Stretch Panic
“We have made them beautiful, like your scarf. Do you want to become beautiful Linda?”
Linda is dropped into a room leeched of its color but decorated by paintings. It’s as if some large straw had siphoned all the pigment in the hall and deposited it into each frame. I am surprised that Linda cannot jump. A hand floats from her scarf like a flying dog on a leash. I squeeze the button on the shoulder of the controller and the hand mimics me by pinching the landscape. I pull on a door and it swings open. Linda falls into a meadow where a dozen women with comically large assets wonder around. Occasionally, one will fall of the map and use her unique physical features to helicopter back. I learn that in order to open other doors, I must reach around the women’s natural defenses and destroy them. This is a nightmare.
Underneath its surreal exterior, Stretch Panic is a game about the kind of dysmorphobia that children, particularly girls, experience while growing up. Each of Linda’s sisters has become physically distorted by demons who have stretched them to match their desires. For some, their vanity has influenced their new form and the demons have molded them into tall, angelic models of femininity. For others, their obsessions have transformed them into homunculi-like caricatures: a pyromaniacal sister has her head stretched into a fire-breathing melon while a budding Egyptologist is now encased by a flying sarcophagus. We get to see these girls in their original forms before they are possessed by demons and they look so much like Linda. In a way, stretching and pulling their new, monstrous features feels like an attempt to compress them back into their old shape.
When I was a child and first started to grow hair in my armpits, I shaved them. I didn’t like the change. I never shaved my legs, but I got close. It occurred to me one day that I would have to shave my armpits for the rest of my life, and I was only going to begin growing more hair in more places. On that day, I realized that I was going to be changing forever. My hairs would continue to push out, my pores would expand, and my weight would continue to fluctuate. I would grow to a maximum height at some point; years later, at a different point, gravity would eventually wear down my spine and I would begin to shrink. I had to learn how to accept being in constant change.
After you exorcise Linda’s sisters of their demons, you can view them in a gallery. In this gallery, you can stretch parts out and pin them into place. Here, you are the author of a caricature of a caricature. Aside from facing off against the sisters and destroying busty bikini babes, this is all you can do.
After you’ve exorcised every demon, the girls are free. They join Linda in a parade, marching in unison, perfect again; except, just as the game up to this point has only been a bad nightmare, the ending is only a good dream. The truth is, each of these girls will stretch and change form. Their inner personality will shift and alter how they appear. They are together now, but later, no one knows.