So, hi! Naarel here! It’s after Ectocomp results are published and I feel a little dizzy, knowing that I got FOURTH. PLACE, not only in my category, but also in the overall ranking of all 48 games. Excuse me my language, but holy fucking shit. What the fuck.
I guess I need to make a postmortem for this bad boy now. Sit down, relax, and make sure you don’t look into any mirrors. There will be spoilers and the trigger warnings that apply to the game most likely apply to this postmortem as well.
1. From the Beginning
I decided to enter Ectocomp for funsies. After all, I’m coming back to my interactive fiction roots, and Ectocomp seemed like one of less intimidating ways to get into the more competitive side of things.
My initial plan was to enter LPM, just to make something without care and see how things go. So, I started throwing ideas to get to what I wanted to do, and I knew that I wanted to do something with a “double” - a doppelganger, a rogue reflection in the mirror, something like that. It’s really a fascinating concept, after all. The idea that something could replace you, or that there is some other you that you just don’t have an access to. The idea of a double life.
The first idea was codenamed “Evelyn Red/Evelyn Blue” - a series of short diary entries from a woman and a man, both named Evelyn, based on a poem I wrote some time ago. They sooner or later realize that strange things are happening around them, and their realities are melting together, all culminating in a big reveal that Evelyn Red and Evelyn Blue are the same person from two different timelines - except, Blue transitioned, while Red didn’t. That sounds pretty cool and trans, and I love it when my work is queer. Except, I started taking this one VERY personally, and it just wasn’t sustainable for me to continue with it. Therefore, it got scrapped, but the idea of that duality remained. I was thinking about the right hand/left hand duality as well, due to the question from CAIN TTRPG character creation - “is your hand your hand?”.
One evening, I was listening to a song that my friend sent me - “Mona Lisa Moan” by Eartheater. There’s a line there that goes “how you gonna see me in your dreams/then freeze when you meet me?”. This made me think about the duality between real life and fantasy, and from this point, I started thinking about a Jekyll-and-Hyde-esque situation, in which there’s a character with hidden desires that acts on them through their alter ego. From here, I got the character of Mona, the hedonistic alter ego to a shy and reserved Lisa.
Here we go. The beginning.
2. Mona Lisa and the Changelings
The very first idea was pretty simple: Lisa wakes up after an (implied traumatic) event she can’t quite remember. Struggling with anxiety and depression, she escapes into the fantasy of being someone else - a woman called Mona, who’s extroverted and bold. Lisa leaves her boring life behind every night, taking on the persona of Mona. However, as time passes, Lisa realizes that Mona has become her own entity, and that Mona wants to take over her life completely. And so commences the brutal, psychological and physical fight over the body.
And if you think about it for a second longer, you’ll know why I didn’t decide to go with this idea. Oh wow, a traumatized person develops a different personality which later becomes violent. Never done before. Totally sensitive and cool. In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.
So that version got scrapped pretty quickly, but I couldn’t give up on Mona and Lisa. There was just something about them. I was on a walk in my beloved Polish middle of nowhere when suddenly, I remembered an old idea I had (another one of the personal ones that’d kill me if I made them real…), and… bingo.
I was passing by a place where another one of my ideas was born and died. In short: a trans guy finds a corpse in a ditch - one that looks just like him before he transitioned. Panicked, he hides the body and comes back home, only to see that the corpse is here, and it’s not only breathing and “living”, but also, it replaced him completely. It’s like he doesn’t exist anymore, or like he never existed in the first place. The replacement narrative - the thought that something could take your place and nobody would notice or even remember that you existed - now, that’s terrifying.
Somehow, my mind connected that with the lore of changelings (and the Slavic equivalent of a changeling called odmieniec or podmieniec - at least in Polish). After all, they are replacing the original person, aren’t they? I kept connecting the dots. Replacement. Replacement from the start. Cuckoos? Cuckoos! Brood parasitism. Parasitism.
Here we go. A changeling - a parasite. A being that doesn’t have a body of its own, so it has to take over someone else’s body. Fairly easy to connect it to actual changeling beliefs, which most likely came as an explanation of neurodivergency and/or various illnesses and conditions that weren’t understood well in the past.
And so, the final idea: there’s a changeling and there’s a host. They have one body, and we have to figure out where to go from here. The horror of the host not having full control over her body and the horror of the changeling not truly having a body of her own.
3. Slide to the Left, Slide to the Right
So I decided to go for it. Monica - the left hand (I changed the name… I felt like it’d be too funny haha to keep them as Mona and Lisa), and Lisa - the right hand. Handedness here is significant - the “left hand” was often seen as the “wrong” hand, one that’s “out of norm”, and Monica was meant to be fairly “out of norm” compared to Lisa, who’s a “model citizen”, let’s say.
