It is fun to see people "get" Possessors
I wrote two weeks ago about Possessors, the last game I worked on at Heart Machine. I joined the Possessors team two years before it came out to help with comprehensive story revisions, and to write new material (a lot of the side conversations between the two protagonists, Luca and Rhem). I think the story is extremely good. And i wouldn't have come across without art from Sophie Medvedeva, who did the many incredible character portraits for the entire cast.
I've been extremely busy over the past two weeks, because I'm moving yet again, for the third time in three months. But Myriame, our producer, has been paying a lot closer attention to the people playing this game than I've been able to, and she passed along this short article about the game's themes.
When a game finally comes out, it's always a huge relief to see people "get" what you were trying to say with the story. You have to trust that players will get it... but sometimes, you end up making a lot of licorice-flavored material, where you know that not everyone will appreciate what you're trying to do. I've worked on a lot of games about emotionally unsettled, often-inappropriate, volatile protagonists who are sometimes cruel to their friends, who do things that are self-evidently "stupid", who never quite say what they really mean, and who struggle to articulate what they really feel. Possessors is like, this, and Mageseeker was also like this. I'm currently working as a contractor on yet another game like this. (They're my favorites.)
When I work on a game like this, I'm always hoping that the audience will actually engage on any level with the story's themes, and develop a well-rounded sense of the character and their problems. You want an audience who can sympathize with the character, critique them, and also understand why they're sometimes failing to be the person they want to be. Again... you just have to trust that the audience can do this, and that they will. But the internet is a never-ending carousel of people with zero media literacy, so it's easy to imagine the hordes of people who could fail to engage with your work. This makes it such a relief to get proof that people have engaged with it.
Anyway, reading this article was some of that proof for me! Lex focuses in particular on a conversation I was very excited to write, where the demon Rhem confronts Luca, the protagonist, with some very blunt questions about her lower-class upbringing. Luca blows up at him, refuses to share any vulnerability about this, and rages that she shouldn't have to think about these awkward things in her life. It's great to see someone get what we were doing with that scene, understand why it's in the game, and see Luca's "bad" behavior in the context of her life in the game's world.
Anyway... any time you write something like this, people like me are watching!! And it makes us feel pretty great to see people engaging with the material like this!