Amon | wen
In this era of Internet mourning, where depression can be abbreviated by "jade" or "EMO", everyone seems to have a bit of mental illness.
Social phobia, autism, and split personality begin to become excuses or self-introduction bombshells, but few people are really willing to visit a psychologist.
How many people know what the world looks like in the eyes of people who are truly diagnosed with mental illness?
If you're a lover of psychological horror, you've probably heard its name — Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk... (MILK1 for short).
Or have ever seen a screenshot of its highly recognizable game screen.
Even if you've never heard of it, it doesn't matter. It will take you to feel how hard it is to buy milk as a person with a serious mental illness.
The world is only red, and even the simplest and most complete sentences cannot be organized. You have to communicate with an inexplicable voice in your head, and even the kind words of others will be understood as malicious.
Even if the player helps her buy milk, for her, the hellish nightmare world is never over, and no, she has long lost the ability to dream.
Yesterday, indie game producer Nikita Kryukov released the game's sequel, Milk Outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk... (MILK2 for short), which tells the story of a little girl who bought milk and went home.
Unlike the previous game, which costs only about 20 minutes for a price of 6 yuan, MILK2 is more like a formal complete game work, with cutscenes and dedicated artists, and more plot branches.
But what doesn't change is that we're all in some game created in the protagonist's head. In MILK1, the protagonist does not know how to buy a bag of milk, so he creates a visual novel game in which his ideas and language are displayed in the form of words, and the power of the "player" is used to guide the progress of the game.
This time, she created a click-and-adventure game to find her thoughts hidden in different objects.
The girl returns home after buying milk, through the horrible living room and kitchen, and finally back to the bedroom. In what seemed to us, the most ordinary dark room was a flood beast in her eyes.
She was pulled back and forth between her fantasies and reality, and even though she knew that there should be no such demons in the normal world, she was still trapped in reincarnation.
We've never seen a girl's clear face in the previous game, and this time she finally has a look in her imaginary game world, but that doesn't help her realize her true "existence."
Sometimes she would think she had jumped off the balcony, sometimes she would think she had died by a demon infusing her with a poison, but in any case, she was just a lonely girl.
In the previous work, we learned that the girl had "only red in the world" because she witnessed her father's jumping off the building, and in this work, through the thoughts in the computer, we learned that she had a "living person" netizen.
She confided in him about her life, and he made it all public. That's why girls are so insecure, and all we can do is persuade her to unplug the power cord from her computer.
At the end of the story, the girl becomes a mother in a dream, with a little boy as difficult as herself as a son. This time, she helped him buy milk as smoothly as a normal person.
This seems to be the girl's fantasy of projecting the image of her mother onto herself, helping a mentally ill child from the perspective of a helpless parent.
However, at the end of the game, the little boy shouts the most heartbreaking sentence to her (or the player) - "You didn't help me at all!" ”
My weekly experience ends here, but the game triggers different plots and animations every week, maybe we can really make her happy?
Or maybe she'll only be able to stay for a short time after she's taken her pills and become her only but short-lived friend.
The game maintains a gloomy hue of red, purple and black throughout the game, and whenever the girl falls into a cyclical fantasy of death, the player cannot dialogue with her.
Compared to the previous game, MILK2 has relatively few meta elements, but as mentioned earlier, the game quality has also gone up a level after the sequel has increased its manpower.
Whether it is the soundtrack, art and copywriting, it is worth remembering. However, I think many people will fall into the pain and self-pull of mental illness patients for a while after the end of the game, and they are reluctant to recall.
However, the cruel truth is that this is the life that girls have to repeat every day; it is also the real life of a mentally ill person.
You can choose to escape the disgusting red color of ALT+F4, but they are even in their dreams. That's why the meta element in the game is so fascinating.
At the end of the article, I still hope that you can experience these two short games with a total price of no more than 50.
It's hard to empathize, but the next time you face a mentally ill person around you, at least you can try to imagine how hard it will be for you to do something that is easy for you.
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