, has taken certain things for granted, or feels they aren't worth mentioning, or she can't mention them. And so often like Cheree I had to go to some nice place and come back later. Mine are different than Cheree's. I'm fortunate to have a lot, and CRMM worked for me to revisit a few people. I realized I don't have 100 years to transcend and put them to the side, but I do have a lot of resources, and I hope I've used them.

There's a lot of spiritual stuff in CRMM, and you might wonder why it's there until you complete it. But I was able to relate a lot of the spiritual stuff to more concrete mundane things I'd seen in the world. I certainly had a lot of suspects by the end, and they weren't guilty, but they sure didn't help matters. It was far too easy for the antagonist to do what they did. I also thought about what my ghost might show people, where I'd go, where I'd like to astravel once money wasn't an issue. I remember feelings I didn't deserve to take a vacation to somewhere as dazzling as Cheree showed me, certainly not as much as certain people who were more gung-ho about life. But one of the big non-spoiler takeaways I have from CRMM is, there were people in CRMM who were not evil or close to it. But they sure as heck didn't stop it, and they didn't gain the self-awareness that they should, or could have, until it was too late.