Game: Lydia
Genre: Adventure
System: Nintendo Switch (also on PC)
Developers|Publishers: Platonic Partnership| Nakana io
Price: US $4.00| AU $3.00|CA $ 3.94|£3.50| €4,00
Age Rating: EU 16+ | US M
Release Date: 17th January 2020
Review code used, thanks to Nakana.io
Games, often have us talking about joy, about the things which made us feel like we’re having fun or experiencing something new. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, the game at hand, Lydia, is something which feels new, and it is pushing the boundaries of games, in the best of ways. However, I’m going to need us all to put our serious hats on for this review. I’m not asking for you to take me seriously, but I am asking you to approach this game and its sensitive content with seriousness. Because of the nature of this game’s story, please, if you have trouble with topics of: child neglect, emotional abuse, and the harsh reality of substance abuse, go ahead and close this review. Come back to it when you can. Put your mental health before anything else.
This review is about a game that confronts these topics respectfully, with integrity, and pushes the players to be better by understanding others better. I want you to keep this in mind. There is not a bad bone in this game’s body. I do want to note that this review will contain spoilers. Since the core of Lydia is narrative, I don’t think it’s possible to do a proper review without addressing the narrative qualities. Though I don’t think this ruins the experience. I truly believe Lydia is more than just it’s narrative, and only by playing through the game will you feel, for yourself, what I’m talking about here.
Just like your favorite book or movie or album, describing it to a friend is a challenge you step up to, but it’s not because you want to tell the story yourself and it’s not because you can do it justice. It’s just that, you want to convince your friends to experience it for themselves, this is at the crux of all criticism, all reviews. Just like I treat you, with this writing, as a friend who I’m trying to help, so too does Lydia reach out and try to tell us its story.
The Story
Lydia is named after the main character of our adventure. She is at once a child, a tween, a teenager, and also, at once, in her adulthood. It’s never certain when the game is taking place, it seems like the events of the story happen as episodes of her imagination, but I have a theory that this ambiguity is important, we’ll get back to it at the end.
The game begins with Lydia, as a small child, on the street in front of her house. This world, for the most part, is in black and white. She’s talking to her friends Sheila and Steve. Sheila says she was promised a horse for her birthday, Steve is saying it’s a laughable idea, after all where would they store the horse? All their houses are the same small size, the same cookie cutter homes, he knows her parents couldn’t keep a horse. Lydia is, figuratively, between the two. While she also laughs at the idea, she ultimately tries to diffuse the situation, trying to get her friends to apologize to one other for hurting each other’s feelings. She then proceeds to go inside. She finds her father who reminds her it’s her bedtime. Lydia convinces him to tell her a bedtime story. As he’s telling the story of a princess and a monster her mother interrupts telling him Lydia has to go to sleep because the guests will arrive soon.
She’s sent to bed.
Once in her room she begins to look for Teddy, her purple bear. She opens the closet, then looks under her bed where she finds Teddy. Lydia is talking to Teddy, but to us she’s talking to herself. Teddy is telling her there’s something nice in the closet. She thinks it’s empty and then a light appears. She goes towards it. Then she’s transported to another world.
In this world, Teddy appears. He is a soft lavender tone with a white beard and stomach. He tells her they’ll go together to find the monster in the closet so he can prove to her it isn’t really all that scary. I won’t tell you the story in this moment-to-moment retelling any longer. Suffice it to say you encounter stand-ins for her parents in this world, soon they manifest into literal versions of them the more you return to it. I want you to understand how Lydia is presented: she wants to resolve conflict, wants to avoid it, but the real monsters are of the sort that cannot be avoided.
Each time she steps back into the closet she imagines herself a little older, each time she gets closer to the reality she lives in. The game ends with her as an adult, confronting her mother, the monster in the flesh. This is Lydia’s story, it creates a powerful perspective and in doing so makes you experience, to a degree, everything that Lydia is going through.
However, what I’d like to focus on instead is the exceptional quality and thoughts woven into an undergirding structure that supports everything the story says and makes you feel. I’m going to focus on four ways, five depending on how you think about it, that Lydia weaves this structure together. These four/five ways are: movement, color, choices/dialogue, sound, and time.
Let’s Get Going!
Lydia is a short experience, lasting a little over an hour. This isn’t being held against it, I think it works in its favor. However, the developers put a lot of thought into how to get the most out of this hour.
Movement
Movement is one of the key means by which we experience the game worlds that are set before us. A game like Bayonetta is fast paced and makes you feel powerful and agile. A game like Breath of the Wild makes you feel, with its climbing, that you can go anywhere and overcome any obstacle with the right approach. 2-D games often compensate for the lack of a third dimension by offering great movement and controls, see Celeste with its pinpoint maneuvering, maybe Braid with its time rewind feature, even a game I’ve seen brought up in conversation with Lydia, 2010s Limbo which knows you want to solve puzzles and gives you a very mobile persona to work through. All of these games offer ease of movement. Yes, they’re all platformers. But let’s also look at a game like Forgotton Anne (sic). The titular character, Anne, moves with ease. I would argue that game is also a narrative based game, not so much a puzzle game or platformer.
Now let’s turn to Lydia. Lydia’s movement is intentionally slow, deliberate, makes moments feel more reflective.
I used to cycle. So much that I called it “cycling” instead of “riding a bike”. I’m not stating this out of pride, I promise (in fact it’s embarrassing). I also used to run. I hated running because it got me nowhere and loved cycling because it got me anywhere, however, cycling requires a much greater distance to feel challenging and feel fulfilling. Running on the other hand? I hate it. It’s grueling. Running 12 miles is a drag (Sorry to any Half/Full Marathoners). But those 12 miles I would run gave me a lot of time to look at the things around me: trees, cars, people waiting for buses, birds, flowers, livestock, dogs barking at me, things which on a bike would fly past me.
Lydia’s slow walk from place to place is like my running. It increases the burden, increases your focus, makes you look at your surroundings more. If it weren’t for the deliberate use of slow movement, I’m not sure if I would have been able to gather the rest of these ideas. The developers are doing us a favor. In short story writing, there are writers who use “compression”. They write stories that go by quickly, but while you’re in them they feel longer, more impactful. This is a difficult thing to do. It’s harder to pull off in a video game because it comes at the risk of making a game feel tedious and sluggish. The developers clear this hurdle, because they aren’t just slowing Lydia down for the sake of making it feel reflective, they’re actually giving you things to reflect on, giving you a clarity otherwise inaccessible.
Color
For example. Color is sparse in the world of Lydia. Again, Limbo is often brought up as a stylistic comparison, almost definitely because it is also a black and white indie game. But while it can be a stylistic choice meant to make a world feel dreary, Lydia understands that in a world of black and white colors are potent markers. Heads up, there’s a few more spoilers coming.
Color in Lydia is so scarcely used that when it’s used two or three time, you can tell there’s a significant line being drawn by the color, connecting things. We could think about this like a basic form of symbolism. Though, importantly, they don’t leave it at that. Rather than make an A=B kind of symbolism, Lydia and its meditative pace exposes you to a color alongside an experience in order to make those colors feel like something. Giving color feeling is more difficult than giving them a coded meaning or moral or “symbol”.
Red & Yellow
There are two colors I’d like to focus on, which repeat. Yellow and Red. You first see Red when Lydia first walks into the world of the closet space. Lydia and Teddy walk up to a big frog-like demon who is emanating a bright and frightening red. To be honest, it isn’t the monster, but it is frightening. Despite giving rather lighthearted conversation, it is still jarring and grotesque. The way the light washes has a sickly aura to it. To any fans of manga, there’s an overused trope about something emanating a “dangerous aura”. This is it. I get it now. Seriously, just look at it. It gives me the heebie-jeebies, despite being nice.
The second time you encounter red is when Lydia has finished walking through a forest of trees with yellow eyes, glaring and pointing down at her.
Their eyes coupled with the dark of the forest and the uncertainty of where Lydia’s heading, it all makes my hairs stand on end. There’s palpable dread in the air. Then you begin to see that same red glow, it’s somewhat orange, but it evokes the same tones. It felt at that moment that Lydia had been tricked, that she was about to come upon the monster and that it would devour her. But the orange is indicative instead of the mixture of red and yellow. It’s an in between, it’s complicated.
Then, you come across Lydia’s father, or a version of him. He sits around a campfire at a campsite. He talks to her. A nice melodic song, the only respite of joy in the game, begins to rise, it’s the kind of song you’ll remember for a while. It isn’t a song you might find yourself humming, but it’s the kind of song that somehow feels familiar, though unknown. Lydia’s father begins to tell her a story, everything seems okay in the world. Teddy bids you farewell. The song plays on. Then, a phone call breaks the melody. Her father picks up. His friend wants to come out and drink with him. He tells Lydia to go to sleep.
The next scene involves. . .well it’s a tough scene. I won’t spoil it, because I think it’s one of the most nuanced moments. I would say it’s portraying Lydia’s Father in two lights simultaneously. Teddy embraces Lydia in the tent while she overhears a terrible conversation. Teddy can only say he’s sorry.
The Yellow comes into play in a “real moment”. Why “real moment” is in quotes will become clear when I explain my thoughts on this game’s sense of Time. Stick with me here though.
Skipping over one closet-episode, when Lydia is out of the closet-world and finally goes downstairs she has to walk through another form of dark forest. Here, her home, is filled with people who for a lack of better words are completely wasted, some on the brink of alcohol poisoning.
Every single one of them looks about the room with the same yellow in their eyes that filled those of the trees in that wretched forest. While the red evokes a sinister element, the yellow is unsettling in a way that makes you flinch. When you flinch it’s because you think you know what’s coming, you’re preparing for a blow. Yellow, here, suddenly makes you feel on edge, waiting in anticipation and eager to flinch.
Lydia makes her way through the room of inebriates, speaking to some of them, before the room is suddenly empty and Teddy appears. He warns her not to go outside and tells her the real monster is out there, but that it isn’t something harmless or something which is just imagined. Lydia goes outside. There, towering over the land, is a figure dressed in an Elizabethan garment, frilly sleeves, neck ruffs and all. Her eyes are aglow. She hides her face behind the masks of tragedy and comedy, and from behind the eye slits that same yellow glow seeps out. This is Lydia’s mother.
She assails Lydia with guilt, Lydia is made both physically and emotionally small.
I’m not here to suggest what these colors mean. To be honest I don’t think that’s how symbolism works or should work. I do, though, believe that the colors are sharp tools to make you feel. The initial fright of the demon maximizes the initial fright of the forest, the yellow eyes in the forest maximizes the fright of the living room. You don’t know what they mean, but just like Lydia, you have to work through the fear and dread. You don’t have a choice. Which brings me to my next point.
Choices/Dialogue
This will be a shorter section, because I don’t think it requires any direct or in-depth examples. What do we all feel when we have no options, or don’t know them? What do we all feel when we choose one thing but are handed another? We feel frustrated and we feel powerless, we feel deceived and we feel anger.
Often in games, choices that don’t affect a story are seen as a letdown, but in Lydia’s world it’s made clear that you have no choices. Often times your choices are a set of “???”s.
Just like a child at the whim of neglectful parents or a world blind to her, Lydia can, at times, protest to a character’s dialogue but often she’ll go unheard. Often the only option is not her option. Depending on the dialogue choices you’ve made, sometimes she speaks according to what has been chosen, but often she’ll be cut off and dialogue continues to a script. We could say it’s the game’s script, but, truly, it’s the parent’s script.
I don’t think this limitations on options is a flaw, whether or not it was deliberate, it results in situations that deny us choices. In doing so we are made to feel powerless and weak while we feel slow and dreadful. The thing which connects us to our world, our voice, is made silent regardless of whether or not it’s audible.
Time
Time is murky in the world of Lydia. The closet-time shifts and goes to the future, through the different ages of Lydia. We’re led to believe that the real time is her childhood with Teddy outside of the closet. However, when we consider the final scenes of the story, this simply isn’t true. Clearly Teddy’s presence in the living room indicates that something isn’t real, and clearly the towering matriarch couldn’t have been real. After these scenes the game cuts to Lydia as an Adult. It’s a decisive moment. She needs to decide whether or not to pass an ultimate judgement on her own mother. I think this is a telling moment.
It reveals one thing. All of this has been a deep reflection into her own past, while an adult. However, going back and reliving these forms of trauma often has one feeling powerless, which makes the process all the more frightening.
I think this is why Lydia sees herself as a child overcoming an unfaced reality. It’s also why everyone else’s voices shift as time goes by, her friends’ voices especially, but her voice remains the same almost-whimper of a child. She becomes the most powerless form of herself in order to find true power, the resolution to look at things dead-on and to no longer make excuses for those that hurt her. She chooses, as an adult, to do what is best for herself. In a way, so much of her life has been silence and denial, so it’s in this moment she chooses to use her voice to make a stand.
More Than A Story
If it isn’t clear, and I do want to be clear, this game is not just a story. Lydia is composed of all the elements that make the player limited like Lydia. Where most games make us feel powerful and uplifted, this game wants us to feel the turmoil and dread of having these experiences, if only to a small degree of the reality. Lydia is a game designed to foster empathy, to make someone feel and see a story they may not know exists for other people and to allow those who have lived it to see the light at the end of a tunnel or perhaps to just know that someone else out there understands.
It’s a powerful and beautiful game. It requires resolution to make your way through it, but it’s because of this that we must play it, must try to be better. Lydia is a game that wants us to be better, that wants society to be better, that wants people affected by these tragic circumstances to feel better. This game should be played. It is one of the rare instances where a game feels like more than a game. I respect this game deeply. I admire it, and I admire its creators. I’m excited to see, within five or six years, how this game has affected video games as a whole.
One Last Note
I know one story can’t be everyone’s story, but this game handles delicate topics, and it handles them gracefully. It’s a game, which if you’re up for it, you should definitely try, especially at its accessible price point.
One last note: this game offers a $1.00 (USD) DLC. The DLC offers an extra feature on the main menu of the game, it gives Lydia a colouring book of monsters that she can paint with happy colours. More importantly, however, the revenue from the DLC goes towards Fragile Childhood, which is, as the description for the DLC states, “a non-profit organization preventing and diminishing harm caused to children and adults due to parental substance abuse.” You do not need to get the game in order to make a thoughtful donation, though I highly suggest you also support these creators by purchasing this potent set of truths, which also happens to be a game.
I know this may have been a tough review to get through, given the nature of the material. I just want to thank you if you’ve made it to the end. I do want to say, one last time, Lydia is a game that requires some resolve to get through, but it is a masterpiece.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up
Wow, that review! Nice job, Everisto! Can we find your reviews on Steam, or do you only play on Nintendo? That’s a pity that you stopped writing 🙁
I totally agree, and it’s indeed a pity that Evaristo left our team!