Also, I took the title from the Bible, because as an ex-Catholic, I just kinda need to use the stuff from the past sometimes. It’s from Matthew 6:3, and most translations render it something like “When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”. I always thought that, in the literal sense, it was a rather fascinating thing: doing something so secretly that not even your other body part knows. And the right hand is, biblically, aligned with strength, with power, with authority. Left hand is the inferior one, the one associated with weakness and wickedness (the word “sinister” comes from Latin “sinister” - left hand…). It was fun to think about this duality - the dull right hand in charge and the spontaneous left hand underneath it.
I thought it’d be intriguing to play with the visual orientation of the text on the screen to reflect it all. Lisa got that traditional, left-to-right text orientation - the norm in English. Monica got the non-standard right-to-left. In the middle, there are bits for dialogue and, at one point, the thoughts of the main character from before the change. The centered parts are “objective” - from a perspective that is neither Monica, nor Lisa’s.
This ended up being confusing. I tried to remedy that in early builds by color-coding the dialogue, as I didn’t want to use dialogue tags (I don’t like to write them…), but it was hard to find colors that will be readable and will have good contrast on both the light and the dark theme of the template I used. That, and the fact that in some scenes, you are meant to be confused as to who’s speaking. Not telling you which ones. Figure that out yourself.
I decided to make the two characters distinct: one in the past, with her own life, and one in the present, also with her own life. One day from Monica’s life, one from Lisa’s - separate entities in separate timelines. I was meant to slowly merge the two together with time, but…
Well, guess what. It’s time for me to talk about all the shit I wanted to do and didn’t do.
4. All the Shit I Didn't Do
In 2023, I burned out severely and became a miserable shadow of my former self after I tried to make “Let’s Get Bitter Together”. I promised myself then that I’ll never push myself this hard for a game, ever. I kept this promise.
I quickly realized that I was writing way beyond the time and energy I had. This grand plan of slowly merging the two timelines in sublime ways wasn’t going to work because I just don’t write fast enough and I just don’t have energy for it. Therefore, a lot of content got scrapped, deleted or cancelled. Here, I’ll introduce some of those.
Choices. Yes, you were meant to have choices scattered all across the story. Choosing things that aligned with Lisa’s values would give you Lisa points, choosing those that aligned with Monica gave you Monica points. In the final scene, points get tallied up, and you get the ending that you were working for. Perfect balance between the two would unlock a secret third ending, the one in which Lisa and Monica cooperate. Needless to say, I’m glad this got scrapped - it really hits harder when you have only one final choice to make, and when you have no option of cooperating. Also, it saved my sanity, managing branching would kill me, I think.
More body horror scenes in Lisa timeline. Like, a whole lot more, based on the body tearing itself apart or developing strangely due to it being unable to handle two presences within itself. Double irises and second sets of teeth and shit like that. The only thing that really remained from it was the double heart - metaphor for them both being alive and having their own desires and motivation. I regret that I didn’t do it because they were meant to get increasingly worse while Lisa would keep denying that anything wrong was happening, hammering home her desire to just keep on going with her perfectly mundane life.
More scenes with Vivienne in the Monica timeline. The bonding that she and Monica did was meant to escalate to full on relationship levels, which would certainly push Monica towards wondering how ethical having a relationship in a borrowed body really is. The parallel between Vivienne’s transness and the changeling thing was meant to be explored within those scenes as well. Pains me that I scrapped them, though I’m relieved that I don’t have to deal with the ethics of consent in this situation.
A “what do we do with a changeling” scene. See, there’s one bit of crucial lore that was somehow hinted at, but not truly explored. There are scenes where Monica’s parents are brought up. There was a scene where they argue over their dazed and confused daughter about what they should do with the obvious changeling infection that she’s going through, and decide that… they should let the changeling take over. Yep, that’s right. Monica’s parents not only knew their daughter was getting replaced, but also actively encouraged Lisa’s existence. This is hinted at in the actual text where Monica’s mother tells her that she’s “always been” Lisa, and in the off-hand line where Monica remembers her parents took all the mirrors out of the house (as this is one of changeling weaknesses). This also tied to Vivienne’s “my mother thought I was a changeling” bit. It ties pretty much to the mindset of “I’d rather have my child be sick or dead instead of whatever they are now” that’s unsettlingly common with parents of queer and neurodivergent kids. “I’d rather have this well-behaved child that obeys instead of whatever I have now”. You get what I mean. I simply didn’t have time for that, so it had to go, unfortunately.
A flashback scene where Lisa and Monica have a conversation about sharing the body. Yeah, this one just… I just didn’t know where to put it. I really wanted to start with Monica’s first night out to put the reader nicely in this weird situation. It’s a shame that I couldn’t figure out where it went because I thought it’d be really interesting to write their first conscious interaction where it became clear why Lisa let Monica control the body again. I won’t say what’s the reason because I think that the mystery is a part of what makes the whole thing interesting. Still sad that I didn’t write it.
