Play it Again, Alex
Few games in recent memory have been as controversial as Ackk Studios’ YIIK: A Postmodern RPG. Released almost five years ago now, the game continues to exist in the collective consciousness of the internet.
Now, the game wasn’t an asset flip. It wasn’t broken. Gameplay-wise, it wasn’t even terrible. Its main issues seem to stem from presentation and story. An unlikeable protagonist, a bloated writing style and at times incoherent story are a fine recipe for a divisive reception.
It’s difficult to imagine, however, anyone could’ve forseen just how deep the ravine would turn out to be.
People decry it as one of the worst games of all time. Memes are constantly made of its protagonist. Its developers have been called awful people. Video essay upon video essay has been made, picking the game apart over and over again. So much has been said about it at this point that, for all its text, people have started to run out of things to comment on.
Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the silence had eventually given way to positives about the game emerging in the last couple of years. The masterminds behind the game, the Allanson brothers, have spent the past five years working on updating the game to meet their original vision. The first major update came in the form of version 1.25 – simplifying some elements of the combat, tightening the dialogue and giving a taste on the kind of cinematic experience the game was truly supposed to have.
The next – hopefully definitive – update is set to come sometime this year. Dubbed YIIK I.V, it is set to completely revamp the combat system, change the entire feel of the game’s cinematics and provide about a dozen hours of additional story content.
In a strange way, I’m excited. Although I can hardly call myself an unironic supporter of the game, I applaud the brothers’ determination. The work they’ve shown off so far seems to be an impressive leap forward. Whether it’s for the better or for worse, we will inevitably see.
Before that inevitability comes, though, I wanted to take some time to reflect back on the game as it is now. Although I’m sure my thoughts won’t be terribly original, I wanted to leave a record on how I felt about the game prior to the update and see how I feel about the experience following I.V’s release.
Since it’s impossible to really talk about the game without going into details, I’ll be structuring this post as a general summary of the game’s events, occasionally pausing to talk about some aspect of the game when I feel is relevant.
As a result, this post contain spoilers for YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.
The game opens on April 4th. Alex, our protagonist, steps off a bus. He’s a fresh college graduate who has just returned to his home town of Frankton. The game doesn’t tell us this so much as Alex himself does – the story is framed as being told directly by him. It’s an interesting decision that we’ll touch upon later down the line. For now, it forms a relatively simple first impression: Alex seems fairly innocuous, the plaid shirt and glasses putting his vibe somewhere between a lit major and a computer programmer. (A guess that turns out to be fairly accurate.)
The graphics are charming; while most of the cutscenes and dialogue are presented in the form of visual novel-esque sequences with character portraits, the rest of the game is entirely 3D. It’s weird and colorful. Frankton is a neat little town, its residents presented as blocky caricatures that give the whole game a retro feeling. As if a God looking over a 2D game twisted his head a little and saw the depth of his own creation.
Alex goes home and finds a note from his Mom asking him to pick up some groceries in town. Alex seems slightly annoyed at this, having to go around just as he unpacked, but we ultimately head out with the list.
On our way to the store, Alex notices a path leading into the forest that he doesn’t remember being there. But he’s even more taken aback by the cat resting on it – an orange little thing with whiskers shaped in a Salvador Dali mustache.
It’s at this point that we have to talk about a major critique levied against the game: namely, the aforementioned narration by Alex. The narration sections are long, so much so that the 1.25 update gave the players an option of shortening or flat-out cutting out entire portions of them. This wouldn’t in itself be a huge problem… under specific circumstances. Like, if you took the narration and saw it a novel, it’d probably come off way better. But because so much of it is delivered in a static, unmoving shot, where you’re either staring directly at Alex or the object Alex happens to be fixating on at the time, the monologue always feels dragging, especially with the voice acting. Since the game takes on a visual novel style to deliver these, it may have noticed one of that genre’s quirks – even when all of the characters are voiced, the protagonist’s thoughts and the overall narration very rarely are. I’d say it’s very difficult to really get the kind of delivery to sell prolonged internal thoughts without the reader getting disinterested. Just as you would if someone was talking at you, on and on. Like reading a large, unbroken paragraph that seems to go on forever. By the time the monologue finishes, you may not even fully remember the scene the monologue had interrupted.
