wtwla sigils

dec. 5 2023: i've played with those we love alive a bunch of times but i don't have any pictures of my earlier sigils anywhere. i used to be better about making them sigil-like but these newest ones are pretty much scribbles

videogame environments usually try to hide how repetitive they are, but in my experience needing to backtrack again and again because you can't solve a puzzle or need to grind exp or whatever very quickly destroys the illusion of being in a real/changing place. this game doesn't bother trying to convince you that you're in an evolving world: the environment changes only four times total (a religious ceremony, a shop opening, it raining once, and dead people following you around). you can't really do anything about any of that beyond observing it; the only thing you can choose to do is to craft/not craft an item that lets you see two more things with slightly more detail. u are like the dead ppl following u around. u cannot do shit. u watch awful stuff happen and all you can do is detatch

i mean you can make choices in the story segments but in the free-time segments (which are a good chunk of this game/the part that i focused in on during this playthrough) you can't do much beyond observe. playing the game today made me so anxious because i felt like i wasn't allowed to do anything beyond ruminate, and that can be scary to do for too long

it's what the sigils are too: they're pretty much just journalling how the game makes you feel. filling out prompts. this game reminds me a lot of depression/executive dysfunction because you really can't do anything beyond observing unless there's another person there who can Do Things at You (put you into a narrative)! trying to be a better person without another person to do it for is like evolutionarily super tough. people need other people whose aliveness they can feed off of. giant aliveness human centipede

please play wtwla it's a good game <3