[Content warning: childhood abuse, sexual abuse, long-term illness]
While at indie game conventionౠ WASD in London last month, I was drawn to the games that told grounded human stories like a moth to a flame.
The Quiet Things, Pieced Together, and I’ll Be Brave Tomorrow approach different themes under the mental health umbrella in refreshing and creative ways that aim to help people connect and feel validated in their own experiences. All three games have a 90s aesthetic feel and feature cultural references that will no doubt resonate if you were a🙈round at the time. And even if you weren’t, they still hit pretty hard.
As someone who grew up in this time period, it’s unsurprising that these games call back to the era so deliberately, considering the lack of resources and understanding that mental wellbeing had back then. Tr💯ying to communicate how you felt or attempting to understand what was happening at any given time was challenging, frustrating, and downright confusing. You were often forced to suffer in silence, but things have changed.
The Quiet Things
Silver Script Games founder and BAFTA breakthrough recipient Alyx Jones is not shying away from such visceral experie☂nces with her studio’s debut title.
The Quiet Things is an autobiographical first-person explorati🐈on game that takes players through Jones’ childhood via the protagonist, Alice. Covering the ages betwee꧋n eight and eighteen, it will explore familial abuse, homelessness, and sexual assault from her teenage years. Jones says that addressing the stigma around these topics is vital and, “being able to represent that experience accurately is important.”
The catalyst for Alice’s trauma begins with the loss of her mother to cancer and traces how her life breaks down while under the thumb of an aggressive, controlling father (voiced by Dave Jones, known for his role as Halsin in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3).
While exploring her childhood home, the subtle and affecting environmental details help you pie꧟ce together what’s going on so effectively that I felt my heart clench more than once during the demo.
From the number of times Alice is listed on♈ the chores calendar in the kitchen to having to restrict herself from going to the bathroom out of fear, Alice becomes conditioned to poor treatment. The diary pages you interact with have an uncanny level of detail that goes beyond the scope of simply recalling memories. I can barely remember what happened last week, let alone twenty years ago. As it turns out, these are real excerpts from Jones’ past diaries, adding an extra layer of authenticity and vulnerability to the game’s story.
With great vulnerability comes great responsibility though, and to protect the identities of those involved, names and places have been changed. This also provided Jones with 🍬a degree of “healthy ꦍseparation” between her and the lead character during development, helping her better safeguard her own wellbeing and objectively consider the player’s own perspective.
It also features very detailed content warnings at the start of the game - providing the player with ample information to determine if they are in the right headspace to continue. To develop this 𓆉further, the team is consulting with the video games mental health charity on how to effectively signpost mental health resources and further trigger warnings throughout the game.
The Quiet ꦛThings is currently in developmﷺent and will be released later this year. You .
Pieced Together
Pieced Together isn’t nearly as hard-hitting as The Quiet Things, but it approaches a rarely touched upon topic in a cosy scrapbook puzzler. It explores thꦡe themes of change, acceptance, and learning to let go by focusing on childhood friendship. The story follows Connie, a girl who is writing a letter to🍸 reconnect with childhood friend Beth.
Outside interspersed letter writing, the game is set entirely within Connie’s scrapbook as she reflects upon their friendship from the moment they met. Working your way through the scrapbook is a delight, as the game replicates the journaling process in lovinglꦍy hand-crafted ways.
Its light puzzling elements involve sifting through a selection of photos, stickers, notes, and clippings to illustrate each key moment in Connie’s childhood. As I carefulౠly designed each page, I was not expecting a Girl Talk magazine reference (Gurl Talk) in the year of our lord 2024, placing the period firmly in the ‘90s and ‘00s.
If you’ve ever read it, you’ll remember various quizzes about friendship or ‘which boy from [insert boy band here] will youꦑ marry’. As I cut up the page, I could♒n’t help but smile at this wild bit of long forgotten nostalgia.
While chatting with Kate Killick, creative lead at Glowfrog Games, we discussed how the breakdown of a fri🍒endship is a form of loss.
There's grief attached to that which we’re mostly expected to accept, but in actuality, can be really difficult to process. “Everybody on the team felt this story had some basis in their lives. It’s just such a common experience to deal with friendships drifting apart,” said Killick. “It can affect you as much as a breakup.” Killick added that “it’s almost like it’s not obvious enough, people don’t talk about it as much, and they don’t treat it [in the same way],” resulting in a lack of reflection or closure.
Pieced Together is still in the early stages🦋 of development, with no set release window just yet, but you .
I’ll Be Brave, Tomorrow
It would be easy to glance over at I’ll Be Brave, Tomorrow and dismiss it as a simplistic platformer, but it aims to be much more than that. In partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital🌊, I’ll Be Brave, Tomorrow is a narrative adventure game from the perspective of Robyn; a sick child in hospital playing the titular 2D platformer.
If you’ve read the 2022 novel ‘Tomorrow, and Tomor♑row, and Tomorrow’, the premise may sound famil♐iar. The team were directly influenced by Sam Masur’s journey, who also spent much of his childhood in hospital, playing video games for escapism.
This inspired InkForge Studios to represent the real life experience of the game’s creative director and studio Founder, Thomas Hunt, who’s been a patient at GOSH since he was three months old. Technical Director Archie Crampton is the Sadie to Hunt’s Sam, as they combined their respective skills to make a game featuring both 2D 🦩and 3D elements.
Weaving between the interactive hospital room and pixel art platformer, it highlights the importance of escapism through play by incorporating a series of mini-game෴s and home comforts - like their favourite plush Fred the Frog, who offers companionship to Robyn.
When you boot up the SNES-style console at the foot of the hospital bed, you’re transported to the retro platforming world as a rotund robin - a parallel to Robyn, who can hop, jump, and glide through the levels with easಌe. The hospital room changes between play sessions, offering more opportunities to learn and engage with Robyn’s journey - keenly feeling their fears and aꦿnxieties during treatment.
The Robin also serves as 🐻a personal touch from Crampton who explained tha♍t the robin was his way of incorporating a part of himself, “My mum’s always had a theory that if you see a robin, that’s a family member who’s passed - so adding a robin into the game is a nod to my father.”
Both the pixel platformer you delve into and the real world outside of it have a real vibrancy to them, as the team aims to make the prospect of being in hospital a less frightening ordeal. A challenging prospect, considering most portrayals are negative. The idea is to foster as much positivity as possibl♛e while still tackling th🤡e hardships these kids face.
Crampton tells me that they’re trying to flip the perspective to, “they’re not going [to hospital] because they’re ill, they're going there to get better.” This also helps with the feeling of othering they may have as a result of needing treatment.
It’s h𒁏eartening to see a game exploring this, especially for the children at GOSH, who will have a chance to interact with a game that directly represents them. InkForge will be donating 50 percent of their Steam revenue from the game to GOSH when it’s released and is bringing the game to 🤡Steam Next Fest in June.
If you want to𝓀 check it out now - the WASD demo is an👍d .
