There’s a number of games there on the market, touching the sensitive subject of mental disorders and social angst. Some time ago it started to be a general rule that the plot has to be treated with an extreme care if someone even tries to do something around this subject. It’s not only because someone could feel offended, but also because the reason of telling such stories is not to make the ingame observations entertaining (“adventure game voyeurism” – my personal term to depict it), but often to deal with the problem itself, doesn’t matter how futile or hard that problem seems. There’s a sense of mission in these games, a quest for wellbeing, a fight against social rejection and indifference, an uprising against inner deamons, both developer’s and player’s.

A shining example of how to approach the subject is Fran Bow, made by a couple of Swedish developers, Natalia and Izak Martinsson. They hold a special place in my mind and heart, beacause as a subscriber to their Facebook page, Twitter account and videos I am continously impressed by them and their ventures, which in turn gives me a heckton of inspiration.

Fran Bow is a girl living in an asylum. She looks pretty normal, “kawaii” one would say after the Japanese, but there’s something unsettling about her from the very start. Maybe that’s how she reminds me of the Beetlejuice and Lydia Deetz? The deeper concern for the character appeared after she received her medication. The simple mechanic of hallucinating after taking a pill to unravel the whole new world with its scary denizens makes one go deeper and deeper the rabbit hole. Fran is traumatized by a loss of her parents, that, according to an intro scene, were brutally murdered, but the more one delves into the story, the more one realizes that the real past, the truth, is obscured. It is obscured by memory and the thin barrier between what is real and what is not in Fran’s mind. It is obscured by self-centered denial, and the justification of acts performed by seeing herself in the light of blissful innocence. Finally,  there’s this strong perception  of Fran being a victim, not only in her own eyes, but also the player’s. Asylum is a bad place and the alternative world is sometimes worse. Sometimes it is the opposite though – the alternative world gives much more option, friendly interactions and the false feeling of security.

Because there’s Remor out there, an immensely scary entity who toys with her and haunts her. The first time Remor appeared onscreen, even I was startled.

Fran is a victim of many things, but what was depicted greatly by game’s creators is how Fran additionally self-victimizes herself in an inescapable loop, going deeper and deeper to the black abyss of despair and lack of self-confidence, as she wanted to punish herself additionally. But there’s part of her there that is still fighting. That part becomes strongest in the alternative world of medication pills, but even there deamons lurk that make her helpless and weak. At one point she’s made completely unable to act, being only at the mercy of the things she cannot control. This is a true art of storytelling – because the only idea how that feels like I have in my life comes from games like this one. I have never been struggling with PTSD, I know myself enough to withstand some difficult things and I understand a lot, but I have not a slightest idea how an orphan, whose parents were brutally murdered, or a gravely hurt girl (physically or mentally) for that instance, feel like. In us, consumers of adventure games (and storytelling in general), there often is this dark urge to go farther on the lane of empathy and be able to feel things a regular person wants to escape from. Some of those disguise themselves as such with a sinusoid of the presentation of contradicting emotions (cheap TV series these days…), but this story is different.

It really gets you to walk a walk in Fran’s shoes.

And there’s that thing – as Fran delves deeper into her own story, there’s no way to tell which of the worlds is the real one. The border gets thinner and thinner, and even player has a problem of determining what is real and what is not. This schizophrenic uncertainty is followed by a weird feeling of stillness, that again, brings Beetlejuice to my mind. Is Fran even alive..?

Following Fran’s steps the player is exposed to the immense lore and a gallery of bizarre characters of the protagonist’s world. Here comes another layer of the problem – an addiction to exploration of that everchanging place with it’s own rules and rulers. Even if ego, id and superego are somewhere there to find and bind together as a solid personality, there’s so much more distractions in there, providing the false feeling of coziness and socialization with others. A mind trap.

Walk a mile in this girl’s shoes if you dare.

Videogames are there on the market for several decades now. It’s hard to think about this medium as a new one anymore.  The current generation of 40-60 years old people grown along the rise of the 8 bit personal computers, and these people are no longer younglings videogames are attributed to. Because for several reasons, the medium is still considered “for kids”. Whenever a parent sees PEGI’s markers they think about videogames in terms of gore, sexual content, violence and swearing in general, thus creating a binary mindset in their heads: a) games for kids, b) games not for kids created by deviants. It might sound severe but that is still the truth. You would be amazed how often I still stumble upon “aren’t videogames for kids?” ignorant question.

