else Heart.Break () Journal One–Out on the Town

image

“Look, you have to get out and meet some people!” the DJ I strike up a conversation with at the cafe tells me. “Not just sit alone in your room all night.” She says she’s playing a set at a nearby bar later and that I should come. I say I will.

This is an early moment in else Heart.Break (), a new adventure game in which you play as Sebastian, a young man who heads to the unfamiliar town of Dorisburg with the expectation of starting a new job. Wouldn’t you know it, things don’t quite fall into place when he gets there. Both he and you are left without a clear path forward, and there’s something scary about that, but something exciting about it, too. There’s a feeling of potential in the unknown, and it quickly becomes clear that Dorisburg isn’t an ordinary town. Strange things can happen here. Maybe wonderful things can happen here, too. 

else Heart.Break () wants you to feel grounded in Dorisburg, even as Sebastian’s entire future seems up in the air, and all the little ways that you can interact with the environment–just sitting at a table in the cafe and sipping your coffee, or playing arcade machines that actually function in the gamespace–help make the surreal city feel more real, too. 

image

Feeling connected to the environments that Sebastian inhabits makes me feel more connected to Sebastian. He seems to be on the brink of something, though when you’re actually where he is in life, it’s hard to know if you’re on the brink of fizzling out forever in a place where you know nobody and nobody knows you, or you’re about to find yourself and actually start your life in earnest. I expect it’s the latter that else Heart.Break has in store for Sebastian, but for now, his plight is reminding me of fears I’ve experienced when my entire future seemed lonely and uncertain. 

So the DJ tells Sebastian to not just sit alone in his room at night, to get out there and meet some people, to come to the bar where she’s playing a set later. I was at a bar the other night with a friend, talking about the difficulties I have with meeting people. 

There are so few people who I have any interest in to begin with, I said to her, and on top of that, so few of those people are likely to ever have any interest in me. “I go to lesbian bars and I feel so othered sometimes. I go out on dates with women I meet on OKCupid and some of them can’t even gender me correctly.” 

I guess I’m being a little loud when I say this because a woman at the next table turns around and says, “Really?! I’m sorry, that sucks. You’re a very attractive woman.” 

And it’s nice to hear that (when it’s sincere and appropriate and not creepy) and I actually have no shortage of people telling me I’m attractive and don’t get me wrong, I believe that I am. It’s just that meeting people is complicated and hard for me. Meeting great people is exceptionally rare.

In else Heart.Break (), there is no quest log. There are no stated objectives. I really like this. It makes Sebastian’s future feel that much more uncertain. You don’t have to go to the bar to hear the DJ play her set. But I reckon that she’s right. What good does it to Sebastian, or me, to “sit alone in your room all night”? So I head to the bar to see what fate might have in store for Sebastian. And fate clearly has something in store for him. Her name is Pixie. She strikes up a conversation with Sebastian, and invites him to a party the following night.

image

I immediately wonder if the game’s creator named her Pixie to tip us off that she’s a manic pixie dream girl, a character who exists just to change the male protagonist’s life. 

I believe in the possibility of meeting someone great. In fact, I’m counting on it. But I don’t want to meet someone who changes my life. I want to meet someone and have us change each other’s lives. Someone to fight the scary day with.

I need to see where this meeting with Pixie takes Sebastian.