Anyhow, finishing his rumination on the cat and its Dali-like mustache, Alex goes on to the grocery store and gets the groceries. On his way out, he remembers there’s a record shop nearby and decides to pop in. Strangely enough, even though the store is full of records, the girl at the counter tells Alex she won’t sell him any records. And, indeed – when we open the shop menu, there’s indeed not a single record to be found.
But there is a single item that can be bought – a disk with with something scrawled in marker over the top.
YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.
It costs one dollar.
Naturally, we buy it. Alex’s narration admits he doesn’t know why – why he bought it or why it was even for sale. He vaguely remembers the title, certain that it’s a PlayStation game he once played at a friend’s house. (Taking, of course, several paragraphs of considering whether that disk may be that very same pirated copy that his friend had). The girl at the counter doesn’t comment on the purchase, and Alex doesn’t think to ask. He does note that she seems strangely angry, and wonders if there’s something about him specifically that she has a problem with.
We return home, put the groceries in the fridge, find Alex’s old PlayStation and hook it up to the living room TV.
We are then treated to the game inside the game. The main menu of this ‘inner’ YIIK looks far flashier than the one of the actual game. But also far more simplistic – letting us pick between only starting a new game or loading an existing one. The first option, as we find, doesn’t work. The button just flat-out doesn’t work.
The second does seem to work. There’s a pre-existing save file, with the player at level 51 and 41 hours of play. This doesn’t actually make any sense, since Alex had previously explicitly told us he’d lost the memory card. Oddly enough, for all his talk, Alex never actually comments on this detail.
We boot up the save file and are immediately treated to a cutscene.
This ‘inner’ YIIK appears to be rendered in the same style as the outer one. We see a massive white room. There’s bodies lying all over it. Men in plaid shirts of different colors. They look familiar. In fact – they are familiar. They’re Alex. They’re all slightly different from the Alex we’ve seen up to this point, but it’s definitely him. They all appear to have been slain by a massive being wielding a sword and shield. A woman in green stands amidst the bodies wielding a massive sword. She appears to be planning to square off against the entity. Her joints are like that of a puppet. She is, in fact, a robot.
Then the narration starts. In the same way we’re already used to.
It’s Alex’s voice. Just behind the woman, there he is – also visibly different, but so frighteningly familiar – standing. He recognizes the woman as the ‘Essentia 2000’.
According to Alex’s narration, it seems that she had been bringing over Alexes from different dimensions in an effort to fight the being – revealed to be named ‘Proto Alex.’ As the name suggests, Proto Alex is also a version of Alex.
It’s unclear what the goal here ultimately is – this seems to be the game’s finale – but Alex teams up with the Essentia to take this monstrous version of Alex down.
What follows ultimately serves as a tutorial for the game’s combat system. While most of it is your traditional RPG fare in terms of the menuing and turn-based rules, there is an interesting twist to the combat mechanics – practically every attack and defense action is done in the form of a minigame. While amusing at first, it quickly becomes tiring, as it ends up significantly slowing the pace of the game down. While Patch 1.25 has tried improving on some of this, the combat still feels frustratingly slow. Whether it’s the enemy health pool or I just happen to be bad at the game, I really don’t know. That’s just my personal experience.
There are four party members in this first (final?) battle: Alex, Essentia, a boy named ‘Rory’ and a woman called ‘Vella.’ Rory seems to have an interesting ‘pacifist’ mechanic, where he can select party members to protect instead of attacking his opponents. (This mechanic is never used or seen again outside of this first encounter.)
The group ultimately defeats Proto Alex, and we are treated to a cutscene where Alex and Essentia stand in the clouds, Alex seemingly finding a new lease on life and vowing to go into a different reality where no version of Alex exists, and where he can go and be with his friends.
The game in a game ends.
