In a constant search for thrilling and captivating storytelling, I tend to often pick up horror novels or games. With a lot of mediocre and a lot more of bad content out there, one has to be very, very careful while picking something to read or play. So I watched the trailer of “Gone Home”, and understood it was another horror game, placed in the abandoned house, with jumpscares and spectres. I am not a fan of cheap jumpscares, I prefer the psychological horror instead, but the thing looked interesting enough.

I am not sure what made the creators to produce a trailer advertising this game as a horror game. Perhaps they wanted to attract attention (succesfully as you can see…)? Or maybe they wanted to play a prank on an unknowing player such as myself? It really doesn’t matter, because in the end I was able to play that interesting and important story.

The year is 1995, Oregon. Katie, a student, comes back from overseas to her family home in a fictional Boon county.  To her amazement she finds nobody there, so she starts searching the house for the clues where her family might be. During the search she finds an objects from the mid 90s era (casettes, Street Fighter videogame etc) as well as other objects reminding her of her family: her father Terry, a failed writer who makes a living by being an electronics handyman, her mother Janice, who pursues her director of wildlife consservation career, and her sister Samantha.

Samantha. Game focuses on her from the very beginning, when Katie finds a note from Samantha on the door, asking not to investigate what happened.

For me it sounded as an invitation to actually investigate…

During exploration Katie finds more and more messages from Samantha, or items shedding light on Samantha’s life. Freshly after moving in to this new house, Sam was estranged. She couldn’t find a common ground with other teenagers at school, she felt lonely and misunderstood. Eventually she met Yolanda, a military school cadet. They started sharing interests like grunge music and Street Fighter game, and, eventually, became romantically involved. When the whole thing was found out by sam’s and Katie’s parents, they started living in denial her daughter was lebian and started imposing some humiliating regulations, like the one Sam’s bedroom has to be opened at all times when Yolanda was visiting.

Again, I don’t want to spoil the story. I just want to highlight that this game is one of the most important games there to depict the LGBT problems of the 90’s, and of the current times, still. I’m a straight guy, so I have to learn about that anguish, feeling of injustice and pain people like Samantha still feel in the world of self righteous idiots who use religion (the worst tool there is) and morality (non-validated morality; morality requires constant validation –  Socrates…)  to justify their worst behaviour. The evil that actually makes people like Samantha suffer.

Because evil it is. Socrates argued that no one wants to be evil, yet people still are becoming as such. What are the mechanics of evil then? A higher power, like the devil? Highly unlikely – for me the devil doesn’t exist, as there’s no god or gods. One cannot prove god, not with a scientific method, and without scientific method a proof is as valid as me saying that elven warriors rode dinosaurs in the medieval Kraków – a complete and utter bollocks. Lets focus on certainties instead: what is certain is human ignorance and carelesness. Let me emphasize:

Evil is born out of ignorance.

That’s why it is so important to learn .

That’s why it is so important to learn about other people, other cultures and viewpoints. That is why multicultiralism is better than xenophoby and monoculturalism,although not without its own perils (yet still better!).  Without knowledge there can be no idea of wrongdoing. Take the SSmen and Wehrmacht military – the German Nazi butchers of the II WW. Did they think themselves evil? No, not until they learned the cause and effect of their actions, and some of them, sincerely understood they were evil, while the rest remained in the darkness. What was the difference?  The knowledge about the whole picture.

Games like “Gone Home” are doing the blessed job of letting us, gay, trans or straight, know of the suffering and anguish of another person. The pain that could lead to broken lives, broken promises and depression. The storytelling that makes us feel the problem and by engaging the emotional intelligence, to grasp it better. Shortly – to employ our empathy, and thus, to become a better human.

Do I have to say more?

Building tension in a story is a very hard task. In writing it’s difficult because it’s really hard to compile text the way the tension contained within unfolds in the reader’s mind as expected. In videogames it’s sometimes twice that hard: the first thing is the writing – dialogues and scene descriptions, the second being other media, like sound and graphics. It is to easy to make what was supposed to be a creepy story a ridiculous  one. Especially when that story contains supernatural or psychological elements.

“Sanitarium” is a very special game. Right from the very beginning it builds up the said tension. First of all, after seeing the intro of a doctor trying to get to his office ASAP for some reason we wake up in an asylum. And not the regular asylum, but a heavily overgothicized, grim version of one. Our nameless protagonist has the whole head covered in bandages and an amnesia. The very first contact with the surroundings is based on fear.  Fear of the unknown place, unknown people, lunatics in the state of psychotic episode as the tower they are placed in is about to explode.

Then it gets better and better. Our protagonist starts having visions. First of all there’s an angelic figure that embodies the sadness and the genuine care for our protagonist and that is she that takes him away from the exploding tower. Max, because finally our protagonist is able to remember his own name, is miraculously saved. Or rather placed on a perilous journey of finding himself. He lands in the land of heavily disfigured children withour adults taking care for them and exploited by an alien entity. There a player learns an important lesson about Max – he’s empathethic and compassionate. This is the first clue to the puzzle, because at this point a player is completely puzzled what it is all about.

Max journeys through many places having some interludes in the asylum, which makes him believe (which is supported by one o the doctor) he is insane and experiencing just delusionary visions. But world after world he unravels there’s far more to it – he goes throught the comic-book like setting where he has to save the world, the sad memory of his deceased sister (one of the most heartgripping moments in the game, and probably in the whole game industry), the domain of the dead and the Aztec village.

The game constanly builds up tension, the plot thickens, becomes denser as Max and the player move towards more and more answers, which in turn produce more and more questions. The solid world surrounding Max, that at one point makes Max to start accept the fact he is insane, becomes more and more fluid. To the point one can think Max is really shaping the world around him somehow, and the player slowly stops believing in Max’s insanity. Max feels disturbed and hurt, but logical, and in all his logic he’s a feeling and a deeply caring person. This just doesn’t add up.

Tension is built also by the growing urge of doing something, yet no player nor Max know what it could be. One just feels it, as Max is being forced to solve more and more problems around him, that these problems are but a tip of an iceberg, and in fact, there’s something else to be solved, elsewhere. This uncertainty is the main stressing factor, and the deepest cause of this game being so memorable, in my oppinion.

That feeling that you have to do something, to complete something, but you cannot remember what it was is infuriating. Max directs his attention to other tasks, because idlesness is the one thing here that truly makes both protagonist and the player, insane.

And there’s a moment when Max stops being Max at all. He becomes his deceased sister, visiting a circus on an island. The island and its denizens are cut off form the land because there’s a huge Kraken in the sea surrounding the place, that kills everyone that wants to leave. It’s really hard to express how bizarre the felling of the place is, and how out of place the characters there are. In this oniric place the urge of doing something important, to understand, is just overwhelming.

The journey of the mind goes through many stages in this title. Battling amnesia and trying to understand the symbolism of the world around Max is the true challenge of this game, and the main highlight of it’s writing.

I will not spoil it for you anymore. If you want to unravel its mysteries, learn the truth about the angelic entity and the urge of doing something Max has, then pick it up, play it if you haven’t already. The game aged a little but it’s still beautiful and heart-touching. I replayed it a dozen times and will never forget it.

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.