Anamorphine is a simple game, navigated only with the joysticks, with a complicated premise, crafted by Artifact 5, Inc. You are simply Tyler, a photographer emotionally connected to cellist Elena. Anamorphine is a game about feeling for another human being. It’s about having to see your loved one’s life begin to deteriorate. It’s about not having the kind of control that you didn’t need before. It’s about you being shut out when all you want to do is help. It’s a lot of things in one, but ultimately Anamorphine is about a spectrum of loss and what that can do to someone.
Anamorphine is a perfect name for this game. In combining terminology from both character’s circumstances, anamorphic and morphine, it truly indicates the game is not about just Elena or Tyler. It’s about both.
Perspective is Everything in Anamorphine
Anamorphine begins with you and Elena going through the moving truck as you move into your new apartment. You start your new life. Being the photographer you are, all of your memories are in photographs. You capture moments in time that matter to you as almost a reflex. The caveat to that habit is that you also capture all of the life-changing, horrible moments as well. They hang on the walls of your history. Even your memories are still life, full 3D memories that you navigate one still moment at a time, taking in every detail. Soon, those images show the truth of the matter as you inch closer to the details.
The injury that changes Elena is such a fluke. The fact that it’s a fluke makes it that much harder to swallow. Her life, a successful cellist, teaching young players, playing with her stupendous quartet, is completely engulfed in music and her ability to express herself through an instrument. The accident, one of the few memories in full motion, is her taking a turn too fast and breaking the radius and ulna bones in her left lower arm.
The bow hand is the right hand, which can be more forgiving. The right arm plays motions with the entire hand. The left hand is intricate and demanding, necessitating a stilted level of finesse that any minuscule injury has the potential to degrade. I had a deep cut on the tip of my left pinky in high school. That took over two months of healing and recovery to get my hand back to a form where I could play my violin again. I couldn’t image a broken arm…
Inevitable Truth Warps Perspective
After she recovers, she tries to play again. You see her wince on every delayed fingering. You hear each missed note, the shrill mistake hanging in the air for what seems like forever. You feel for her. She’s trying to get it all back, but you see it all compounding onto her as she tries to endure.
She grows dark. She shuts you out. She stays in bed for days at a time. She even spends a string of still memories sinking deeper into the bathtub. Alcohol bottles often fill each room, but they’re not just hers. One scene, in particular, stuck with me through it all. It was the turning point in my playthrough.
She appeared at the kitchen table, head down and hair illuminated in dark, cold shades. Her hair was the tell, a kind of mood ring that showed you exactly how she felt about her world. I moved toward her. As I got close, a door, complete with frame, appeared in front of me and slammed shut. I moved around it, and she had disappeared to another part of the apartment. I followed after her into the music room. Another door slammed on me. I went into the living room after her. Another door slammed on me. I moved to the bedroom, where she stared out our window, taking in the cityscape of Montreal. Another door slammed on me.
Other, more metaphorical scenes stuck with me as well. You’re on a bike, going after Elena. After a long, tedious ride through turns and obstacles, you find her caught in a freefall into an abyss, each scene successively delivering a darker chasm. You jump out to her, but you never quite make it and fall in. These scenes gave me a perspective I hadn’t considered in all of my own depressive troubles: the love of my life. I knew that my spouse, C, has been patient and supporting and helpful in all ways on all venues, but I never considered how my own uncontrollable mind projected itself.
You Are Not Alone
Neglect is an outcome of depression. It’s never the desire. Isolation is the embodiment of self-worth in those dark times. You indicate that your life can only matter to you, even when it doesn’t, and you bury yourself in that mindset. You don’t feel the collateral damage because what you feel is a white-hot Absolute Zero.
When Elena slammed those doors on Tyler, I cried in remembering all the times I slammed emotional doors on C. Even before I finished the game, I stood up, walked over to C, and offered a long-overdue hug. C and I have been through so much in our fifteen years together, finding each other in our growing and developing minds, seeking out our identities and individuality in a cookie-cutter locale, seeing that we’re still each other despite the words we find to our developing definitions.
I try not to take that for granted, but flaws are inherent to humanity. It’s what makes us special, memorable, important. We don’t want perfection. We want humanity, no matter how much the world demands otherwise. Appreciate yourself, your loved ones, and those around you for their flaws, their humanity. We all deserve a better life.
Seeing how this uncontrollable behavior affects those you love is an important thing. It’s not a guilt trip. Please don’t even consider that. In this defeated mind, you need to know that you’re not alone. You need to know that you’re important. You have worth, even in that deep dark. Accept help if you need it. Please accept help. You won’t want it, but want and need are two different dimensions. Please accept help. You deserve it.
Anamorphine is out right now on PS4, PC and Xbox One. You can check out our review here.