Returning to reality, we see the original Alex visibly freaking out. That was him in a video game that came out while he was a kid. That was his voice.
Thinking things through, he decides to try and get in touch with the friend he played the game with all those years ago. His name was Michael. As far as he knows, he should still be in town.
Vaguely remembering the number, Alex uses his phone to call Michael.
The man who picks up instead is a Japanese man called Toru Okada. He appears to live in the neighborhood and has been searching for his cat all morning. He says he’s recently heard about a Michael disappearing. In fact, it seems that quite a few people have been disappearing lately – always last seen hanging around the old abandoned Factory Hotel north of town. Toru figures Alex is likely to go check it out, so asks Alex to keep an eye out for his cat, too.
This entire conversation is a reference to Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The protagonist, Toru Okada, is an average but passive man who finds himself entangled in increasingly bizarre events after his cat disappears: from mediums, to a woman who watches faces, to the woman’s son who cannot speak but who is perfectly understood – and, ultimately, to Toru’s own wife’s disappearance.
A lot of the game takes obvious inspiration from Murakami’s body of work in general. The narration that tends to drift off into random memories and self-reflection. Weird dream-like events. Characters that break off talking about themselves and their past for a long while.
I actually own a copy of Wind-Up Bird!
I’d definitely say it’s one of my favorite books.
For its thickness, it doesn’t actually feel like a particularly long book. That dream-like atmosphere has always carried Murakami’s books in my mind. They’re easy to read. They’re chill. They’re weird, but not to the point where you’re lost. In a weird way, the way his protagonist’s thoughts tend to drift is what keeps things grounded. You understand them. You understand their frustration. You understand their faults. You understand their hopeless stupidity.
I read quite a lot of Murakami, actually. Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to re-read any of them, ever since I found out he was arrested for cannibalism in 1998.
Alex heads back out, this time taking the strange trail leading to the woods. It leads him to the mysterious Factory Hotel, which serves as our first dungeon. He enters and searches its empty halls, eventually stumbling across…
A girl.
And… a giant robot?
She introduces herself as Sammy. She says that she’s been living in the hotel. As far as she’s aware, no people – disappearing or otherwise – have come through it. She certainly hasn’t seen a cat. It seems Alex had been sent out on a wild goose chase. Or, as it happens, a wild cat chase.
She explains that the robot, who she calls Wilhelm, doesn’t actually work. She found him in the hotel and has spent the last few years repairing him. He’s almost ready – the only thing missing being the heart that will bring him to life.
And the only heart that will do is her own.
Sammy is an interesting character. Her main motivation throughout the story is to die so that she can give her heart to Wilhelm. But she believes that not just any death would do. Suicide doesn’t seem to even occur to her. In fact, in her mind, it’s entirely paradoxical. All her life, she says, she’s been passive. Besides basic physiological needs, she had never wanted for absolutely anything. Until, of course, she began to repair Wilhelm. This led to her wanting to give him her heart, which, in turn, led to her wanting to die. She finds this concept exciting, undeniably happy that for the first time in her life, she has some sense of direction.
In her own words:
“I exist to disappear.”
Alex, visibly anxious, still has her tag along as he continues to explore the depths of the hotel.
They fail to find Michael. Instead, they enter a room with a ringing phone.
It’s Toru Okada. Alex tells him he hasn’t found his cat or Michael. Toru suggests that he’d consulted with a medium in the meantime, and that she said that people have also been disappearing around Windtown. She said to focus on a boy called ‘Rory Mancer’ in particular.
Remembering that there was a character called ‘Rory’ in the game he played, he decides it can’t be a coincidence. He leaves Sammy at the hotel and takes a bus to Windtown.
The first thing you learn upon stepping into Windtown is that everyone in Windtown wants you fucking dead. Just daring to ask directions to Rory’s house triggers a fight with pretty much everyone.
Alex, no doubt broken and bloodied, reaches the house. From what little he’s managed to gather in-between the battles, Rory disappeared shortly after his sister died. Their mother, unable to handle the grief of losing both her children, packed up and left town. The house is now virtually abandoned.
