Half a month ago, this two-dimensional woman occupied the headlines of my circle of friends, Weibo and major game self-media.
If you don't know her yet, it's Sugar Sugar, the heroine of the indie game Anchor Girl Heavy Dependency, released on January 21, and the story of her attempt to live stream is the main content of the game.
Landmine Woman, Mental Health, Condor (probably) Anchorwoman, Kirakira ~☆... These elements succeeded in piquing my curiosity and some "darkness" that was hidden deep inside my heart. In order to express my love for this woman, I even sent the official evaluation invitation code to my colleagues, pre-ordered a copy on Steam, and willingly paid tribute to the second dimension.
PS: In fact, I was going to draw a lottery, but I didn't expect my colleague to quickly use the activation code, which colleague I will not name.
I started playing the game the first day after it went on sale, but things went a little differently than I thought. I thought that "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" would take me into the inner world of a two-dimensional Brahmin and mentally ill person, and let me lament that "human beings are really troublesome" while trying various possibilities in sugar candy... But I'm wrong, or maybe the world is wrong, and there's always one of them wrong anyway, because I think the game really doesn't taste good enough.
Half a month later, half a month later, I finally took a break from the overwhelming promotional articles, rent disputes and the Spring Festival holiday, intending to use a column to talk about why I feel this way, and my views on the mental illness game.
Warning: This article contains pictures that can be uncomfortable and plenty of game spoilers, so please don't read it for unprepared readers.
>>> what happened to "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence"?
Thinking about it now, I would have felt that "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" was not strong enough, perhaps because it was too false in some aspects and too real in others.
I initially poured a lot of malice into Sugar Sugar, carefully controlling the data while trying to "play bad" Sugar Sugar: I operated A P to frequently roll sheets with Sugar Sugar, and also let Sugar Sugar open dating apps and unknown passers-by to open rooms, and the only visual manifestation of these behaviors in the game was pressure, dark numerical changes, and subtle changes in Twitter content, and there were no unique events popping up.
No, what the hell am I expecting, kuso (
At the end of the day, the essence of Anchor Girl Heavy Dependency is just a trade-off between a few resource bars, and most of its fun comes from dialogue, events, and playing with meme quotes, and there are always some flaws that make me feel like a play.
After realizing that "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" is really just a game, I opened the modifier and decided to try all the endings one by one. From this moment on, the game loses its fundamental meaning and becomes some kind of special software for watching the plot: Flying Leaves is banned, charcoal is burned to commit suicide, becomes the leader of some mysterious religious organization, indulges in the life of Ah P, and even gives up live broadcasting to return to a "healthy" life... I tried the good and bad endings, and even the hidden endings were played out by strategy.
After I got tired of playing, I uninstalled "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence", but I didn't feel the slightest relief, because after I took the initiative to cut off the gameplay of this game, "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" became real, and even made me a little creepy.
At first, I thought that Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence was a crazy game, crazy enough to make me revel in pixel-style two-dimensional women and 8-bit electronic music, crazy enough to make me give up all my thoughts to feel the thoughts and emotions of sugar sugar. However, the sugar candy portrayed in "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" is not like this: the contrasting speeches of Twitter size, the desire for recognition, the chat room full of all kinds of god-bound remarks during the live broadcast... These things remind me all the time that Sugar Sugar is not a crazy character that the author has created, but an ordinary two-dimensional mine woman who exists around us. She was desperately looking for some kind of spiritual sustenance, and she was on the verge of a possible collapse at any moment.
If a game is too abstract, I'll let myself immerse myself in it and try to summarize and deconstruct it with logic when the game is over. Although the "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" looks abstract, the more I play, the more I can't look at sugar candy with a fun mentality, even if there are a lot of favorite stems in the game.
In other words, sugar sugar's pain and struggle is all too ordinary for my aesthetic. But it is precisely because of these ordinary that Sugar Sugar can become a real person and generate empathy in my eyes. The author does not try to directly show me the inner world of Sugar Sugar, but observes Sugar Sugar's hearing, seeing and every move from the perspective of the male protagonist Ah P, so that we can feel his experience and thoughts.
This made me feel more negative emotions, so that I could no longer face up to "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence".
While it's not good to call my friend a landmine, I must admit that I do have a group of men and women around me who look normal like sugar candy but don't know when they're going to explode completely. The author of "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" gave Sugar Sugar redemption through Ah P and the player in front of the computer, what about the "Sugar Candy" in the real world? I can observe their every move like Ah P, but I can't and can't do anything to save them like Ah P, so I can only let them sink on the brink of collapse. Even if they can return to "normal", like the healthy ending in the game, will they really feel happy in "normal"?
I don't know, so I'm confused and miserable.
>>> a truly crazy game, what does it look like?
After deleting "Heavy Dependence on anchor girls", I was silent for a long time, and finally decided to go to "Milk inside a bag of milk of milk" (hereinafter abbreviated as "Milk") to reminisce about the real madness.
"Milk" is an almost diametrically opposed work to "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence". It's short, it takes only 20 minutes to clear, and it's not realistic at all, so abstract that I can't understand it at all: the protagonist is a young girl living in Russia, and because she suffers from neurosis, everything in her eyes is purple as shown in the picture below.
