Number two, blackberry bloodbath
Plot Deconstruction: Hello, bl4ckb3rry bl00db4th, you are a newly-turned teenage girl. As you traverse through different your ages and experience the rises and falls of growing up, you find yourself avoiding all of the little hurts along the way in an attempt to find something or someone that can make you feel truly happy again. But is that possible or does hurt only come in different forms?
Positives: This game was so incredibly stylized and I loved it for that. The switches that happen between abstract poetry and descriptive poetry was well-intertwined and never truly felt out of place. The early design of the chat rooms but with the use of some Gen Z lingo felt like a timeless mix of early 2000s to 2020s’ girlhood. A lot of the feelings stay the same after all, it just manifests in different ways. I also enjoyed how everyone kept their chat-room names.
My Questions/Notes:
Here are some random thoughts that arose during my playthrough
- You’ve gotta tell him you want a private first kiss. Not in front of a crowd. OH, SO WE JUST PUNCHED HIM. Okay! Noted!
- I got my first ending! blackberry got revenge, kinda? But it didn’t seem like the joke was on anyone else except for her… hm. Anyway, let’s go do a ritual.
- Wait, not the silly bands!! That’s a school treasure. I’d crash-out afterwards too if I burned them for nothing.
Overall Impression: I enjoyed playing this! I thought it was funny at moments and incredibly sad at others, but a overall good depiction of what some people go through when they try to find out who they are in a world that keeps moving on.
~ Special Section ~
Something this game had me thinking about:
The names people choose online as a kid often reflects an interest or a specific feeling that they find relatable, but one word can only describe a piece of a person. Trying to encompass the entirety of a person into an already defined term is already a fruitless venture. The main character reflects on this near the end of the game when she’s in the bathroom with her past best friend wondering how her friend changed over the years they grew apart.
To me, growing up is trying to find all the pieces that make up the person that you want to be and creating a collage of concepts, beliefs, and ideas that eventually manifests as you. But when you leave someone in the past, everything that makes up who they are often just boils down to just what they did or how they affected your life. In your memory, they effectively become a reflection of their screen name forever. blackberry deals with the hurt that others caused her and the whirlwind of life’s continuous march as a way to run from her circumstances. The people that used to push her around in the past transform from one-off experiences into chains that she bears. They hold back her life and fester because she never truly takes the time to look her trauma in the eyes. But the thing about mental trauma is that it has a funny way of taking root in your head until you have the courage to look inside and push on the rotten parts so that it finally can heal.
You don’t only have to bring out your inner child at therapy sessions. You can walk with them at every moment and be the gentle care that they never got.
(love games that make me think, kudos to the author)