And yet–
The front door is unlocked.
Alex steps in and calls out into the darkness.
A shadow moves.
He calls out again.
The voice that answers–
Is his own.
It’s Alex. A different Alex. The Alex from the video game. The one with the beard. He’s been squatting in Rory’s house for the past couple of weeks.
They exchange information. Our Alex covers the events leading up to his arrival. The other Alex explains that he’s come from an alternate reality and that the events in the video game had actually happened. After the ending, he traveled between realities. As promised, he was looking for one where Alex didn’t exist. He inevitably ended up in this one. For some reason, though, he finds himself unable to leave. And since he didn’t want to mess with the life of our Alex, he decided to keep a low profile.
The two team up to search for Michael. The other Alex is aware that people have been disappearing in Windtown, and says that most of the rumors seem to suggest it’s got something to do with the town sewers.
They descend into what is the game’s second dungeon, Windtown’s sewers. Here we’re introduced to the concept of using tools outside of combat to clear obstacles and solve puzzles. Other Alex shows off what he calls his ‘signature move,’ where he whips his hair to cut through small bushes.
At the end of the dungeon, we find…
Nothing.
There is absolutely nothing in the sewers.
Other Alex admits he knew as much. It’s just a sewer. There was no reason to think anyone would actually be hiding down here.
Before our Alex has a chance to understand what’s going on, the other Alex pushes him off the ledge they’re standing. Our Alex falls into the dirty water and promptly drowns.
And that’s how I killed him. How I killed myself.
From this moment on, the narrator, and control, is handed over to the other Alex. The impostor who has now taken over this reality’s Alex.
We guide the impostor out of the dungeon. As we’re about to leave Windtown, a payphone rings. Once again, it’s Toru Okada. He seems to be aware of what the other Alex has done and that, indeed, he had actively orchestrated the events. He reveals that his real name is ‘Marlene’ and invites Alex to ‘enter the Mind Dungeon’.
The Mind Dungeon is exactly what it sounds like – we’re literally in Alex’s head.
When we first enter, we meet a Krow Named Marlene. They serve as our primary assistant and admonisher in and outside the dungeon. ‘Krow Named Marlene’ is no doubt a reference to Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, where a character called ‘The Boy Named Crow’ appears prominently as the protagonist’s imaginary friend and confidant.
The Mind Dungeon basically is how the game handles its leveling. Every ‘floor’ of the Mind Dungeon is basically a level. At every level, you have four doors, each of which has a pre-determined number assigned to it on how much it would increase. You assign a single stat to every door by spending experience points. When all four stats are assigned, you get to descend a floor lower.
Or, you can do what I always did and just have Marlene handle all the assigning for me and automatically move onto the next level without thinking. It’s faster and pretty much just works.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat idea, but like the combat, it just feels slow and unsatisfying. Leveling up should have some level of catharsis of seeing a number go up quickly.
As we descend the Mind Dungeon, we occasionally meet certain apparitions. One is a Librarian. Another is what appears to be Alex’s father(?) The former, at least, should also be a reference to Kafka on the Shore. Although, admittedly, the stuff that went down between the protagonist and the librarian in that story was far less PG-13.
I think. I’ll admit I don’t remember Kafka on the Shore that clearly. I was mostly going through it as a comfort read after a friend of mine died.
Anyway, through talking with Marlene, we find out that some of what impostor Alex had said was true. He is the Alex from the ending of the video game. And although he tried to go through with his idea of going to a universe where no Alex exists, he quickly ran into some practical issues – namely, the lack of a social security code and none of his friends recognizing him or wanting anything to do with him, presuming him to be a crazy hobo. As a result, he’d taken to traveling to different realities and seeing if there’s an Alex whose place he could simply take the place of.
He initially planned to take the identity of one of the Alexes who had died trying to fight Proto Alex. He wasn’t too happy about the state of their lives, though. His next strategy was to find realities where Alex would get into an accident or die of natural causes. This, as it happens, didn’t work, either, since any realities in which Alex died featured a very public and dramatic death.
