Game EXP: Lydia (NS)

Lydia is an indie game first released in 2018 on PC by Platonic Partnership and was ported to the Nintendo Switch on the 16th of January last year (2020).  I found Lydia to be more than a game in that I felt that it was something I experienced, and in another fashion, it is often referred to as a visual novel as there are only just a few gameplay elements that go beyond progressing dialogue.  And Lydia is definitely a unique experience from the gameplay to the DLC, that only takes just over an hour to play the entire game, it still has me thinking about the characters, the story, the developers, and their real-world experiences that lead to the story in the game being told.

The description on Lydia's eShop page describes the game as being able to "Explore the thought-provoking memories of a child with drunk and broken parents. Based on real experience..."  I will admit that I did not fully process the description and did not think too much of it when I was browsing games on the eShop.  I have seen other games [citation needed] have similar descriptions that have similar claims to seem edgier than it actually is.  What initially drew me to the game was the icon in the eShop while browsing, and the description that it used hand-drawn art, and again, that first sentence, but taken with a chunk of salt.  I also did not notice at the time the description of the DLC, costing only $1.00, which essentially is a donation to Fragile Childhood, a nonprofit in Finland whose aim is to seek out "new and efficient methods to secure a less troubled life for children who suffer from the adverse effects of parental alcohol use."  It was not until after I finished the game that I saw the DLC and description, which made a lot more sense then; I had initially thought that I would look into the DLC after finishing the game thinking it to be traditional DLC and not primarily a monetary donation.  The DLC, at least on the Switch version, essentially is Lydia coloring a monster, with each part outlined in a different bright color.  The monster is chosen by pressing A as the design rolls by like a slot machine and the colors are automatically/randomly filled in for you.  I do wish you could select how you could color the monster, but this will have to do.

Thinking more about the game, I could equate it to Requiem for a Dream if you took out the heroin abuse and substituted it with alcohol abuse and passive-aggressive narcissistic parental abuse.  You never see either of Lydia's parents beat her or put her in physically dangerous situations (like making her clean up broken bottles in the kitchen, or beating her with a broom if her room isn't clean), but she is kept awake by a house full of drunken adults with her parents nowhere to be found, with various party-goers having different reactions to having a small child looking scared and wandering through her own living room.

Lydia is told from the perspective of a young girl, maybe five-years-old at the start who lives with her parents and the time period jumps each time she is "reappears" in her bedroom.  The game progresses through various points in her life as she copes with the abuse from her parents, always escaping into a fictional world that is always unnerving.  I found the transitions between reality and Lydia escaping into her mind strange at first as I was not sure what to make of what was happening, but during the fictional stage, it seemed pretty clear that this was a coping mechanism, which left the imagery at times confusing, but only looking back on it now does it seem to make more sense.

For me, the game only fell flat in one sequence.  There was a sequence when teenage Lydia is trying to get past her Dad and she has to distract him by calling his cellphone and making up an excuse for why he needs to leave the room.  What took me out of the game was that when you are on the phone with your dad, you are given dialogue options for what you can say.  Here, if you chose the wrong dialogue option (one that does not progress your dialogue tree), your father calls bullshit on whatever determination he came to, and not picking up that it was his daughter on the other end of the phone.  So then you just have to try again, figuring out which dialogue option keeps you going through the dialogue-tree to end up reaching the outcome where he does leave the room allowing you to meet up with your friends.  It was a little frustrating for me because that were some choices that I thought would work, based on previous conversations and interactions with Lydia's Dad, but I thought that the final choice, reached after calling the Dad nearly 10 times, seemed more dangerous towards Lydia than giving him a reason to leave the room.

Before closing out, I should mention the Beep Speech in Lydia.  All of the dialogue is spoken in-game, but it is done in a way without having to dialogue, which works well for localizing a game made in Finland.  Lydia, in particular, speaks with a "beep-ba-boo" with slight variations here and there for inflection and just so that the speaking did not become repetitive.  The voices for each of the characters are distinct too with the Father constantly mumbling, possibly like he is permanently intoxicated, and her neighbor/friend Sheila whose voice does age-up as the story progresses, but interestingly, Lydia still has the same "Boh-puh-puh" tone to it, until the very last sequence.

You know, I do not know if I feel fully qualified to really delve into the deeper meanings of this game.  I was fortunate to not grow up with parents or family members who acted in the fashion that Lydia's parents treat her, although I have seen my fair share of alcohol-related issues, not that you have to have experienced this type of trauma to accurately talk about the experience.  I will say that the end of the game affected me quite a bit in that I was thinking about it all evening and for the last couple of days.  In the end, you are offered a choice that and I leaned one way because I saw the way Lydia looked, had experienced moments in her life, and, outside of the game, have seen enough of how narcissistic and emotionally abusive parents can act and manipulate their children for their own benefit, often victimizing themselves in their own minds.  This happened at the end of the game, although I won't be specific, and for me, I just felt that Lydia had had enough (spoilers in the P.P.S. below so you can avoid it if need be).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

P.S.  There is a great interview with Platonic Partnership over on GameIndustry.biz that I recommend checking out.

[The Spoiler P.P.S. is down there ↓]

P.P.S.  In the final scene in the game, Lydia is at the hospital where her mother has been admitted.  It was not made clear to me the reason for her being there, and it may not have been overly important, but the mother asks Lydia to stay with her using all of the tools in her narcissistic arsenal to guilt trip Lydia to staying.  She uses the "I may not have been the perfect parent but I still love you" guise, she uses anger directed towards Lydia and immediately backhanded apologizes by saying that it was Lydia who made her react this way.  Her final ploy is to entice Lydia to look through a box of photographs with her depicting all of the loving moments they had together.  This is when you are given the option to stay or to leave.  Part of me did want to stay just to see what the mother would say and to see how Lydia would react to being shown these pictures that had been tucked away in a shoebox for who knows how long.  I ultimately decided to leave as mentioned above, again because I felt that at that point, Lydia had decided to she needed to cut her mother out of her life and I selected for her to leave.

Then the mother became a combination of angry and sad, flopping forward toward the foot of the bed, spilling over her box of curated memories crying.  Roll credits.

The hard part for me with this decision was that as the credits rolled, you saw a number of the pictures that the mother had saved and they all did in fact show Lydia and her parents in happier times, but happier in those specific moments.  The last picture showed the mother nursing Lydia when she was just a baby and, at least to me, looked happy about the experience.  Maybe it is because Conklederp and I recently became first-time parents but this last one broke my proverbial heart because seeing where Lydia's life went and where it started before everything broke, or was it always broken as the dialogue during a camping scene seemed to suggest.