everything in their hands

This is an extremely ambitious game in terms of aesthetics and use of game engines. I'm genuinely so beyond impressed at how much was accomplished here and at how vividly these character's lives, their digital wasteland of pointless crap, is rendered. The multimedia approach of Decker screens, emails, handwritten dms, photos of real people, deepfried reddit screenshots, it all connects together to build a really tangible feeling world that becomes more emotionally resonant even as its component parts become more disparate and abstracted.

I guess it's fitting for a game that is told in a way that is often obtuse and unintuitive, switching from perspectives and narrators and forms of relaying information, that I'm not really sure how to begin untangling my strong emotional reaction without becoming completely incoherent.  

If I had to summarise my feelings, I'd probably say that to me this game captures the feeling of coming across snuff or harrassment or bigotry online so vile it rewires your understanding of what humans are. What they are capable of. In a way that feels like a form of dark enlightenment, and there is something ugly yet seductive about that. A seduction that if indulged will consume you entirely.  

This game makes you sit in that feeling of doom about progress, political scientific personal and spiritual, at the expense of others' suffering. There's this pervasive fear throughout that capitalism will render us all brutal extractors of any value we can get from others. Bodies, memories, religious ecstasy and the human soul itself, blood and hair and signifiers of personality, names and faces, nothing is too pure or good to be defiled for the sake of inane fleeting pleasure. Commodities to be used and discarded. Everything good devalued for the sake of producing more and more content, more product, more anti-meanings devoid of value.

There's many different threads to pull at with this story. The Javes are fascinating and the characters relationships to them are compelling as we explore what they can achieve via the Javes and what they can't. What it even means to be a Jave, how they differ from their human masters and how they don't. There's themes of abusive sexual relationships and SA, saviour complexes that fetishise the victim further, silicon valley and the human inability to stop building on each others bad ideas, and finally, how after the dust settles how we fail to learn anything. I can already feel myself itching to come back to this game and analyse different strands of its narrative and themes. It's so impressive how every character is able to have a thought provoking character arc that I could have written an equally long review just focusing on any of them. Even small parts of the worldbuilding like the reddit communities and Plum stuff could be analysed for ages in terms of their implications. I imagine my interpretation and feelings will probably change as I revisit this work and make more connections.

This game has immediately established itself as my current jam favourite. The minutia of niche internet communities based around tech, fetish porn, snuff, whatever, builds into this towering almost cosmic horror about how easily everything we are can be eroded. If a human being can be copied and pasted like a png then what sets up apart from our products and devices? Are we not also just things to be used? The way this game depicts sexualisation of the Javes specifically in terms of how their suffering is endlessly sexualised connected to a really painful part of myself and my past that was cathartic to see validated.

And yet throughout it all there's these moments where humanity and feeling seems to be restored to the characters. There's an occasional pinprick of hope that even a virtual body can feel warmth on its cybernetic skin. The biotechnological symbolism of wires in the game is really interesting. Like the internet itself they both connect people and shackle them, these experiences exist simultaneously in a feedback loop. A better world is two Javes kissing and maybe a better world is possible.