You ever find it difficult to talk? Like, you’re good at words. You went to school for words and you know how to use them, more or less. Maybe you’re not super impressive at it yet but the only way to get better at using words is, well, to use them.
But in certain situations, you can’t.
I’ve come out a couple of times at various points in my life. I had difficult, emotionally draining, wonderful conversations with people in the process of figuring out who I am – and I have never really officially told my parents. That I’m a (stupidly-) panromantic asexual, that I’m nonbinary-agender-trending-towards-wanting-to-be-femme-more-every-day-but-now-is-not-the-time-for-that-conversation, that I’m even using a different name on the internet, not just as a nom-de-plume but as the name people – my friends and the people I love dearest! – refer to me with.
My parents don’t really take an interest in my work. It’s not really their fault. I kind of picked a weird and far-from-lucrative career path, first as a media studies fellow at an anarchist think tank and then as a video game critic, with years of depression and nothing-of-note in the middle. So I feel safe saying this here knowing they likely won’t see it. As far as they know I am still a cishet boy training people at a call center company. I live with them but the walls I’ve put up are thick enough to be soundproof sometimes.
I feel guilty about that, of course. But hell, I’d rather be the gender and sexuality of least resistance to them than find myself in the deep ocean. Not right now.
In If Found…, there is an astronaut, and an aspiring astrophysicist, and a daughter who wants to be recognized as such, and a world that won’t let her be who she is. It’s a narrative you likely have heard before. Only you’re trying to erase it all. Every aspect, wiped away in faux-pencil marks and cosmic dobs of paint. As the story travels through a time and space both alien and familiar to me, from the intergenerational fighting to the dingy punk houses to the relationship woes to the final, tear-streaked moments of the game, it seems the point is not to record the moments of a story fraught with pain and tension, but to wash it from the annals of history entirely.
Every aspect of the art and writing in If Found… was phenomenal, but playing it on mobile felt special. Swiping around the screen to move to the next moment felt so intuitive and good that I have to mention it here. Fuck, it’s one of the best-feeling games I’ve played on mobile, and I don’t think it was designed strictly for that space.
The game feels so good to play, which makes what’s happening so hard to watch. The setting is the Republic of Ireland circa 1993, just a short time after homosexuality was decriminalized there. The main thing for Kasio, the protagonist, is not that she’s gay specifically, but that she’s trans – and folks seem to go out of their way to conflate the two states of being as though they’re mutually exclusive, and it feels spiteful. Maybe that’s just looking at this with 2020 glasses, where every shitheaded thing a cisgender person says about trans people is more likely to be borne out of malice than pure ignorance, but the game can’t help that.
Kasio moves into a squat on the edge of town with a punk band consisting of some of her friends from before she went off to college in Dublin. The punk scene is at first welcoming, but it’s plagued with many of the hangups of wider society. We’ve all been in a scene like that. At first, everything looks wonderful. It’s practically gilded. But the closer you look, the paint is chipping and that gold foil is really just caramel Hershey’s Kisses wrappers flattened out on various surfaces to make it look fancier than it is. Maybe a band you know has a drummer that did something nobody talks about. Maybe you know a game developer who did something nobody talks about. Maybe you’re aware of all these spaces made for you but they never seem to fully materialize. Maybe people lipsync the slogans at you but their ideas are never put into practice in any meaningful way. And then someone says something to you, and you realize you can’t be here anymore.
When this happens in the game it’s a shock, but it’s understandable. The narrative explains what’s going on to us. Kasio tells us what happened, we see it drawn on the screen. When it happens in life, and then it keeps happening, you understand nothing. There is no convenient narrator there to tell you how to feel or what to think because everything turns into a mess.
In If Found, everything eventually turns out okay, and people move on from this moment in time. December 1993 becomes a memory. Relationships get rebuilt. Life continues. My immediate reaction was that this was an unrealistic “happy ending.” But given enough time and distance from any situation and the edges really do begin to wear down, soften, get rounded. I no longer feel the rage I did in my early 20s about certain things; Kasio is able to not only face her mother in the epilogue but spend time with her and another family friend, like “old birds,” cackling away.
This moment will fade and be replaced by better moments. It isn’t easy. It may be preceded by many worse ones. That’s how history works. But it might actually be okay in the end.
If Found… is on Steam for $12.99 and on the iOS App Store for $4.99.
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