Mind Palace
Overview
1st place in #Creativity and #Mood in College Game Jam 2021. Overall Ranking #8;
In a technologically advanced world of the future, remote-visualized-psychological therapy has become the trend. The protagonist is a psychotherapist whose daily job is to access people's mind palaces through neuronal network connections and find out precious memory fragments of trauma from layers of barriers, which should be repaired or even erased depending on the patient's condition. It is a rather dangerous profession, because the memory palace hides people's dark side and the patient's subconscious will interfere with the psychotherapist's treatment, and even cause fatal consequences. On this day, the psychotherapist's online consultation room had a case that was more difficult than anyone in the past.
Controls
1. Use Arrow Keys to play. ⬆️ ⬇️ ⬅️ ➡️
2. Click bottom-right to enable full-screen.
Development Team
Lingyan Jiang | Wenyi Xu | Tianchi Yang | Jiacheng Guo | Yuhao Gao.
Brainstorm & Mechanic
We got inspired from What Remains of Edith Finch.
We settled down our main mechanic: Divide the screen into two, the left side is a maze where an avatar of the player navigates, and the right side will be a black panel where 1 question and 4 options of answers will be displayed. The 4 options represent the 4 directions of Up, Down, Left, and Right. By choosing from the options on the right, the player make their moves in the maze on the left side.
This mechanism itself is simple, but we believe that it has offered capacity for narrative design.
For example, the player sees that there is only 1 way to go in the maze, so there is really only 1 option that the player should choose. However, the content of this option does not make sense at all.
This is just like sometimes when people do not feel like doing a thing while they do not have any other options; or when there is a fact about ourselves that we didn't fully discovered or we don't want to admit.
Narrative Design
I decided to set the story of this game as a process of a young woman talking to her heart.
The maze on the left side of the screen is this woman's memory palace.
At the beginning of the game, the player is guided to think that they are a psychotherapist who enters a patient’s memory palace through high technology to understand and guide the patient’s emotions and trauma by asking questions and getting answers from the patient.
As the game progresses, the player gradually discovers that the psychologist they represent and the patient they are treating are actually the same person. This person is actually talking to herself.
In the end, the character meets a demon who was generated by her trauma at the end of memory palace. By confronting the demon, the character finally relieves the trauma of his childhood.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
代入感很强 文本很有深度 令人深思 很简单的讲述了一个让人害怕但是平常的故事 从小女孩的角度出发讲述 玩家虽然不是小女孩但能感受到更深的恐惧
要是有音乐 并且是彩色的就更好了A really surprising and healing game!
Introducing gamers how to play this game with the first few lines and then BOOM--IT'S ALSO A MAZE GAME! I thought it was just another dialogue game at first but I guess I was wrong! A really unexpected move that makes me continue playing!
The story is also meaningful and very therapeutic. With the dialogue taking place as real therapy, the issues about the family of origin and personal identities are always heart-touching and thought-provoking. Everyone can recall their own childhood memories and traumas during the process. As the girl finally gets the resolvement by hearing the apology from her mother, I hope more people can get healed by playing this game.
很棒的游戏。虽然是第一次玩文字类游戏，但迷宫类的文字类挺有新意的(可能我玩游戏比较少吧) 刚进入游戏确实不知道做什么，我还以为要在输入框打入我的名字呢...
结果是按方向键。虽然最后知道是女性向游戏，但前大部分都是跟日常生活有关而且对话内容也容易让人联想到对应的事情。 读着对话鸡皮疙瘩都起来了，看来在文字方面真的下了不少功夫！有点小失望的是我以为是多结局游戏。如果能加入音乐就更好了
加油说得好
I really love this game even though I know I might be opinionated.
I felt lost at the very beginning of the game, not knowing who am I or what am I supposed to do. However, later on, I started to figure out some clues about myself through exploring the world of my own mind. Yes, I *am* actually lost and I seek help from a seemingly professional. It's almost like the game is designed this way on purpose so that I could be dropped into an unknown scenario and let me survive. Some of my personalities and beliefs are not well suited in the cynical society, some of my past are frowned upon by even the most intimate people. As a player, I could sympathize with the protagonist's experience from the narratives.
While progressing more and more into the game, I sense that maybe the conversation is actually between me and myself. It turns out to be true. I am the only one who could help me out of my own fallen castle deep down the ocean of the humiliating past. To me, this part is the most moving and stunning part of the story. All of these are expressed without explicit mentioning of anything but through the nuances of conversations only. I almost cried a bit during the later part.
Till this point, I know that in order to help myself to become better, I need to actually defeat and reconcile with the inner demon inside my memories. I have to let go of my past and restore faith in myself and others just like me.
The ending is not something unexpected, but the delicate and exquisite emotions are well conveyed through the conversations themselves, which is no small feat, in my opinion.
The game is not perfect of course, given how little time the game was completed in and the current quality, I hope this game could surely be expanded and refined into its true final form. with better environments, arts, interactions, and user experience because I think the game deserves them. At the core, what I value the most is the story and the flow of the storytelling. More importantly, the game itself discusses a commonly overlooked social problem among young females on body-shaming, slut-shaming as well as toxic and abusive parents. These experiences in the earlier years of someone may have hurt or divert the life forever afterward, but due to their intimate nature and the conservative social norm in some areas, they are lesser know to others who are privileged enough that haven't had such bad experiences. I hope this game could let people know that these things truly exist, and they could happen to the closest people around us, and they do more harm than one could imagine. As someone who hasn't experienced such things myself, through this game, I find the game makes me better sympathize with people who might have been through this terrible nightmare.
Thank you.