im writing this first thing in the morning after finishing the game last night. spoilers ahead, reader beware.
i think the first, and by far most important, thing to say about this game is that it is beautiful, in every meaning of the word. the soundtrack, the cgs, the writing, everything. roaches’s blind date genuinely had me fucking paranoid in a way no game has in some time, maybe ever. i’m especially glad to have spent more time with Noise, as schizophrenic characters that aren’t disgusting ableist stereotypes are few and very far between. Harsh Noise my fucking beloved <3.
in the fullness of time, though, I think this game will be remembered far, far more for its second half, with its wall breaks and manifesti and tonal shift. this game made me feel like…a voyeur, watching the mental breakdown of an artist i enjoy on some social media site, unable to do anything about it but having an unfathomable amount that i want to say. i think there’s a lot in there that really resonated with me and there’s a lot in there that feels like it was something put in the there so it can be processed and understood and moved past, but i’m still stuck on the parts of this game that reveal that it simply wasn’t made for me.
i have a very different relationship to gender and the way my body has enacted it without my consent, i have a strained relationship with the concept of transfemininity and transfeminine transsexuality, and it all stems back to the horrific rise of social violence that transfems are enacting upon one another. in a somewhat cruel twist, i often found myself sympathetic to a certain slice of Death Industrial. while obviously there were one million reasons that her comeuppance was deserved, i can’t look past the person there who was an outsider to society, yet an outsider to this community that feels like it should be at least somewhat open to her, who maybe could have found a way if she knew how to bond with people. i also can’t help but wonder, in this game about learning to love the transfemine body in the face of terminal dysphoria, if testosterone could have helped her in some way.
loner dog, to me and in large part, was a game about finding yourself in a community of peers i have never been allowed access to, because i’m too butch or too fat or too brown or too mixed or too autistic or not trans enough or too weirdly trans or because i can’t force myself to be a fucking gold star lesbian or whatever. it provided, for however mixed a bag and however brief a moment, a window into a life that striving for felt sisyphean in nature to me. in turn, the death of harsh noise felt like…one person’s “come to jesus” moment on what that community is, what it means in the greater world, what is beautiful about it, what is ugly about it, what infections may fester within it. that game isn’t for me, and it never could be, but i hope it reaches those who need it. it reminded me that the only person who can tell the stories i want in hopes of reaching the people i want it to reach is me. there’s a jam starting in two weeks, and i’m hopeful i’ll have something done by the end of it.
from now till the earth reclaims me
Harsh Noise my beloved <3