Mothered is weird, even by the standards of the games that I tend to recommend. It calls itself a “horror roleplaying game” – it is not particularly scary in a traditional sense, and the “roleplaying” is much looser than you might come to expect. But how do you bill a game about playing a broken person?

I am fortunately pretty healthy most of the time, but earlier this week I took my first proper trip the hospital. The pain I was in was severe and unlike any I had experienced before in my life. Fortunately I am fine now after my stay, but for even just a day I was questioning my reality and pain receptors in a way I had never done before. How can human beings operate under severe stress all the time? What does that turn us into?

Mothered is a walking simulator of sorts, where we walk around a small country house and its surroundings (an orchard, a barn, and a graveyard), doing our best to make sense of our disjointed reality. Nothing really looks very good at all. The game as a whole is happy to look unpolished, even by the standards of the PSX revival movement, which includes games like Aka Manto or Murder House. At first I was genuinely put off by these aesthetics, thinking them to be beyond the pale of looking bad. It almost looked like an asset flip, which feels terrible to write. But the longer I stuck with it, the more the graphics worked. Because the environment is this twisted, broken wreckage of normalcy, it helps to distract you from what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian sci-fi plot. The twist isn’t itself noteworthy, but how they portray it is. It really is the aesthetic element and the character writing that complicates this otherwise familiar narrative.

You return home to find your mother has turned into a mannequin-like creature, and you must follow her orders. Her animation is beyond stilted, as she clips into objects and her fabric warps across her body. But beneath this veneer of inhumanity is strangely empathetic dialogue, dialogue that shows just how hard she is trying to get a semblance of anything normal across. The game is an exercise in trying to please your mother, while also never being able to. We can’t capture normalcy. We can’t return to the time before we went to the hospital.

It is a game about trying to capture moments  of meaning in a world that doesn’t make much sense. It’s a frustrating game, a boring game, an obtuse game, a game that doesn’t really seem like it should work at all, but it accomplishes a lot with very little. It is the kind of precious gaming experience that weird little online game stores can provide. It might not sound like I’ve pitched much of a game, but as far as horror niches go of slow-paced psychological horror where you are just as much of an oddity as the world you inhabit, Mothered is hard to beat. 

You can buy Mothered: A Roleplaying Horror Game on Steam.