PEGBRJE: Changeling and Fugue in Void
One is straight out of my teenaged years, and the other is… not.
Changeling is a visual novel by Steamberry Studios, following the path of a young protagonist as she returns to her home town after 5 years of living in the big city with her family. Details begin to slowly emerge as she recalls her childhood ‘disappearances’ which lead to their move away, and it all comes crashing down as she learns about the town and her own past that she’s forgotten. This culminates in a typical route-based visual novel experience where you get to attempt a romance with one of the cute boys seen above.
Let’s get this out of the way early: I am a sucker for young adult fiction. I devoured my local library’s YA section before I was really a young adult, and continued to consume the libraries in the surrounding region until I moved away for university. YA fantasy where the protagonist is a young girl who moves to a new school to find out she has super powers and the cute boys may or may not have similar powers and are intimidated by her powers or attracted to her by fate. Settings where angsty boys end up as earth’s last hope due to coincidence and struggle to understand why, all while cute girls vie for his attention. I say this because I wholeheartedly believe this to be the most YA fiction game that I’ve played to date, and I mean no disrespect by this at all.
Changeling checks nearly every box of the YA fiction right off the bat. Protagonist has a murky past and is moving back to a town from the city to where it all began. Meets cute boys almost immediately through random mishaps at school or as soon as she moves in. Her brother hates her for unknown reasons (for all I know, he’s the protagonist in a different YA novel running parallel to this one) and constantly berates her. Protagonist finds herself surrounded by supernatural individuals that also happen to be the cute boys from earlier. She also learns of a secret society within the government tied to the supernatural elements. By YA standards, this is a home run — and I haven’t even gotten to her own backstory yet. It’s so unabashedly predictable, yet at the same time I found myself laughing along and continuing to play.
While my bias towards YA fiction is an obvious reason for this, I can’t help but admire the dedication and heart gone into the writing of Changeling. Characters all interact in a cheesy ‘I’m attracted to you because you’re the protagonist’, such as the traditional handing off of item and hands touch for way too long, but they’re also so genuine in who they are. I usually find that the love interests fall into specific tropes such as bad boy, nerd, popular kid, the standard idea of what teenagers think are the defining traits in people. Yet none of the characters I met ever felt as if they fit into a specific mold, even after lengthy interactions. The bad boy who rode a motorcycle? Blunt, to the point, yet formal and empathetic in a distanced way from the very beginning. The popular kid? Mistaken for a girl at first encounter and is a complete klutz who seems to stumble into popularity.
It’s these character traits that deviate from the traditional norm while still keeping some of the more realistic tropes that makes me continually flip through the chapters of Changeling. Interactions are predictable and fun, yet also feel fresh and meaningful to the protagonist as she struggles to get a grip on everything that’s occurring around her. Characters feel drawn to her for ‘main character’ reasons, but she integrates herself into the group quite seamlessly and with many others as to make her not completely stand out. It could be best described as returning to your bedroom after its been completely cleaned — the familiarity of the space is comforting, and nothing is really different, but its fresh and just different enough that you need a moment to feel it.
That’s how I felt while playing Changeling. It’s the same as every other novel I remember fondly, yet also embraces and encourages the comparisons as it delves more into the characters that drive the interactions. With over 40–60 hours of gameplay according to their itch.io, I doubt I will get through every route, but I don’t feel I need to. I have already experienced the joy of returning to this YA space once again.
Well that and I’m mostly just gunna romance the headless guy. Cuz heck yeah why not.
For a space that I’m completely not comfortable in, Fugue in Void.
Fugue in Void is a walking experience created by Moshe Linke, an indie dev. At the beginning it states ‘creative chaos’, followed by ‘this is a story of my mind’. What follows is by far one of the most bizarre and surreal experiences I’ve had in 45 minutes. It can only be described as a walking experience into the mind of another, and I fully don’t believe that this can be described.
Take for example, the title ‘Fugue in Void’. In musical terms, a fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique — that is to say, two harmonically interdependent yet rhythmically independent musical lines focused on a musical theme. Void in this case is either referring to the nullification of a contract, or the space of nothingness that resides in nothingness. So in essence, this is a game of paradoxes in nothingness — the complex nature of the mind and the enigma of thought that can only be described as ‘chaotic’.
If this sounds like word soup to you, I don’t blame you. I still struggle to understand my time in Fugue of Chaos. There is brutalist architecture surrounded by flashing lights and confusing spirals of monochromatic tubing. Images slowly begin to fade in, only to distort into a different object before fading out. Control is given and taken away without warning. It is an adventure into the mind of another, and quite frankly it terrifies me.
I don’t think I am supposed to understand Fugue in Void. A game that peers into the mind of another so plainly and chaotically does not need to be understood, yet when experienced that is all we attempt to do. That which we cannot understand terrifies us, and rightly so — yet it is at this lack of understanding that we can learn something new. At least, I believe that we can.
If this didn’t make anything clear, take away this: Fugue in Void is a walking simulator that gives no answer to no questions. To experience it is to experience the void.
Links below.
