"Not including it felt like a weird omission. "This is a very personal game and is a part of my life," says Brier. She didn't want the protagonist's female relationship to feel like a phase or be dismissed as a college thing. Yet while she herself had a relationship with a woman before meeting her current partner, Dawson, she flipped this for the game to avoid bi-erasure. The game's narrative is of a young woman discovering her bisexuality and, for Brier, it reflects a lot of her own life experience. "The most interesting rules are the rules that people come up with themselves, not our rules," says Dawson. Initially the game was more puzzle-like, but over time the team decided to loosen the rules and allow players more freedom to interpret object placement and, thereby, the narrative. And it's kind of fun having these items that are tied to the things that you care about." But at the same, it works really well for our game. "It has a lot of physical artefacts, and some of it is terrible consumerism where we're told that we need to buy more and more to define our identity. "I think there's something kind of wonderful about geekiness and physical items," says Brier. That was something tangible that instantly solidified the connection between these characters, without explicitly showing them. Similarly, there's a D&D influence too, with in-game housemates playing an ongoing tabletop game. These were organised in character profiles. That meant those objects needed to reflect certain characteristics - sometimes specific to that character, other times just practical items. It's not just storytelling but characterisation that's done through simple objects. And then from that we get this story element of: 'he didn't make space for you'. ![]() "We needed to tutorialise the fact that you can move the boyfriend's items around, how do we do that? Oh, we make his items take up as much space as possible. "It accentuated the boyfriend's lousiness," Brier adds. "The game mechanic where we wanted you to be able to understand that you had to move items around ended up becoming a narrative beat, because by emphasising that it made the player feel like they were having to intrude or having to make space for themselves," says Dawson. One example is the boyfriend's apartment level where you must unpack the protagonist's belongings around those of her new boyfriend. ![]() Sometimes it was the game's mechanics which informed the story, too. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.
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