I Got You

Sometimes the mechanisms we develop to protect ourselves or make ourselves feel better outlive their usefulness and become actually detrimental. (Sometimes, also, they weren’t that healthy to start with.) They can spin out of control and start running your life while you feel helpless to break free of them and do the things you actually want to do.

Also, some types of internalized bigotry can create a kind of double-think, especially for a well-meaning person who wants to extend some understanding to others: Here’s why it’s okay for other people to be like this, but not for me. It’s perfectly valid and I wouldn’t judge people for it, it’s just that I don’t have it bad enough to really count. Of course, despite one’s best intentions, this often ends up manifesting in ways that do hurt others, especially if they remind you of yourself.

To elucidate how I Got You explores these themes would be to spoil several of the turns its narrative takes over its relatively short play time, and I do think it’s better to go into it with minimal knowledge about where it’s going, but I will say I found it effective and relatable.

When I first played it, I assumed this was an "illusion of choice" type of game; the outcome I got felt fairly inevitable, and a lot of time choices that I made that were too honest or vulnerable got redirected to a "safer" choice, so I assumed that would happen regardless of what you chose. But in fact it turns out that options that are silly or obviously inappropriate will not be redirected, and you can choose those and see a wildly different version of events in which nothing very horrific happens to you because you self-sabotaged to avoid confronting how you really feel. So that's... good...? (Well, narratively and as a way of using interactivity, it's very effective! For the PC, though, hard to say what's a better outcome.)