Kaboom by Anonymous
It’s anonymous. Of course it’s anonymous, although you have to play to the very end to find out why it had to be anonymous. It is a sad thing that this game has to be made, and another sad thing that it had to be made anonymously. “But at least we have the game!” Yeah, well. That’s true, and it’s a fine game, which is very nice to have and be allowed to play. But we know that this niceness pales in comparison to the horror and grief that made the game necessary. And the author knows it; and the game is also about that, in its own small way, at the very end, without being ostentatious about it. Which is exactly right – this game is an apology, and an apology does not want to be ostentatious.
So, we play a stuffed hare, and when we wake up after a nightmare, we find that the little girl who is our mistress is bleeding and in mortal danger. Also, the house is not in a good shape. These two facts, together with the knowledge that the game was translated from Russian, made me guess what was going on almost immediately, so in so far as Kaboom might depend on later revelations to create a bigger emotional impact, it didn’t really work for me. But I’m not sure it needs those revelations.
Our aim is to get people inside the house who can help the little girl. Her parents aren’t responding, so it’s up to us to do something. The puzzles are traditional object manipulation puzzles, not too hard, but made slightly tedious by the fact that the game hasn’t been streamlined very well: we need to click far more often than is necessary, e.g., to reveal room descriptions and to get back to the object we are working on. But thematically, I liked them. We use old toys that have been in the family for some time, and other objects that mean something to these people. It’s a powerful reminder that the physical destruction of a home is also the destruction of meaning. Many of the puzzles also require us to somehow dirty or hurt ourselves – the very first one has us cover our front paws in blood, and we’ll also get glue on ourselves, get burned, and suffer other indignities. We are indeed sacrificing ourselves; but it also seems to me that it is not an accident that the hare, being the fictional character through which the Russian author is living the fantasy of being able to help a Ukrainian girl, starts with bloodstained paws. At the end the hare dreams of being found and cleaned and perhaps given to a new family – but, he thinks, cynically, “Stuff like that only happens in fairy tales.” Forgiveness, cleansing, the restoration of bonds; it is too much to hope for.
The ending sequence is brilliant in another way as well. Strictly speaking, it is only once we hear the rescuers say words in Cyrillic script that the game becomes geographically located. These words are translated for us, except for one: on finding the girl, the rescuers drop the word ‘сиротюка’, which the hare reflects he has never heard before. You cannot find out in-game what the word means. You have to leave the fairytale and go to your online Ukrainian dictionary, and then you learn that, yes, it means what maybe you feared it meant: orphan. Her parents are dead. Of course in fairytales the girl does not get rescued in order to then find out that her parents are dead. But as the very act of having to look up the word outside of the story reminds us: what this story is telling us is very much not a fairytale, but all too fucking real.