Jackie Jameson Macfield survives.

Despite it all, she survives. That is the core of the 2018 debut title for Studio White Owls.

Well, to me it is.

The actual mission statement of the game, which is even more important, is provided to the player within the first 30 seconds of this harrowing 6 to 8-hour journey. It reads:

This text also appeared in the very first trailer for the game, which I had watched while sitting in the breakroom of my last retail job, transfixed by the dreamlike visuals of this horror platformer juxtaposed against music so melancholic and hopeful and hauntingly nostalgic that I almost cried on the spot.

All of the promotional material lists J.J. and Emily as “best friends”. And there is truth to that! But when you’re a member of the alphabet mafia, well…when you know, you know. Even if the trailer didn’t say as much, you can tell.

That’s a feeling you get a lot with this game. If you are queer in any capacity, you will understand J.J.’s plight better than anyone. Every text she receives from her past indicates an overarching discomfort, dishonesty, and anxiety—the kind that comes with the territory when you can’t be who you are with the people you love. They might abandon you if they know your secret. You grit your teeth and stay closeted.

Living like that is a lot like being destroyed, from both the inside and the outside.

I’m sensitive to horror. I get scared easily and I don’t have the stomach for gore. But I knew I had to play this. And if I couldn’t convince anyone around me to pick this one up and play it while I watched over their shoulder, I’d simply have to do it myself. I did my research; I learned that the game didn’t have blood, jumpscares, or combat (just one creature to outrun periodically in a fairly slow chase sequence). It'd be fine! Maybe!

However, the one thing that kept me away for months was the game's single, core mechanic: J.J. must mutilate herself, or allow herself to be mutilated, to make progress.

She doesn’t self-harm, per se, because she doesn’t need to—her environment gets the job done just fine. The world is hostile and yearns to tear her limb from limb. And it does! It shreds her to pieces. But she will pick those pieces up and use them to pave a path forward. She will discard vital pieces of herself until she is so small and compact that she can fit into any crevice. She will break and fix her spine if she needs to see the world the way it wants her to see it. She will light the inky darkness ahead of her with a body on fire.

It is gruesome and cruel, and you will not like to see J.J. suffering, but it isn’t violence for the sake of violence. Something I really need you to know about this game is that it isn’t torture porn, it isn’t “bury your gays”, and it certainly isn’t trying to argue that suffering is necessary for growth. We aren't meant to revel in her pain; we are meant to see our own pain reflected, validated, and understood. Existing as a person who is not cisgender, straight, or white entails that we contort and dismember and immolate ourselves for the sake and comfort of others. Casual conversations are violent, the basic task of existing in public means to be confronted by forces that aim to ruthlessly rip you apart.

J.J. runs head-first into a world that seeks to harm her at every turn, to find Emily. Her best friend. Her girlfriend.

So I bought the game. I sat in my childhood room, on my childhood bed, beside my childhood friend, playing this game while gripped by fear and curiosity and determination, and I understood J.J.

My flag was folded up and stored neatly in my closet. My friends and family didn’t know what I was (and honestly, neither did I). I felt like I was dying all the time. Maybe I was. But I was also surviving—just like J.J.

J.J. is seemingly alone in her agony, and the majority of her story is delivered in the form of text messages from the recent past. The only communication that occurs in real-time comes from her childhood plushie F.K., a scrapped-together chimera of a creature and an obvious embodiment of her cast-aside innocence and optimism (not that J.J. herself realizes this). They encourage her, even as she continuously lashes out cruelly at them, convinced that these messages are surely coming from someone who wants to troll her and derive entertainment from her pain. It isn't surprising that she would think that way, either; as we learn much later in the story, it wouldn't be the first time J.J. endured such malice.

I get it, though; at some point, we all have been on the receiving end of that senseless sort of positivity, and have actively rejected it when we are at our lowest because those platitudes feel empty, tone-deaf, and unrealistic (and maybe because we don't think we deserve to hope, either).

To J.J., F.K. comes off as not fully understanding the gravity of the situation or how much hurt she is experiencing. She rages at them—how can you talk like you understand? Stop spouting bullshit when you don’t even know what it’s like to be brutalized over and over again!

A friend who wants to understand and tries so hard to, but can’t. They aren’t you, after all. Do you know what it feels like to have a limb ripped off? Even if you have, you’re made of stuffing. I, on the other hand, am real.

Coincidentally, I was in graduate school when I first played this game. J.J.’s experience as a college freshman is a highly relatable one; new friends who mean well but make ignorant or uncomfortable comments, a professor who is goofy and supportive and feels like an idealized parent figure, a single mother who is worried about her baby being so far away from home (but for whose sake is she truly worried?).

