Psycholonials

I apparently never wrote a post about this game when I played through it the first time a few years ago. Well, first of all, to even call it a "game" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not a game. It is a "kinetic novel." There is no interactivity other than clicking to make the story progress. There are a rare few "choices" that you occasionally get to "make" but they're instantly shown to not matter at all, and the story continues on, regardless, your irrelevant, ignored choices having no effect at all. Even Homestuck had more game elements to it than this does, and it was "just" a web comic, for the most part. Just to get that out of the way.

And speaking of Homestuck, yes, this gamestory was made by Andrew Hussie, the same guy who made Homestuck. Having just finished another read/play/watch/whatever-through of Homestuck a week or so ago, but before going into the Homestuck Epilogues and maybe a reread of what there is so far of Homestuck², I decided to take a bit of a break and go through Psycholonials again, which I finished just last night. Here's the thing about Psycholonials: it has nothing whatsoever to do with Homestuck at all, aside from a few references (i.e. Zhen/Z, the main character, was a fan of Homestuck [which is entirely fictional in this gamestory] when she was younger, and she obliquely mentions it roughly three or four times total, I think, in the entire story, a couple times in the first chapter and once in the second chapter, and maybe once during the post-gamestory epilogue bit [which I didn't catch at all my first time through], and that's pretty much it), so you don't have to worry about knowing a single damn thing about Homestuck or any of the rest of MSPA to be able to playread Psycholonials. However, it is very much Homestuck-like, though, in that it was made by Andrew Hussie, and, as such, it shares a lot of DNA with Homestuck. And it is somewhat difficult to talk about it without mentioning Homestuck at least a little bit. The art style is the same as Homestuck. The humor and just general storytelling beats are similar to that of Homestuck. Clowns (and, to a lesser extent, horses) play a big role in Psycholonials, similar to Homestuck. And it's told mostly in a combination of second person prose and script/chatlog style dialogue, similar to Homestuck.

However, Psycholonials is a lot more grounded in reality (relatively speaking) than Homestuck was. It takes place in the real world[1], specifically starting in April of 2020. In the setting of the gamestory, as in the real world at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was just getting started. Trump was still *ugh*shiver* President (though, thankfully, he's only mentioned by name once, I think, as after that he is [and Joe Biden is] just referred to as one of the "senile rapists running for President"). There might be a sci-fi/supernatural element at play in Psycholonials, but it's not a definite thing, unlike in Homestuck, where it was definitely a thing.

Anyway, I'll stop talking about Homestuck now.

The story of Psycholonials, as mentioned above, follows a young woman named Zhen, though she goes by just Z, and her best friend Abby. Both of them are Instagram (*ugh*) "influencers" (*ugh*) and self-described "e-girls," though Abby is far more successful than Z is (i.e. Abby has three million followers, whereas for Z, just hitting 1000 is a huge milestone, at least at first). They are both "terminally online," and in any given scene of the gamestory, there is about a fifty-fifty chance that they will be seen staring at their phones as they will be seen not doing that. They both cultivate a following of "loyal simps," and pretty much the only thing they care about, at least in the beginning, is increasing their respective "brands." Also, Z had a huge meltdown/mental break a year prior to the start of the story (the specifics of which are never really given, though the reasons for it are slowly revealed over the course of the gamestory) and was "cancelled" and has been trying to recover from that ever since, though she has online enemies who would prefer that she remains "cancelled."

Fair warning, I'm going to spoil the first chapter (roughly the first hour or so) pretty explicitly at this point and, by extension, in a more general manner, the rest of the story. Zhen is, to put it bluntly, a villain protagonist. She is not a good or nice or well-adjusted person, and she would be the first to admit that. Neither is Abby, really. At the end of chapter one, Z decides to drunk drive to Abby's house, crashes her car, is accosted by a cop, wrestles the gun away from him after he takes a shot at her for no good reason, and then murders him by shooting him multiple times, and then she drives his police car off a dock into the ocean to hide the evidence (despite the fact that she just went off and left the cop's dead body right there next to her own crashed car). This is only the start of Z's criminal activities, in which Abby soon becomes a most willing accomplice. The rest of the story is essentially just the spectacle of how ridiculous and out of control everything gets as a result of Z's initial encounter with the cop, combined with the craziness of all the online stuff.

However, despite all that, Z and Abby are still... ...likeable, kind of? You still kind of want to root for them to succeed? Maybe? It makes you feel like, in real life, maybe the world really would have become a better place if a clown-based political movement/religion/cult/whatever the fuck it was actually had risen up over a couple months starting in April 2020 and essentially resulted in the destruction of worldwide social order as we know it? Sort of? Not really, but... in a way, perhaps?

Also, apparently, at least some of this story is autobiographical for Hussie? Probably not the killed-a-cop-and-ended-up-destroying-the-United-States part, but at least maybe the being-online-really-fucked-me-up part.

It never happens in the gamestory itself, but I wouldn't mind seeing Z and Abby depicted in Hussnasty Mode. They're usually only ever shown in Hero Mode, at most.

Oh, and the music is pretty good.

I'm putting the "game recommendations" tag on this, but the entire preceding post is a huge caveat for that.

[1] - Well, technically, Homestuck took place in the real world, too, at least at the start, but it fairly quickly left the real world far, far behind, unlike Psycholonials.