Under the blow of the mother's strong desire to control and the unexpected death of her father, the girl's psychological defense line finally collapsed. From time to time, she fantasizes about being surrounded by all kinds of terrifying creatures, wondering if other people have boundless malice towards her, and spending every day under the dual oppression of reality and mind... With the intake of a large number of anti-psychiatric drugs, the level of hormone secretion in adolescent girls has been completely changed, and the cognitive ability and memory level of things have also been seriously declined, which eventually led to the inability of adolescent girls to live normally.
The main plot of "Milk" is very simple, that is, the girl is ordered by her mother to go out to the supermarket to buy a carton of milk. The task was too daunting for her, so she conceived a word game in her head and asked the player to play the role of the narrator in the word game to talk to the girl and help her buy milk. This kind of nesting doll-style word game is also reflected in the title, telling the psychological state of the girl at this time: even the ordinary daily life of buying milk can bring a meaningless logic such as "milk in the bag" and give the girl a heavy ideological burden, so why not to mention other really important things can easily crush her inner world?
My biggest impression of the game was a passerby girl in the supermarket who could only say "Oh.". No matter what the girl says, the passerby will only say "Oh", and the player must help the girl to say "Oh" in order to defeat the passerby with a meaningless loop, so that the passerby "crawls away like a monster lurking in the dark". The girl will then tell the player that she is afraid of the word "Oh" because it reminds her of the following image:
This is the only real CG in "Milk", and the black circle in the middle will gradually enlarge, enlarge, enlarge, enlarge, enlarge... Until everything fell into darkness.
The first time I saw this picture, I instantly lost the ability to speak. I felt a strong fear in this circle, which resembled a black sun, but somehow I could not take my eyes off the circle in the slightest. After realizing that I was attracted to it, I began to try to force myself to stare at the black hole deadly, as if the muscles of my whole body were trying to resist its gravitational pull and prevent myself from falling into the abyss.
After the picture disappeared for a few minutes, my sanity took over again, telling myself that "it's just a picture in a game", there was no need to scare myself in this way, and the author probably didn't add too many metaphors to it, without over-interpreting. But in retrospect, milk is a game full of similar fears and compulsions, and all the player's pity for the girl will eventually be swallowed up by this black hole after the end of the drug, turning into a short and cold line at the end of the game:
"Yes, Mom."
Another game that makes me feel really crazy is Katana Zero, but it's not crazy in the same way as the two games above.
This time, the protagonist changes from a teenage girl in real society to a man who is confused and struggling in a cyberpunk city, "Zero". Once a biological weapon of the government, Zero gained the special ability to predict a short future after undergoing physical transformation, and was able to change its own perception of time at critical moments. He and the "Empty" squad made great achievements on the battlefield, but after the war, they were ruthlessly abandoned by the government and fell into darkness due to drug addiction and wartime psychological trauma.
Kronos, one of the primitive gods of time in Orphean ancient Greek mythology (note the Kronos that distinguishes the Hesiod gods), created the earth, sky, and sea together with his spouse, the goddess of destiny, Anand, and became the name of a government-developed psychotropic drug in Samurai: Zero. Humans who have been injected with Kronos can simulate countless futures in their minds and choose ways to avoid death, but the fate of deceiving death is to completely lose control of time in the face of real death, so that consciousness will stay forever in the moment before death.
The eternal hour will never come, and it will be replaced by another eternity.
As the game's plot progresses, Zero's daily life becomes more and more fragmented: at first he just assassinates various targets while having nightmares, and then he can't even distinguish between real and false, and his mental state has become completely confused.
Throughout Samurai: Zero, the author does not directly describe Zero's inner thoughts, but chooses to let the player personally feel this state of consciousness trance. By using a large number of flashbacks, flashbacks, and montages, and deliberately hiding a lot of key information and leaving a lot of plot blanks, the author succeeds in making players as confused as Zero in being able to distinguish between what is reality, what is memory, and what is imaginary, so that players can also feel the confusion encountered by Zero.
Nearly 3 years have passed since the game was released, and people are still discussing the sacredness of a gold and silver mask that sings comedy and tragedy, whether the little girl who lives in Zero's house really has someone, and what happens to the street veteran who suddenly changes into the image of Zero... From this point of view, the "madness" of zero has indeed reached the hearts of players, and even has a tendency to make players crazy.
At the very least, players waiting for samurai: zero DLC should be crazy, eh.
>>> Summary: The Direction and Significance of mental illness games
My examples of Milk and Samurai: Zero are not meant to step on one, but to show you that there is a rough classification of games that describe mental illness: whether the world is abstract or figurative in the patient's eyes, and whether we feel it all directly or indirectly?
"Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence" is figurative and indirect, its sugar candy depicted from the perspective of Ah P makes us pay attention to the real-life landmine problem; "Milk" is abstract and direct, simple and rough to take us into the inner world of a neurotic patient; "Samurai: Zero" is abstract but indirect, we don't know what Zero is thinking, we can only catch the wind and shadow from Zero's fragmented observations... In fact, I originally wanted to introduce the figurative and direct "The Town of Light", but "Town of Light" is not a pixel wind two-dimensional game, and the column space is limited, so I can only recommend that you go to the Internet to learn about it.
Of course, having said all that, I still feel that no matter what kind of mental illness is caused by what causes, patients deserve more love and a healthier living environment. Even if we can't help them, we can get more involved in games that depict mental illness, and understand their thoughts and emotions through this special art form, so as to face up to mental illness, a powerful enemy that is increasingly plaguing human life.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, starting with caring for sugar candy!
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