This was his last resort, then. To forcibly take someone’s place.
The impostor returns to Frankton. He reunites with Sammy – who he seemingly knew in his reality – and decides to help her in her quest for a good death. (His narration admitting that he has no intention of letting her actually die.) He suggests the two head off into the world and fight enemies. This is essentially the game’s way of getting you to level up before proceeding.
Before heading off, though, the impostor gets the same urge as his counterpart, and decides to stop by Frankton’s record store.
There, we realize that the girl at the counter from earlier was, in fact, this reality’s version of Vella, the woman we saw fight alongside Alex in the video game.
She appears to inherently dislike Alex – original and impostor alike – but she’s mildly intrigued at how Alex has seemingly grown a beard so quickly since the last time they’d spoken. Alex awkwardly navigates the conversation until Vella admits that there’s a reason she can’t sell any records – she doesn’t actually work at the store. The real owner, Michael, asked her to just watch the counter for half an hour one day, and then never returned.
The imposter uses this as his ‘in’, saying he’s trying to find Michael himself. This leads to Vella joining the party.
I’ll be honest – a lot of Vella’s dialogue in this game is pretty relatable. She and Michael are friends, but not that close. Alex speculates in his narration that she’s looking for him because she’s ‘faintly’ attracted to him, but I don’t buy it. There’s nothing wrong or unnatural of wanting to make sure a friend is okay. You don’t need to be ‘best’ friends with someone to care about them.
Take that friend of mine whose death led me to read Kafka on the Shore. He and I weren’t that close. We barely had anything in common. Guy was just way too much into anime, honestly. He wasn’t weird about it or anything – definitely not otaku level – but certainly to a point where he brought it up enough in conversation to where most of our friend group found it difficult to contribute. But still, I kind of admired that about him. Like, he’d had this huge personal tragedy early on in life – his little brother had disappeared – and he didn’t let that define him for his the rest of his life. Personally, I don’t know if I’d be that strong. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d do if one of my family just vanished like that, no matter how young or old I am.
When a piece is gone, it’s gone, you know?
Anyway, upon recruiting Vella, the game fully opens up. I picked up a few side-quests which I never ended up completing – and not for lack of trying. One is about a kid asking you to find and defeat a Golden Alpaca. I swear to God, I searched the entire map and never found it. There’s no guides online on how to find it and most discussions I’ve found on it seem just as confused as to where the fuck it’s supposed to be. Probably a bug? The second is even worse, though. A guy has a precious lockbox that requires a nine-digit code that, according to his grandmother, can only be inferred by decoding the Voynich Manuscript. According to data miners, the required input changes depending on the current time. It goes hour (24 hour clock), minute, second and the last three digits are the milliseconds of the moment the user confirms the input. It’s basically impossible to enter the code. And the only thing inside the box is a World War 2 soda pop, anyway.
Well, whatever. As I said, I never finished any of the side quests. Nor did I, for that matter, finish any of the main ‘quests’. My computer crashed and my save file got corrupted. I was about six hours in and I didn’t feel like replaying the game, so I watched the rest of it on YouTube.
Full disclosure, though – as I mentioned, the combat and leveling feel so slow, and this section of the game is basically just there to force you to grind – so I definitely skipped around a lot. There might be stuff I missed. In fact, I’m almost certain there is. So, the summary will probably be a lot less detailed than it has been up to this point.
This grind section has some things going for it. After basically ever battle we’re treated to some dialogue between characters. Most of it is between Sammy and Vella and their different worldviews: Sammy advocating that not being passive has given her meaning in life (even if that meaning is to die) and Vella arguing that relentless pursuit can lead to crushing disappointment. She further argues that Sammy will have no way of knowing her heart will ever get to Wilhelm’s – leading Sammy to force Alex and Vella to install the heart after she dies.
Eventually, after all the random fighting, the group gathers enough clues and rumors to decide that Michael was seen roaming a certain mountain. The group climbs it, but the only thing awaiting them at the top is an empty wooden house. The only thing of note in it is a lone PlayStation Memory Card.
