Hey I finally beat this! I stuck with Bea the whole way through because I wasn’t sure if hanging out with Gregg would give me a truncated Bea narrative. I’m not sure of how to talk about the game, but that theme of watching your life slowly hit its dead end is a powerful one.
Selmers is a great poet.
Also thanks again to Doolittle for throwing me a copy of this! <3
I finished this last night. Maybe I’ll give it a month or so before I roll through again to see the stuff I missed
I didn’t find Mae so unlikeable? I sorta identified with her aimlessness and emotional dependence immediately. She seems like she’s trying to be good against intense self-loathing patterns and the sting of failure - That it’s later revealed she has an undiagnosed and severe dissociative mental illness makes it pretty clear. I can empathize with that. I found her pretty charming and the friction between her and her core group of friends believable. I guess the fact that her parents are mostly really decent people who treasure her kind of brings her maladjustment into sharper relief during the first couple hours. the fight she has with mom if you follow a certain path really made me feel the feels in hindsight.That I dated someone almost exactly like her might have something to do with that though
I thought all the journal stuff did a lot to help make Mae seem troubled instead of just immature. It was also a really great way to encourage the player to explore and fill out the pages. I especially liked accidentally coming across the more plot-relevant sketches that you aren’t prompted about. I like how the journal enhances mae’s personality so much even though diegetically its the result of a shitty doctor doing lazy treatment for severe mental illness. it’s good or at least interesting narrative friction.
I loved Lori so so much. Reminded me of a friend I had in high school that I haven’t spoken to in a long time. She gave me the Deep Feels. Selmers is a great poet and the best character in the game probably.
I wound up with the Gregg ending and it worked for me. I think this game handles its themes astoundingly well. The supernatural stuff might be a bit jarring, but as with the best magical realist work I think the thematic weight really adds more than it takes away from the surprisingly political picture the game is trying to paint about austerity and the pain of change and the horror of getting older and realizing things aren’t going to go the way you want to. Not sure i can be more specific without getting self-conscious or rambling
Its a really great story and I can easily recommend it to my non-gamey associates
i found Mae immensely relatable to the point of feeling really uncomfortable at how much other people itt (and elsewhere) were saying “Mae’s an asshole”
Selmers and Germ were my favorite side characters by far
good post that i totally align with about a game that reached me in ways i still can’t really articulate
Yeah forever this
Mae vs Ma and Pa was the principal stitch for me. She’s just such a jerk to them in a way I can’t empathize with because they’re lovely and admirable people. If Pa was slouching toward Fox News paranoia or Ma was sabotaging the first-generation college student I could get in Mae’s head.
But maybe this is an intimate facet of mental illness that’s not my experience.
I thought that she had a pretty good thing with her dad! Like, a mutual pun-ship. That he’s implied to be a recovering alcoholic makes mae’s attitude towards her dad pretty optimistic and sorta cool. They watch this awful show together to unwind from social difficulties that at least dad knows that they share. It’s a form of commiseration and bonding for someone who knows they don’t have the faculty to relate to their kid’s life in a way that’s positive. Dad’s monologue during the epilogue reduced me to tears. My dad was so much like him but instead of being funny he decided to be shit and the… iunno it just made me feel.
I think maybe I like Mae more than others because I tried to guide her to pay attention to others whenever I could. I definitely noticed that whenever a dialogue choice came up, the first apparent choice was representative of her instinct, which was often “nah maybe not.” And it does reflect on her character. I just decided to be nice whenever I had the option. And it turned out to be really rewarding
i do like that sometimes you just can’t guide her to give a good answer though (this is a lot of Bea’s storyline)
i think if her parents were outright shitty people her occasional being rude to them or arguing with them would have felt more artificial? She’s clearly on good terms with her parents but there’s a kind of weird natural disconnect between them and her and again it spoke to me.
Iunno when I came home from college it was a really similar situation, same age even, and when you are 20 and your parents are nice and welcoming to you after you have very clearly wasted their money and disappointed the shit out of them it is a hard thing to square and it certainly makes you want to stay out of the house as much as possible and like do some things and it makes you feel small because you wasted somebody else’s effort and that’s a lot
Defensiveness is a pretty predictable reaction in that situation
For me the bright line of Mae as asshole was the college town party with Bea. Getting a little spoilery; I’ll try to be general, but: they get into an argument–sort of like Mae’s meltdown at the bonfire in the forest, where the social dynamic is clear, but Mae has to take the implicit rejection of her identity as an existential threat which must be fought off immediately, and to hell with whatever the consequences for Bea might be. Like, I’m sympathetic to the need to have your identity validated, but my personal social paranoias are such that the knee-jerk, “these people are assholes, right?” response that Mae performs in the party was really uncomfortable to me. Yeah, the college chumps are assholes, but antagonizing them does not change that, and your friend that you’re here for is clearly not cool with this, plz stop. I still liked her! Plus, everybody is an asshole, more or less! But this is just the shape her selfishness takes.
[spoiler]I must admit, I felt Mae was an ass, especially going through (most of?) Bea’s story. Like she was incredibly self-centred or something. I had to stop playing it for a few days each time after some key events.
EDIT: It’s more indicative of people I’ve met in my life. Like, had relationships with. Who had severe mental health issues they just would not discuss and ultimately destroyed the relationship as communication was nearly impossible. I have a strong feeling the people I had relationships with went through seriously terrible times and I found it tough to tread on eggshells with them. I still have positive friendships with these people but they are still unable to form close relationships and I feel terrible for them.
I did more Bea stuff than Gregg stuff by the end but didn’t feel like I completed either storyline. Should I go through it again? I feel like I missed absolutely loads.[/spoiler]
To me, the main reason Mae comes off as such an asshole in the beginning of the game is how much shit she gives Bea at the first band practice.
My sister gets intense tunnel vision and is also pretty sensitive in general so Mae’s obliviousness to Bea’s feelings at certain points was hard for me to outright dismiss as jerkwad behavior. Just had to shake my head and say “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
I played this game over the past week. I like the art style, the music, and a lot of the incidental character interactions. I don’t know what to think of the latter half of the story, with its Hot Fuzz-reminiscent metaphor that’s sort of mixed up with Mae’s mental condition in a way that left me wondering which events are supposed to be taken literally.
It’s hard to tell whether it would be worth playing through the game again at some point to make different choices and see what I missed. Realistically, I probably won’t do that.
I finished this game a few days ago and it’s just…exactly what I needed from a videogame in 2018