An interactive visual novel that is all about the storyline, this Japan-originating genre of video gaming moves to captivate its players by drawing them into the world of the novel. If Found, which was released on the 19th of May, 2020 by DreamFeel, holds the players by the hand and takes them on the journey int the life and struggles of Kasio as she comes of age. Be prepared to have your emotions purged as you play through the empathic tale of love, heartbreak, depression, affection, and adulthood. The beautiful part of this game how that it departs from the norm to infuse a sci-fi plot twist into the narrative.

If Found takes a dive into the life of an Irish female in her early 20s. Set in December of 1993, Ireland, young Kasio comes home from Dublin only to find that home does not exactly offer the comfort she is looking for. With her father dead, her brother, and her mother constantly trying to project her mundane expectations on Kasio, she is forced to decide between chasing a future as an astrologist or leading the basic life of a country girl in Ireland. 

Running almost concurrently with Kasio’s story is the story of a young space scientist Cassiopeia, who has been sent to space to investigate a black hole that is threatening to destroy the earth. The young scientist is in touch with a human on earth who has promised to help her in saving the earth. My guess being that this human is our protagonist Kasio, whose major interest is to be a part of the space program. Armed with nothing but an eraser, we take a retrospective sneak peek into the past life of Kasio and are laden with the responsibility of erasing hurtful memories from her diary. 

The story of Kaiso’s evolution continues as she leaves home and bunks with a couple of her friends, Colum and Jack, who are also in their early 20s. Her experiences may be well too familiar, as she hops through life trying out new things like being in a band. Her daily routine looks just like that of any young adult searching for meaning, joining a band, living in a disintegrating apartment, looking up to Colum and Jack, meeting new people, falling in and out of love and yet still finding solace in the one thing she truly loves – studying the stars. It even gets more familiar as we discover that the perfectly-figured-out life Colum and Jack portray is nothing but a charade. In the end, everybody is constantly on the journey to self-discovery, a feeling that I couldn’t shake whilst playing this game.

It is very impressive how the developers conveniently depart from the cliché expectations of visual novels without losing touch of the focus of the story. The story is told with simple – sometimes monochrome – hand-drawn illustrations drawn in a diary. As you erase layers of Kasio’s past which you feel necessary to remove, a new page is opened in the diary revealing a new experience. The game is so unpredictable that you may not know what to expect as you journey through her past. The idea of the game is to overwhelm you with empathy. As you continue to erase through her life, you start to identify with her struggles and you may even start to hurt with her as she tries to survive a transphobic family, and as she struggles to be accepted in a society blind to transgenders. Towards the end of the game, the eraser becomes thinner, signaling that there is less you are allowed to erase. This works perfectly because as the story progresses, you would have become so attached to Kasio that erasing would not be a mindless act of waving the cursor across the screen. Be ready to have moments of flashbacks to memories and experiences that are identical to the victories and losses of the game characters.

It still beats me how the developers were able to perfectly construct such an interactive piece with a very terse conversation style text. The dialogues are usually very short and devoid of circumlocutions, yet still very honest and self-reflective. This makes it extremely easy to follow the character’s conversations without losing sight of the empathic side of the story. The pencil-sketch, anime-like illustrations together with the color selections help to tell the story as much as the texts. As simple as these drawings look, they breathe life into each character by illustrating their expressions, emotions, and idiosyncrasies. Credence must be given to the soundtrack selection of the writers. If Found features a mix of punk, post-rock, and tense music to convey moods. Sometimes, this is also achieved using simple sounds like the gushing of wind and a dark blue backdrop to depict a cold winter night.

Close attention is paid to the cultural relevance of the plot setting. If Found doesn’t fail to take us on a journey into the Irish culture back in 1993. The conversation is replete with culture-specific references and vernacular. Thankfully, If Found doesn’t leave you to figure their meanings out all by yourself; we are provided with a glossary in the footnotes with contextual meanings of words, pronunciations, and references of each peculiar word.

As the game begins to wrap up, one cannot help but wonder whether Kasio’s visions of space is all but an escape mechanism to help her cope with her travails on earth. I see how that space may present a utopian existence for Kasio where she gets to redeem herself by saving planet earth, thus giving her the love and acceptance, she couldn’t easily find in her present existence. You can identify with this, especially if you are a daydreamer. The game was written to purge our human emotions and bring life and reality into gaming so that as we go through the game, we can see ourselves in the travails of Kasio. One major takeaway from this game, for me, is that sometimes to move forward we have to erase some of the past.