There is a game and you will play it. A you and a you and a you and a you. Because long after this local space erupts, when there's no longer you and me, this piece of art will remain and its memories will remain. Hekki grace!

If you love it, it'll love you back; in all its shades, violet and pink and green and blue... to red. The colours chosen for you by our ancestors. By your mother... and her mother before her, and her mother before her... Does it stretch on like this? Nowhere to go but back and forth...

Everything I just wrote is either a direct quote, a paraphrase or an echo from the game. It's all from different chapters, timestamps, from miscellaneous contexts, but arranged to fit together, be evocative and make emotional sense. I even toyed with the idea of writing the whole review with nothing but phrases from the game. If there ever was a piece of media where over-citing would make a perfect referential fit, it's this one. Its narrative is literally built on the power of repeated words. The main storytelling device, the pivotal means of communication, the central theme - words echoing back and forth... back and forth... through generations, time and memories, putting you in a constant state of déjà vu. Imagine if you had an intergalactic library of stored memories of all time and all history - would you even need new words? Everything has already been said, you can only repeat it... back and forth...

I dream every night of going back home. Haunted by a place that doesn't exist. My eyes start watering, it's as if the ocean wants its water back. I am spilling. It's too much for any one to hold. Spill my insides all over the inside sky... The very fabric of me is transforming.

A dangerous gravity, this game. From the very start, from the sight of the dark still water, I was caught in it. This has been a thoroughly cathartic experience and I was thinking why it had such a profoundly dehydrating effect on me, why I'd become so flooded as to just start... spilling... and spilling... "Bodies have so much water." Is it sickness or just sadness? The answer is complex and multifaceted just like the game. I'll try to capture some of its most resonant strands.


The story isn't a tearjerker though, it doesn't need such cheap tricks, but it's one deeply human, heartfelt sci-fi, built on the bones of its ancestors, on remembering those that remain, and remain, and remain... A postapocalyptic speculative fiction about past, history, time, reminiscing. Hauntingly nostalgic, reflective and impressionistic, looking back from the future, while trying to move foreword. "Swirly... Like a ballet of possibilities twists beneath its surface..."
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Fragmented yet linear, monumental in scope yet poignantly intimate and personal, spanning generations across time and spaces, diving head on into a messy yarn of swirling timelines; traversing huge bodies of water and intergalactic dust alike, searching for a home, looking for new memories. From Hong Kong to Canada to the Orchard; from two stars to one star; from sphere to square; from dangerous nearness whose gravity is echoing to a landing and a remaining. "A diagonal slice through time, place and form" - to quote another piece of gaming art whose migratory ghosts I couldn't help but see wandering about.

From immigrants to aliens, from blue to red, one to six, from allfather to allmother, mothers to daughters, shell to sister, hair to hair, from theocracy to red terror, from individualism to collectivism, sphere to square, names to functions, from traditionalism to progressivism, grace to gratitude, doublespeak to common tongue, pandemic to Sinophobia, discordance to concordance, fire to water, resistance to survival, from apocalypse to ascension, from decoupling of substances to fundamental reordering, history to myth, from a mean high school girl to a hallowed saint, from ancient sins to bleeding wounds, traumas to oceans of tears, from the last supper of a family that eats together to the mass communion with a new family, from city to obsession... "The us is a weave that can be unpicked."

Narrative threading is incredibly complex, but the game plays it tight and loose with exceptional confidence, using mirroring, patterns and associations to connect all the assorted strands. Because underneath them all, this is a game about memory. And what better means to weave a story through, because that's what (hi)story essentially is. Or rather, her story.

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The game tackles herstory through generations of women, their sacrifices, fighting spirit and survival. It's a story of her, and a her, and a her: Iris, and her mother, and her mother's mother, and all the sisters. It's matrilineal like that. It's a game about abandoning your mother, about overcoming her while honouring her. Mothers as authority figures, overbearing, controlling mothers, mothers as perpetual martyrs, always serving others. Mothers carrying severe post-traumatic paranoia together with the thanklessness of parenting, and passing it on down the line. Daughters becoming like their mothers even though they swore not to, mommy issues galore. Ancient sins and traumas get propagated and perpetuated; same patterns repeat throughout herstory. "There is an us with a pattern we are threading."