And then there is Emily.

Emily seems to really see J.J., and each conversation is joy. Their texts are different from the rest—like a breath of fresh air, even when they take on heavier topics with each other—because this is when J.J. feels most genuine, most herself.

They made a promise to be together, forever.

Emily is on her way to the clock tower! Go find her, before the monster does! You have to keep your promise, or the little birdies will die.

And this is not a dream about little birdies dying. They still have so much life to live. Which begs the question:

On her single-minded journey to the clock tower that she and Emily loved to play in as children, she faces traditionally feminine toys that eviscerate her and traditionally masculine toys that flip the world upside down. Her male professor is oddly chummy with her; well-meaning, but a bit too unconcerned about the optics of being so friendly with a female student. She receives furious texts from her mother about her closet, which is partially filled with clothes that J.J. vehemently insists are Emily’s. Abby stands up against homophobic classmates. Lily gradually reveals her borderline obsessive crush on a version of J.J. that doesn’t seem to exist—at least, not a version of J.J. that we’ve seen.

It was at this point in the game that it became apparent to me that J.J. was not only a lesbian, but a transgender woman that had been masking heavily.

As you get closer to the clock tower, J.J. receives text after text, and the situation reveals itself to be more dire than initially thought. There are whispers in the locker room. Her mom found her diary and is about to force her into conversion therapy. Lily outs her to the entire school by accident. Social media posts are making the rounds, berating J.J. and depicting her as a monster in a crudely drawn wig. J.J. feels like she can’t go on, that her existence is a burden to everyone around her. Anyone who cares is worried sick about her as she distances herself more and more by putting on the act of actually being the monster that her peers and mother have painted her to be.

J.J. climbs the clock tower, chasing Emily, an aspirational representation of femininity and true acceptance that is seemingly unattainable to her. She is always just out of reach, skipping up the staircase effortlessly, weightlessly, while J.J. shrieks and struggles desperately in her wake as the clock tower’s mechanisms maim and batter her.

...And on the roof, she finds Emily hanged, alongside a second noose and a suicide note.

The note is not Emily’s—it’s J.J.'s.

Tearfully, agonizingly, achingly, you must walk J.J. step-by-step to her self-execution. You cannot turn back, because neither can she: there is no undoing what has already been done, after all. She hangs herself beside the one person who truly knew her as she realizes what has happened—how she wound up on this island, in this nightmare.

She left Emily behind, doomed her, following a public suicide attempt. The paramedics have been trying to resuscitate J.J. this entire time—shocks administered, major hemorrhage—and Emily, who has been by her side through everything, is weeping. Angry, devastated, alone. She wails hopelessly at J.J., who can barely hear her distorted voice from the brink of death:

She hangs, for what feels to her like a century, until finally the rope breaks, and J.J. survives yet again.

J.J. regains consciousness on a patch of grass in a pitch-black pit of despair. Nothingness. Her phone is ringing off the hook with texts from F.K. in one of the most poignant, impactful moments of the game. She is done losing her temper at them, having given up on living now that she and Emily are both surely dead. But F.K.—her child self, her will to live—loves her, and won’t give up on her. They encourage her because it's the only thing they can do to help her.

You have to get out of here, J.J.! This isn’t a story about pain, or dying, or destruction. This is a story about regeneration.

They tell J.J. that she has to beat herself—accept herself—and she finally understands. The monster that was chasing her, oversized box cutter in hand, was dysphoria wielding the weapon of suicidal ideation all along. Now that she knows this, she can fight it. She regenerates endlessly without stopping her stride as it chases her; she lures it higher and higher. She doesn’t scream anymore, though she is still in pain and you can feel it in her strained movements. She barrels forward, upward, and kills the urge to die with a spear and a bolt of lightning.

J.J. cannot die, because she has to survive. She has to keep her promise.

(I’ve never cried so hard over a game in all my life, though the ending of the original Persona 3 comes in a close second place, to give you a point of reference.)

She wakes up on the floor of the lecture hall, in her body. You finally see and hear J.J. for the first time since the start of the game; she has short black hair, and her voice is low. Her shawl and dress are exchanged for bandages and jeans. Heeled boots become sneakers. The EMT is at her side, and laughs warmly: let me show you the little guy who saved you.

It was darling F.K. grasped tightly to her chest, sopping up the blood seeping from her wrist—the last bastion which kept her from bleeding out. She found what she was looking for. She’s going to be alright now, because she is so, so loved.