I played ANOTHEREAL at vancouver game garden and I can't stop thinking about it

wishlist ANOTHEREAL. do it right now. also follow lena raine's blog for updates about ANOTHEREAL. it is of vital importance to me that I communicate to you how much I want you to play this game once you can. but also, let me explain further, because I actually got to play the demo at vancouver game garden today

ANOTHEREAL was honestly the central attraction of the event for me, because I've been keeping a very avid eye on ever since I caught wind of it. between the themes of death and the angelic imagery and the faint air of abstract mystery and the fact that the game looks like that, I had a feeling it was going to very very much be my kind of game

and so I got to play the demo and now I'm never going to shut up about it. I am demanding that you pay attention to this game. I only played this thing for under half an hour but I actually had to go back and edit that sentence because I genuinely thought I was sat there for an hour and had to be corrected by the friend sat next to me on the train back to our hotel room watching me frantically type this on my phone. that's how utterly spellbinding it was, and its writing hit me hard enough that I'm here writing a blog post about it to unpack the feelings it gave me. it nearly made me cry right there at the venue. I already know this is going to be special to me.

I mean, it's a game about a lonely stargazer on the brink of a death that goes beyond the physical, entombed in a bedroom, surrounded by lost memories of attempts at moving ahead in life and relatives who have become faded-out apparitions in the walls. I might as well have sat down in front of a mirror.

for starters, the game is straightforwardly gorgeous on a visual and audio level!! the predominantly blue-to-fuchsia palette gives things an appropriately spacey feel, there's a lot of really clever ui touches like corner frames that appear to indicate cutscenes or the different styles of speech bubble like during a series of text messages you have near the start of the game. and, of course, the soundtrack features a bunch of delightfully off-kilter tracks with moody ambiance and whimsical time signature weirdness and all sorts of other things that had me swaying in my seat

the characterization is also very well done through the scenes I played! umbra (my beloved, I will die for her) had me giggling and kicking my feet like a schoolgirl at her antics, and the game generally does a great job of balancing philosophical ponderings about existence and EXISTENCE and the obsolescence of euclidian geometry with matter-of-fact sarcasm as our main character astra expresses beleaguered confusion at the narrator's theatrics and seemingly frequent contradictions

but god, did the writing behind astra completely break my heart. the general air of dissociative disinterest of her early conversations does more to prove that she's a ghost than any number of confused conversations about whether she's alive or dead or something in between; she's someone who feels very much like she could slip and fade from the living world at any moment, which makes the tension that follows through the game and the urging of the other characters that much more pressing. she's a gloomy little thing, but she has a beauty and power that shines in all sorts of little moments. she writes fanfic! I wonder what she writes fanfic about…

and the way the shooting gameplay (which I only got to go through the tutorial of, but which seemed really neat!) represents struggles every bit as internal as they seem to be external, the way memories are recalled and clung onto as anchors of selfhood and EXISTENCE amidst opposition and an uncertain sense of self, has delightfully flexible storytelling opportunities that I'm very excited to see capitalized on. it also, judging from what I briefly saw of what I assume was the cool miniboss from the demo, seems fun as fuck. I didn't get the chance to fight that miniboss but I hope I get to later on

I generally can't wait to play every bit of the game I can get my hands on. the narrative themes of where the differences lie between heartless subsistence and something more—between existence and EXISTENCE—were enough to shake me down to my bones right from the start of the game, and one can only imagine where it's going to go from there. it's beautiful and it's melancholic and it's full of wonder and hope and I'm going to ask everyone I know to play it the moment they gain the ability to. and while I don't necessarily know who's reading this, I do know that you should also play ANOTHEREAL anyways and wishlist it so you know when you can play it. do it do it do it do it. this is the kind of game that I am unspeakably happy exists and I want to share that joy as far and wide as I can manage. do it.

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