The repeating patterns are very familiar from our real world history and culture; they resonate with stark clarity, as this individual herstory becomes collective by slowly turning into myth, a hagiography, a gospel. Religious imagery and allusions are strong in this one: from the original sin and loss of innocence, to departure from the Garden, to the Ancient Sister's pride, to allowing your gods to die... To Ascension and Mass Communion. Through it all, cultural, social and political strands tighten into a knot. I already mentioned some, it felt like watching mini history unfold within a small enclosure. "There is a choice and you will make it." - but only at the very end of the game; otherwise, player 'choices' are either flavour or dialogue options, means of conversation. Still, complex societal themes and currents are expressed, dilemmas and messy decisions hard to reconcile: to be water and survive at all costs, regardless of the soul, or to burn for justice and keep your anger close in order to right the past wrongs; to find comfort in tradition which can be a dangerous gravity, or to move so fast to notice there are things worth remembering; to keep an open bleeding wound or to cauterise it; to forgive... or forget. To carry baggage and clutter constantly with us because we're scared of loss, or to choose what to inherit and what to let go, to learn that we can't hold onto everything, because... "Sometimes, you just don't fit in the backpack."

Are we still talking about societal things or have we ventured into a personal space? It started to feel too close to home somehow. That's what the game does constantly; it echoes, resembles, implies... It resonates.* The foreshadowing, mirroring, parallels are masterfully done, they hit you in tidal waves. Truly, this game works like water, and water is a recurring visual and symbolic motif; it creates such strong murmur.

AND IT'S SPILLING... ALL THE WAY INTO THE FULL REVIEW

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This is a game about trust. Armed not with a pristine blade, but with choices and questions, you decide whether to put it in Her or Him. Word of advice though: don't believe His lies! If you do, it'll be the end of the game. And without these wounds and horrors, you would be as you were before, you would not feel the joy of experiencing this transformative "song written in blood" in all its multitudes, for you wouldn't know its absence. The only way out is through Her. That's how it is in love and war. Right at the start it tells you that it's a love story, and with it, it gives you a lens through which to see it, frames it in a particular way. Make no mistake, that's the only thing you can believe in, but perhaps not in the way you expect. Not in all the ways...

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3149519071

Whatever you think the game is, it isn't... just that. It shifts and moulds, ebbs and flows, challenges expectations. It's elusive, you can't catch it and put it in neat drawers, shackle with labels, bind it in roles, just like the titular Princess. As soon as you grasp it on one level, get to know one aspect, she transforms into something else. From the parts that don't fit your logical and ordering gaze appears another layer and another, the deeper you descend the circles of hell reality, the more you unwind the world. The best thing is that it works on every one of those levels, they are thoroughly entwined. It loops back, collapsing into itself, and yet staying the same.

Starting as a subverted fairytale, with a generic Hero on a path in the woods, where a cabin awaits and in it... a Witch Princess you're supposed to slay/save. The dichotomy and playing with millennia-ingrained associations are set up right off the bat. And from then, it goes farther and farther into archetypes - from fairytale to creation myth. At the same time, when you glimpse through a prism of another mirror, it positions itself almost like a "battle of the sexes". A man and a woman in the cabin in the woods, playing roles to occupy forever. Mirroring each other, enacting all the mind games and power dynamics taken to their absurd, volatile conclusions. And to whimpering endings to awkward starts of the relationship. A definitive dating sim if I ever saw one. But that's just one facet, one of many masks it wears.

