[Disclaimer: I received a review key for She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
[Trigger Warning: She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game is an exploration point-and-click game that uses the She Could Fly comic as a vessel to discuss Obsessive Compuslive Disorder in its many facets. The game is played in first-person with a voice-over narrator with visual interpretations and physical practices of OCD, written and verbal descriptions and experiences of OCD behavior including intrusive thoughts. The game is broken up into five chapters (referred to as loops) where the first section is spent finding pieces of a comic page followed by documentary-style interviews about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.]
As someone who does not have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I thought that a video game that explores OCD would be an interesting and novel approach to both a video game as a way and as a learning tool for everyone who sees OCD as that thing people do over and over when they're nervous. As someone who doesn't have OCD, I'm not about to claim that the depiction here is an accurate representation as I've gathered that OCD manifests differently for different people. What I can comment on is She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game as a video game, which we will do as we go through each chapter.
Loop 1:
By the time I'm writing this, I will have played through the game at least two times for various reasons. When I first started though, I thought that the controls were a bit weird. I greatly appreciated that there was the option to invert either axis, but the looking around mechanic isn't my favorite. Here you have to click the left mouse button (or the right trigger on the Steam Deck) and hold that while you drag the mouse to look around. Looking left and right also took some getting used to as I initially couldn't figure out if having the x-axis felt more natural than having it inverted or not, but it's something you'd have to figure out for yourself.
Once you complete the comics page, then you watch a series of documentary-style videos that answer various questions about OCD, with people who are experts from experience answering the questions. This series of videos legitimately felt like something I would watch as part of a training video for my job (I work in the social services industry, so we have 2-3 online trainings each month). I don't mean that to sound as a negative, it's just what it reminded me of.
Loop 2:
I can understand the voice being a little distracting since it is very reactionary. Nearly any time you do anything, Tiger Orchid reacts. This doesn't really allow the player to think on their own especially when trying to either solve a puzzle or to figure out on their own what a particular item could be used for. This makes figuring out the solution more of a one-sided collaborative effort, which I was initially not really excited about, but I kinda got used to it. I also realized by the time I finished Loop 2, that the subtitle of "Escape Game" did not necessarily mean "Escape Room," and once I got that comparison out of my head, it was a little easier to take the game for what it was and not what I had been expecting it to be.
I will add that the final task here, wiping the negative self-thoughts off the door got to me a bit. Wiping off phrases like "Broken" and "I'm a bad person" hit me harder as the voice in my head was narrating the scene as "I am not broken," and "I am not a bad person," being the intended message. I dunno, it just came out of nowhere as I heard my own voice reaffirm that "No, I'm not a bad father."
Loop 3:
I don't know what it was about the Simon game that kept drawing me to it, even though I knew that it couldn't be used the first two times I played with it. I think I was using it like the comfy chair, as something to do to think about what I needed to do next. And I just liked the tones that it made. Then later, when you found the bottom portion of the poster, I didn't realize that you needed to first put it back together for the pattern to work, again, like an escape room where you can solve a puzzle once you have the information, but I understand the mechanics behind locking being able to solve the puzzle in the background and requiring you to physically put the pieces back together first; or maybe you don't?
Regarding the Pink Elephant Paradox, I was unfamiliar with this exact term, but I do know about "The Game" (sorry, I lost again), which is similar to their end game. Maybe. I'm likely missing some additional symbolism with how the pink elephant is represented in each of the loops and until this loop and the accompanying videos, I had interpreted this as like the White Elephant, but just, pink.
And yeah, I missed that first video on the first page, but in my own defense, I think I interpreted that one circle as there for emphasis and existed in the comic.
Loop 4:
This is the second video I recorded for Loop 4. The first, being my first time playing Loop 4 took me 18 minutes 59 seconds whereas this video was only 12 minutes and 52 seconds. I had to rerecord this since I had audio issues in the second half that made any dialogue almost unintelligible to understand and was distracting to listen to even with the subtitles. This time around, I knew where to go and what to do although I tried to create the feeling that I was still exploring in a similar fashion to how I would normally play. On my first playthrough, it took me two attempts to get all of the puzzle pieces in the Ele Quest/Pac-Man game. I was a little disappointed that there weren't any other available interactions with any of the other arcade cabinets, but that's just me wanting to have a little more to do instead of a focused level without any fluff.
By this point in the game, I rarely felt the need to visit the comfy chair since I never felt that the puzzles were difficult to solve. I know that there's the achievement to view everything that the chair has to say, but that will likely have to be its own run since it's the only achievement I have left to earn/collect.
Loop 5:
---
Welcome back.
So yeah, Tiger Orchid. I feel that her misdirection, trying to distract the player in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense, like going to bed or staying in the flat instead of solving the puzzle is a lot more over-the-top than in previous loops where she was either agreeing with and up playing Hana's self-negativity or disparaging anything positive from Ash. On my first playthrough, I went straight for the phone booth before realizing that I couldn't do anything there. This time around, I humored Tiger Orchid's misdirection about the phone booth and looked everywhere else before returning to the phone booth, this time with all three letters which automatically filled in the alternate helpline number. My first time, I only had two letters so I had the number as 3 - X - 1. I tried both numbers, the listed number and 3 - 2 - 1 before finding the third letter and the game stopped your progression and said that the number is not a valid number.
After acquiring all of the pieces of the comic page, watching the first video, and hearing Dr. Blake Stobie mention that rituals associated with reducing anxiety for people with OCD are comparable to fake friends. These fake friends tell you that by performing these rituals you can now be comfortable and safe, but only because you performed these repetitive rituals. That was when, for me, as dense as I can sometimes be, knew that Tiger Orchid had been that self-negative voice in the player's head, and was likely playing as Hana.
I'll be honest, at the end of the game, I'm not sure I follow the symbolism, if any, about feeding peanuts to the pink elephant. Does it mean something more that you the player is actively thinking about the pink elephant and not trying to ignore it? I'm sure that there's something there, but I'm just not able to connect the dots as it feels like they're constantly fading before I can see the whole picture. But once the elephant is satiated and stomps the comfy chair into oblivion, there's the trap door that the comfy chair was obscuring (although not totally as its outline is there from the very beginning). Again, I'm sure that there's symbolism with the trapdoor being the exit out of the game and that it was obscured by the comfy chair the whole time, but I personally never felt that the comfy chair was there to prevent Hana from finding a way to manage her OCD or to hide from it, but as a way to meditate while reflecting on "a happy place." Maybe that's just me being naive or stereotyping. I don't know.
But then I loved the end, as Hana tells her inner voice of Tiger Orchid that she will from then on only be a whisper, that the voice will always be with her, but that her own voice will be the louder one she hears from now on.
I really enjoyed She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game once I got beyond the slightly strange control scheme, the fact that most of the puzzles in the game functioned less like the escape room game that I was expecting and more like a game of 3D point-and-click hide-and-seek with items. It's like an interactive documentary that you have to play for five minutes to unlock 10 minutes of a documentary. And that's perfectly fine because I feel that I've come away with a better understanding of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder beyond someone who washes their hands or stands nervous in a corner and flicks the light switch. It's not for everyone, but neither is Call of Duty or FIFA 20XX. I do wish that there was more about the game that incorporated the She Could Fly comic apart from one or two pages. Maybe I'll just have to check it out from our library.
JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
But You Still Have All Of Me
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