Since Vella remembered selling Alex YIIK, and Sammy remembered the Original Alex talking about seeing himself in a PlayStation game, Alex is forced to bring the girls along and let them see what happens to the game if he uses the card.
We’re once again treated to a ‘game within a game’ section. Inserting the Memory Card has still not made it possible to start a new game, but has added a new save file to load from, one with only 20 minutes of play time assigned to it.
This section shows the beginning of the impostor’s journey. Like in the original reality, the impostor had returned to Frankton after finishing college. This Alex, too, was asked to go to the grocery store. This Alex spotted a path he didn’t remember, and the cat resting on it.
However, unlike the original reality, the cat snatched the shopping list from Alex, leading him to follow it to the Factory Hotel. Here, he met his version of Sammy. As it turns out, she was the cat’s owner. The two tried to escape the hotel, facing off against the other reality’s version of Wilhelm – a fully functional robot who acted as Sammy’s roommate.
The duo defeated him and made their way into the lobby. On the elevator ride down, however, Sammy was snatched by unknown entities, leaving behind a horrified Alex.
The game stops functioning beyond that point.
This entire section of the game feels wildly different from the rest. While up to this point we’ve seen some quirky and surreal stuff (like in the enemies and some of the dungeon design), this section of the game feels wild. There’s ghosts here. Some of the doors lead to empty voids navigated by floating carpets. There’s a talking panda. There’s a room with a giant pyramid that Alex makes cry by poking its eye.
A lot of the critics praised this section, and I can see why. It’s a perfect climax to the weirdness the game has been building up to this point. The impostor Alex starts to truly feel like an alien being. You realize that you don’t understand him and you might not even be able to. There’s a divide between the two of you that can’t be breached; that, judging by his actions, he doesn’t want you to breach. It’s even implied that some of the details presented could’ve been some embellishments on Alex’s part, playing with the idea of an unreliable narrator. What’s worse, then? Not being able to understand Alex because he operates by the rules of a foreign reality, or dealing with the fact that he might be a complete liar?
Of course, by this point in time, we already know he’s a liar. So maybe it doesn’t make that much difference.
And as much as I want to give the game credit – and I feel like I am honestly – for all the cleverness it does in making an unlikeable protagonist, it also just makes the idea of playing the game unappealing. Why would I want to keep playing as this guy? Why would I be able to sympathize and fall for his lies if he’s so obviously in the wrong? Even if the entire point is to show how pathetic he is, as a player, it’s not exactly my idea of fun – especially with as large of a timesink as an RPG.
Back outside the game, a shocked Sammy decides that the game is a direct message to her. Since she ‘exists to disappear’, she believes that taking one of the elevators in the hotel would lead to her fulfilling her goal.
The player is given a choice here. They can either let Sammy go back to the hotel and into an elevator or convince her to stay behind. The former choice will have Alex later go to the hotel and find her heart on a cushion in one of the elevators. The latter will have Sammy sleep over at Alex’s house and winding up dead in the backyard the following morning.
Regardless of your choice, though, at Vella’s insistence, Alex will take the heart and install it into Wilhelm.
Upon turning on, Wilhelm will come to life and attack Alex, leading to a significantly harder version of the boss fight the players had gone through in the ‘inner’ YIIK. (It took the Let’s Player I was watching about twenty minutes – Wilhelm basically always went after Alex and always put him near-death, meaning Vella’s turns were always spent on healing Alex while Alex himself did next to no damage.)
Upon his defeat, however, Wilhelm’s robot shell cracks open. From it steps out a familiar woman.
Or, rather, a familiar robot.
The Essentia 2000.
She’s visibly dazed and confused. As it turns out, Wilhelm had been something of a gestation pod for her – a means for her to be born into this world. She began to form inside him when Sammy’s heart was given to him. Since he was defeated so soon, though, her development has been left incomplete, and she doesn’t recognize who Alex or Vella are supposed to be.