Games are a storytelling medium – like a movie or a book. The medium itself does not define it’s contents. Of course, it’s a game so some elements of it could be predicted and that’s a good thing, otherwise we would be exposed to the constant information chaos (as it is with TV series these days – 90% being the same stuff with different configurations of the same tropes – it’s very hard to pick a good one, and by good I mean not only emotionally but also intellectually captivating; needless to say I no longer even try to watch those).

With this article I am starting a series of describing videogames absolutely not for kids, and not because of their gory contents, but because these require a degree of maturity to comprehend. Over last decade many titles were made with the sole idea of depicting problems that normally are very hard to show in the other media. Like psychological issues and mental health. The subject is so sensitive, I know but a number of books and films that can deal with it in a compelling and inoffensive manner. Oh I know a lot of creators try to show those, but only a small percentage is succesful. The numbering does not rate the products  because all are equally captivating and valuable (of course I do have my favourites but that information can be read between lines I believe…)

I learned about the German developer Daedalic Entertainment from some other game I hope to write about in the future as well. After becoming a fan of creations of these fabulous, creative and unbelievably talended people I naturally searched for more, and found one of their older productions: “Edna & Harvey: The Breakout”.

After running the game a player starts as a young woman Edna, dressed in a hospital gown in a… solitary padded cell. That was an immediately unsettling view for me. The uncomfortable feeling grew bigger with time, especially after understanding that Harvey, the plush rabbit mascot Edna carries with her… talks back to her. The beginning of this story is a small masterpiece on it’s own: the player immediately wants to leave this too bright, unpleasant place. In the beginning one knows nothing about Edna, Edna’s past and character, but two things: that she believes she is healthy but kept against her will for some nasty experiments by dr Marcel. That basically is all that is needed to convince the player to leave this place ASAP. The breakout begins. The story leads Edna to interact with other denizens of the asylum she is in, as well as dr Marcel, always perceived as an evil person, view supported by Harvey. And there goes an another unsettling part of the story that comes with gradually learning how indifferent and empty Edna feels. Something is just not right about how she treats other people’s misery and that, in fact, she’s exploiting the others. After this realization I gradually started to suspect she’s in fact sick.  The game made me believe Edna is well and being abused, especially by showing retrospections of her childhood. Then I realized how devoid of an empathy she truly is and that her self-centered demeanor could be really a mental disorder.

The problem is she manages to escape the asylum with the help of other patients, including a serial killer. In the very end the player is exposed to the truth about Edna and dr Marcel – that whatever sympathy player might have for her she does need professional help and is unable to live a normal life in society. That in fact, she’s dangerous and that was the reason of her confinement and hospitalization.

What makes it brilliant is how game allows a player to get in “Edna’s shoes” and realize how a part of schizophrenia can feel like – he feeling of fear, of being abused by the people actually trying to help you and learn how difficult it is for such a person to tell the truth from lies in a subjective perception of the world.

The second part of the game, “Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes” follows Lily, a small, extremely shy girl from a convent orphanage governed by a very harsh sister-superior. Lily is so shy she only starts saying sentences in the game! Every person she interacts with always know better than her what she want’s to say so she is never allowed to complete any sentence. Even Edna, that shows up in a very, very unexpected way, especially for the people that completed the 1st game acts towards Lily is a bizarre manner. The first disonance here is how the environment is depicted like and how it is explained. It’s a contradiction, because of colourful scenes depicting harsh living conditions. This got me in red alert stage and I focused extremely, just to see what happens when one of the characters dies and how Lily reacts to it: the little, nice gnome appears over the mutilated corpse that we never see, and paints it pink. Yes, what we, and Lily see is a pink blob whenever something nasty or gory happens. Lily supersedes all wrong things from her life, she just doesn’t want to see it. Additionally there are only two persons that actually seem to care about her, and both are rather peculiar to say the least. I don’t want to give to much spoilers, so I’ll just add that Harvey is also here and he gets a pair of new, evil, hypnotic eyes. Harvey embodies all awkwardness of the mental anguish and all the horror of insecurity of an infant in the world of matures. It’s really hard to write more about it without giving to much spoilers, because, as the 1st one, also this game allows player to realize things during gameplay, with it’s crafty storytelling and events exposure.

When I completed the 1st one I said “Oh sh*t…” to myself. When I completed the 2nd one I yelled : “Haha! Finally!”.  Showing such grim and difficult subject with a pastel colour palette and cartoony characters seemed impossible for me, until I played this marvelous production.

Some trailers: