Kate Hawley

Stuck

Stuck is an introspective exploration game in which the player guides a small seedling through multiple mental planes, exploring their personified negative feelings in an attempt to understand themselves better. Stuck takes inspiration from Anti-RPGs like Yume Nikki and Mother and attempts to create a whimsical world full of character interactions that can be at times either comical or bleak and overwhelming. I created Stuck as a sort of personal diary piece in an attempt to express negative emotions that have been accumulating over the past year of quarantine. While the subject matter expressed through the dialogue and visuals of the game is very personal, I wanted the game to not be solely personal and included comedic and lighthearted elements in an attempt to ease players into the more negative aspects. The major theme of Stuck is, as the title suggests, feeling stuck. Feeling stuck in time, feeling stuck in a rough point of life and feeling stuck in a negative mindset are all subjects the work explores. The player’s avatar, the seedling is a visual representation of this theme of feeling stuck, they are an unbloomed flower in a world of fully bloomed flowers who represent the seedling’s perception of those around them, assuming everyone they see is in a much better space than they are. The seedling is prompted to leave their room and venture out into the world, by a disembodied voice, in an attempt to get a better perspective of their own mindstate. As the Seedling leaves their room, they step into a distorted mindscape that becomes less connected to the real world the further the seedling ventures from home, eventually transitioning from the warped version of the real world into an abstract embodiment of feelings of either anxiety or existential dread depending on which way the player explores. The characters the seedling encounters begin as flowers who voice what the seedling imagines they might be thinking but as the world devolves into the more abstract mental planes, the characters too begin to be presented as more primal fears from skinless piles of organs and shadowy figures haunting the anxiety plane to countless alternate versions of the seedling trapped in an overgrown garden at the end of existence in the dread plane. Interacting with these characters and experiencing the locations they reside in will hopefully let players make their own connections to certain parts and think about what these feelings mean to them. While I made this game as a way to express my own feelings, I don’t expect or necessarily want players to see this as being about me, I hope it’s seen as an exploration of negative emotions that can relate to any person experiencing them. This work is also not about solving these feelings or making them go away, it focuses on exploring and thinking about them as I believe that introspection is a useful tool when it comes to personal growth.

“Play Stuck here.”