Alex’s narration seems to decide to take full advantage of this and attacks her. She’s a tough opponent, but given her state, far easier than Wilhelm.
She turns to scrap. The only thing left of her is Sammy’s heart, now encased in metal, and still beating.
Vella is visibly disturbed by everything that’s happened and after a particularly rough exchange in which Alex puts the blame of all the events on her – for letting Michael get up and leave, for selling Alex the game, for insisting on fulfilling Sammy’s wish – she leaves Alex.
Blame is a very easy thing to do. When my friend died, his sister insisted that I – I – had something to do with it. She kept saying that she saw me talking to him at his record shop the night he died.
Of course, that’s impossible. I was at home the entire time. My Mom and a friend testified as much.
But there’s probably some comfort in seeing people as monsters. Especially ones you don’t like to begin with.
Alex realizes that Sammy’s heart acts as a detector, beating faster as he moves closer to somewhere. He follows it, eventually finding himself at a lone abandoned lighthouse – one that wasn’t actually visible in the overworld up to this point.
Alex enters what is more or less the final dungeon of the game. He ascends the lighthouse, floor by floor. And, at the very top…
…Is the most recent floor of Alex’s Mind Dungeon unlocked by the player. From this point on, Alex can no longer level up, as attempts to go down will now just lead back to the lighthouse.
Instead, we can continue to the top floor of the Mind Dungeon. There’s a new door here. It leads to an area similar to the one Alex had met Sammy in the ‘inner’ YIIK.
Finally, there’s Michael. The ghost we’ve been chasing this entire time. The person we’ve spent all these hours walking around aimlessly for. The person the original Alex died trying to find. The person that led to the Sammy of this world connecting with the Alex of the other. The person this version of Vella would never admit she likes – not in front of Alex, anyway.
And he’s just some guy.
Him and Alex don’t exchange a word. Alex’s narration goes quiet. He’s visibly horrified, at the very least disturbed, but he simply can’t bring himself to say anything.
The moment we interact with him, we’re given control of Michael. The only thing we can do is leave the room – and the Mind Dungeon.
Now back in Frankton, Michael goes to the record store. Vella welcomes him back with open arms. Michael apologizes for making her wait as long as he had and promises to make it up to her.
Months later, we see the two walking through the streets of New York. It’s New Years’ Eve. The two seem close. There’s no outside narration. The characters just talk. Michael is funny. Vella is more relaxed – to the point where you’re not even sure if you ever got to see the real side of her up to that point.
They walk through the crowd. The countdown starts.
3…
2…
1.
In an instant, everyone disappears. The countdown. The fireworks. The crowd. Vella.
All that’s left is Michael, and an empty city.
Becoming the last man on Earth, he walks through the city, the only sound being the echo of his own footsteps.
As he walks, the game fades to black.
Finally, we are once again returned to the main menu of the ‘inner’ YIIK.
This time, we can start a new game.
Credits roll.
Ultimately, it’s an ending that doesn’t really feel like an ending at all. Judging by the online reception, if there was someone who hadn’t been enjoying the game but stuck through it until the end, they were positively livid. Nothing was resolved. Barely anything was even properly established. Who was Proto Alex? What was the deal with Michael? Who was the Essentia? What happened to Vella?
What does YIIK even mean?
A lot of people walked out of it feeling the game was ultimately nonsense for the sake of nonsense. A set of surreal events designed to pull the player along until the end credits, in some vain attempt to appear deep or smart.
Whether that’s actually the case or not, I can’t tell you. I think one of the major issues when it comes to having discussions about this game are the constant presumptions of authorial intent. People have said that Alex is the writer’s self-insert. It has been said that Sammy’s elevator kidnapping in the ‘inner’ game was exploitative – a one to one invocation of a real life unexplained death. Some have called the developers racist. Others have seen them as misogynists.
It’s a nasty thing, to be judged by your work in such a way.
And although I personally cannot say I enjoyed – or even liked – the game on the whole, I do recognize the effort that must’ve gone into it and am genuinely interested to see how I.V updates the game.
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