Technically, I played this game and a pair of related games last night. It went Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk, then Looking Up You See Only a Ceiling, and then Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk. But Miabomiabom (what an acronym) is what my mind has been sitting on. It's not a pleasant play experience, and it's not providing a sense of narrative catharsis, and it's certainly not glorifying the idea of overcoming suffering, mental or physical. Or as the game is so effective at pointing out, mental and physical.
Media that touches upon mental illness can be understandably fraught, but oddly enough Miabomiabom and its cohorts were familiar and friendly in their agitation. Maybe that doesn't make sense, but my roomie finished playing The Last of Us Part 2 recently and we were both emotionally apathetic to how gleeful that title was in its depictions of self-loathing and anguish. And of course violence. That game and it's political compass are annoying at the least and thrilled to force you into a hateful narrative complicity at the whole.
And I think that Miabomiabom is a game that is violent too. It's deeply, skin-rendingly violent. It gets it. It knows why you're here. Why you're sticking along for the ride. But it's also funny, and saddening, and empathetic. It understands why you're STILL here... It knows that if you reach its conclusion, you've got a lot of feelings sunk down within your blood and bone.
Maybe I was in a good spot to receive Miabomiabom last night. I'm exhausted by narrative that revels in perfectly rendered, 4K resolution, billion dollar stories about how hard it is to want to hurt someone else, how much anguish you must feel for inflicting pain on another person, as they lie suffocating under your boot.
And I'm still exhausted after last night. But I'm glad that Miabomiabom was there to be exhausted too. It asked for empathy, knowing it may receive none, but in our mutual fatigue there may be some consolation.
Or not.
But at least we tried.