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The heteronormativity is inevitable by design, owing to feminine-masculine paradigm carved deeply into our lizard brains by eons upon eons... therefore perfect for reimagining. It entirely reflects the binary play, dance of the opposites, yin-yang of the central theme. Permeated with dichotomies from top to bottom, the game deals in polarities, dualities that are inexplicably, perplexingly caught in eternal entanglement, not knowing where one ends and the other begins. "It's in our nature to be trapped", but also complementing and completing each other like two halves of the same whole. "We aren't stuck. We're one." It's like it flirts with some grand Romance... if only we trusted each other.


Where to even start? StP touched on every aspect of toxic codependency it could fit within this mutually tethered infinite dance bathed in blood. Love turned to hate turned to seething.

Trust issues, betrayal, resentment, power play, backstabbing, cruelty, wrestling for control, trauma bond, co/interdependence, enmeshment, gaslighting (tbh, the Narrator was the one who gaslighted me the most), shared illusion. Boundaries? What are boundaries when you're you're caught in twisting vines of the Wild force of Nature, contorting you, intertwining you? Boundaries are a reminder of the pain of separation and fear of falling apart. A limit of your world. "We're one... We're a path in the woods" with no beginning and no end, and on that path is a point where toxic codependency becomes sacred ontological symbiosis.

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Have I just romanticised malignant dynamic? Has the game? Relax! If anything, it plays with romanticisation in a cosmically cheeky way rather than being one. It works because it's thoroughly metaphorical and allegorical, keeping the needed distance while making it fun and poignant in equal measure. Smart and witty, its healthy self-aware humour saves it from the paralysing horror. (Chanting "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves." also helps.) Every line is full of valuable insight, firing your synapses in multiple directions. But underneath it all, it's deeply heartfelt, emitting a "warm soothing glow", as if saying "I'm sorry if it hurt" with its open, bleeding heart laid bare outside of its ribcage, after ripping yours out.


When you pass by another mirror, just squeezing through a crack between the cage and the abyss, a whole new perspective opens up, a vast and quiet plane that will make you see this dynamic more fully and profoundly. Is it the ontological symbiosis of abstract concepts dressed as an interdependent relationship, or is that kind of personification of the universal used to explore human connections? It works both ways. It works in many mysterious ways: human, mythological, grand metaphysical and metanarrative. This is a place where, in playing with metanarrative tools, metafictional and metaphysical become one and the same. Yes, that's a lot of meta. Or rather, the metaphysical underbelly of reality becomes fictional, the game, whereas the fictional world in need of saving shifts into metafictional.

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>>Uncut FULL Review<<

I composed this write-up as if I'm going down the circles of reality, passing many levels on which this game can be enjoyed. Reflections on myth, existence, meta... Love. But for that you need to read the pristine version of this review as some of it would be considered "spoiler", so perhaps check it out only after getting one ending. A tickle: think of many contrasting concepts that we like to gender and how the game subverts it. It masquerades as dualism, but is perspectivist in essence. Who's Acting and who's Reacting, who has Roles to play and who has Choices isn't so clear-cut when all the paths are circles.

When you abstract the world down to the solipsistic level, an island locked within a cage of cold isolation floating over the abyss... all of it is You. Well, except that one thing, outside of you. The Other. To cross the limit of your world towards that other, to make a bridge, to free yourself from the prison of inward-facing mirrors - that's love. To see yourself as a reflection in their eyes, like you can never do on your own. That's why the line from the title is so powerful, even if poetically ironic after such violence. It's unpredictable, it could start a raging fire; it's absolutely terrifying, sharing a heart with another. "But the most terrifying thing of all is to leave one's heart unshared." To project yourself over the vast nothingness of the abyss, you need to make a leap of faith. It was always about trust.

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Never mind that... All these heady themes aside, the game is simply unapologetically FUN. It revels in it. The best way to fight oblivion. I was savouring it, not wanting to put a dot on it, because I couldn't ever play it again for the First time, even though I played it numerous first times. But She, in her infinite wisdom, "unfurling an endless cascade of smiles", told me to not mourn her... for she will make for an unforgettable heart.<3