The last game I remember genuinely creating an emotional, though bittersweet, response for me was We’re Not Really Strangers. I played it with a good friend of mine that I knew I wasn’t going to see for a while, with graduation and life coming our way. There were a lot of things I suppose you internalize after being good friends for so long, many things often left unsaid. Like how proud you are of them for growing into the person they are today, how excited you’ll be for their future, and how sad you are that you’ll miss out on the new adventures. The game’s design is simple – it’s just a box of questions with 3 levels of difficulty. You can buy different sets for different audiences (friends, relationships, etc) that best suit your needs. The options are drawn from levels 1 through 3, with 3 being the deepest questions and 1 being more surface-level check-ins. You play by taking turns and answering the questions with the number of people you have.
Though the game is not narrative by nature, has no sounds to elicit an environment, nor necessitates the players to learn some set of rules like jumping/climbing etc through an afternoon of play, it has a way of building a world for players’ own lives. One can say that it’s like filling in the narrative gaps of your own life and the characters you hold in it. Whether played with years-long or newly made friends, the stages set the scene of getting to know each other and being courageous in expressing internal thoughts otherwise unshared. It doesn’t force the vulnerability of this “narrative” (stages are freely played, progressing when both players are ready), but rather allows players to enter this safe space and world as they choose. The questions themselves further challenge you to reflect on the choices you’ve made and your stories with each other so far (kind of like Braid but meta) and express those feelings to each other. You give and receive vulnerability and understanding. And by doing so, you form deeper bonds with one another through this shared experience of slowing down and pausing to really get to know each other. In the end, these stages do really provide a much-needed scaffold to get past all the unsaid and open up to one another.
