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rynlingIf Found is a two-hour visual novel about a transgender 23yo who doesn’t get accepted to grad school and goes home to Ireland to her working-class single mother, who means well but doesn’t understand what “transgender” means because it’s 1993. This delusional 23yo child doesn’t attempt to explain anything to her mother and then gets mortally offended by her mother’s lack of understanding.
If Found is a solipsistic empathy vampire that made me hate:
(1) Ireland,
(2) gay people,
(3) visual novels,
(4) and myself,
in that order. It’s a pretentious but boring story about a shitty and boring protagonist told through shitty and boring art and delivered in the most pretentious yet boring way imaginable. I got an hour and 45 minutes into this two-hour game and couldn’t bring myself to put in the last fifteen minutes to finish it.
It could be that the story hits too close to home for me personally, and that I don’t empathize with the protagonist’s poor choices because I made different choices when I found myself in a similar situation at around the same age. (By which I mean: I am gay and nonbinary, I was homeless after being disowned by my religious family, and I went to grad school right after college.)
I think it’s more fair to say that this particular story should have been a graphic novel, and that it really doesn’t need to be a game. There are no dialog choices and zero elements of gameplay, and the player can do nothing but sit there and press the same button over and over again while the text progresses e x t r e m e l y slowly. It’s a horrendous slog.
Also, as a major plot point, the protagonist accuses a sweet and gentle 19yo gay man of assault despite the fact that he did nothing but confess his crush on her after she spent a week flirting with him. This is assault because she’s white and he’s South Asian, and he’s threatening because of his brown skin, I guess. That’s always fun.
I suspect that a lot of the praise for If Found probably comes from people who spent about twenty minutes with it, came to the conclusion that the concept is interesting, and then walked away. Maybe if the “game” were indeed twenty to thirty minutes long, it would have worked better as an experimental piece of mixed-media art. As it stands, it’s an endurance test that’s painful to sit through.
If Found is a solipsistic empathy vampire that made me hate:
(1) Ireland,
(2) gay people,
(3) visual novels,
(4) and myself,
in that order. It’s a pretentious but boring story about a shitty and boring protagonist told through shitty and boring art and delivered in the most pretentious yet boring way imaginable. I got an hour and 45 minutes into this two-hour game and couldn’t bring myself to put in the last fifteen minutes to finish it.
It could be that the story hits too close to home for me personally, and that I don’t empathize with the protagonist’s poor choices because I made different choices when I found myself in a similar situation at around the same age. (By which I mean: I am gay and nonbinary, I was homeless after being disowned by my religious family, and I went to grad school right after college.)
I think it’s more fair to say that this particular story should have been a graphic novel, and that it really doesn’t need to be a game. There are no dialog choices and zero elements of gameplay, and the player can do nothing but sit there and press the same button over and over again while the text progresses e x t r e m e l y slowly. It’s a horrendous slog.
Also, as a major plot point, the protagonist accuses a sweet and gentle 19yo gay man of assault despite the fact that he did nothing but confess his crush on her after she spent a week flirting with him. This is assault because she’s white and he’s South Asian, and he’s threatening because of his brown skin, I guess. That’s always fun.
I suspect that a lot of the praise for If Found probably comes from people who spent about twenty minutes with it, came to the conclusion that the concept is interesting, and then walked away. Maybe if the “game” were indeed twenty to thirty minutes long, it would have worked better as an experimental piece of mixed-media art. As it stands, it’s an endurance test that’s painful to sit through.