Just so I don’t do a whole new section, I need to say that all the time cuts and prioritizing myself resulted in some bits of “…left hand…” being not up to my standard. Specifically, the changeling infodump that Vivienne does (believe me, it makes me cringe), and the endings. I wrote the endings about 20 minutes before the deadline ended. Yep, that’s right. The whole thing didn’t even get edited properly once. I felt incredibly bad about reading the “cleanly edited” note on one of the reviews that I sent a DM with the entire confession about how I did NOT edit anything.
Anyway. Time for us to move to a more interesting section.
5. If I'm a Changeling, and You're a Changeling, Then Who's Controlling the Narrative?
I won’t deny: it was pretty fun to make it all into a “who’s the changeling” thing. I really liked the whole process of muddying and blurring this question. It was also incredibly fun for me to read what people thought about it. Of course, we get the standard take of “Lisa is the changeling”. But then, there were people who thought it’s actually Monica, which was really interesting to see! That meant that my little mind games, however unsophisticated they really were, worked.
There were also interpretations I haven’t considered, such as “they’re both changelings”. Utterly obsessed with this one, because it implies there was a third person who got completely consumed by both of them, and now, the changelings are fighting for their place. Now that’s really interesting, and I say it unironically, I was thinking about it a lot.
Can’t be in this section without mentioning the “we [the player] are the changeling”. I still need to sit a little with this one.
My intention was, of course, for Lisa to be the changeling, but I quickly found out that people are doing very interesting things when you give them your work and let them bite into it. I left a lot of things vague, either on purpose, or because I didn’t have time to flesh them out. This left enough field for speculation about the themes, vibes and my intentions.
My intention is for my work to make people feel, think and reflect.
Is it about queerness? Is it about capitalism? Is it about conflict of desires? All of them, maybe? I leave answering this question to you. If you read it and it moved you somehow, and if you could relate, and if it made you think about yourself, that was all I wanted to do with it.
The “meta” layer of “…left hand…” was truly fascinating. The way people talked about it and made their own theories really made me feel like I did something great. And above it, of course, was the big question with a hypothesis that I posed to everyone who finished playing and was within my message range.
6. Which Hand Did You Choose?
There’s only one choice in the entire game: a choice between the left and the right hand. This is where you choose who’ll control the body from now on.
Now, Lisa was written in a very specific manner. She seems to have no hobbies, no interests, no friends, nothing outside of her work and chores at home. She’s completely uninterested in all the weird things that are happening to her and around her, and she tries her best to not think, simply moving from point A to point B, from one day to the next. Monica, on the other hand (heh), is clearly social, capable of meeting new people, curious, and in need to explore. All of that, combined with the fact that Lisa is an intruder as a changeling, made me believe that people will majorly side with the left hand. This is why I asked - I needed to have that confirmed or debunked.
And of course, they did… but not in the proportions I expected. I don’t have the exact data - I know, I know - but more people than I expected sided with Lisa first. This was quite a surprise for me. Narratively, choosing Lisa seems to be the bad option. But see, I didn’t even want the right hand option to lead to a “bad end”. The original ending here was far more bleak, but I thought to myself: holy shit, this is so unfair. Outside of gaslighting Monica, Lisa did nothing wrong. She’s got no other way to live but the strange parasitism she’s condemned to. She just wanted her fucking spreadsheets, for fucks sake, and who am I to deny a woman a joy of Excel?
When the reviews and comments started rolling in, I realized one thing kept being brought up over and over again.
“I felt bad for Lisa.”
It really makes me tear up when I think about it, and it makes me tear up when I’m writing this postmortem now. I realized that people are far kinder than I thought. That they read about the boring, apathetic Office Worker #21224 and thought: “damn, I want to see her happy too. I feel bad that nobody cares about her. It felt wrong to take this life away from her, even if it’s not the right choice to make.”
And I really think that the beauty of releasing something to the world is learning more about people who interact with your work. It was strangely uplifting to see people be conflicted about the final choice and have such strong feelings for Lisa. There are Lisas everywhere, after all: at your school and at your workplace, on public transport and in the streets. I’m just happy to know that people are more empathetic than I expected. I really am.
7. So, What Now?
I don’t know. I’m already lowkey planning my entry for Ectocomp next year. We’re diving into Gothic vibes if I’ll keep the idea. I think I still need to process my 4th place, which I did not expect, from this year, though. Strong debut. I’ll never best that, I fear.
Thank you to everyone who played, everyone who reviewed, everyone who told me what their choice was, everyone who supported me, everyone who even thought “damn, this looks cool! I wish I had time to play it”, and of course, everyone who voted. Jesus godsblessed Christ, this was more than 50% five stars.
So, what now? Well. I’m going to lie down. I need it.
