The Archivist and the Revolution by Autumn Chen
“The past does not exist. Only the present is real.”
But the past is painfully present, here. Today’s conditions are the result of the revolution. Those living around you, and those no longer living, are the result of the revolution. What you wear and eat, how you walk and speak, the job you work and the apartment in which you live. Everything is long after stasis, after the end of stasis into some new hell.
A gut punch of a game, and a strange experience for me in particular because many of its concerns are my own current obsessions. For that reason, I’m not going to go into huge depth here. Suffice to say The Archivist and the Revolution is brilliant, desperately sad, mechanically detailed and set in a stunningly realized world that comes to life in suicidally unpleasant ways. A portrait of a trapped person on melting canvas.