Decade is a brilliant and deeply frustrating game. It's very rough around the edges, in the code, in the art style, and in the writing and narrative its built for itself. It's unbelievably dark and crushing, following a time traveling timeline based system, sending three children back a decade at a time to learn about and influence the past to try and leave the bunker you're trapped in, in an unlivable apocalyptic world. There are somewhere around twenty endings and most of them are horrible. The very process of building up to them and agonizing over choices, and even exploiting time itself to win through meta knowledge as the time traveler, and on a second level as the person playing the game, made for an emotionally and mentally challenging puzzle with no right answers and only pain and anxiety as your reward for it.

Each of the three children you send out has their own complex personality and reaction to all of what they see. Sometimes horrific, sometimes lavish, sometimes mundane, but never inconsequential. They'll come back with new perspectives, ideologies, dispositions, and questions for you which cause conflict and friction with the mission. It's quite difficult to manage, and at times it's crucial to send the right person to the right place at the right time that you just have to intuit from what you already know about them. At several points they all have their own plans which they ask you to execute, all giving their own unique endings but pretty much dooming you from ever seeing the right choices on a playthrough. What is most terrifying is seeing them age in the span of minutes, and eventually die if you're too late with trying to get one of the main endings of the game.

They resent you, pity you, mistrust you for the position you've placed yourself into. The only one who knows and understands how to operate the time machine, and can't be sent back. You're stuck in this younger age, and they point out the absurdity that they're taking orders from a 17 year old who has the best intentions of humanity in their heart when all of them in their own way are hung up on living for themselves. Because they've gotten to truly live, and the distance from their reality complicates the vision of this future you spent so much time trying to cultivate. It's a lose lose predicament for everyone. A constant reminder of sacrifice for a myopic greater good as you destroy timeline after timeline with no certainty of what the hell you're doing at all.

All of the endings you get are actually false endings, as many of these kinds of interactive fiction games are. Bad endings forcing you to go back and experiment until you can figure out what you're supposed to do. I'll be up front and say I only got one of the main endings and struggled to get the rest of them because the game continually would glitch out, struggle to retain inventory through all kinds of strange errors, and in one case, completely prevent me from progressing in the way I need to in order to finish the game, crashing every single time I'd retry. It's also unforgiving with regards to mistakes. If you have one dud trip, you will not be able to get the best ending, forcing you to rely on a pre-mapped out perfect route and just have to pray that nothing in the save corrupts and it just lets you. You have to get four items which combine into one, and a fifth item which details a letter from the creator of the time machine. Then, and only then, while everyone's alive and you making the right choice, can you get the real ending of this game.

I can't really reveal much else about the world and the many ways it changes and can be influenced by your choices, but it's largely shaped and governed by several philosophies and movements which rise and fall through the timeline. The main one of influence are the Nerolians who have seen all of the chaos of a great and terrible war and brought the world into a sort of modernist simplicity and honesty which left people wanting for complexity but living in relative prosperity until its decline. The alpha timeline you start in was completely destroyed through melting rain, caused by the successors to the Nerolians, the Vetiverians, who were once an art movement aestheticizing violence, taking it to a simple extreme of holding violence and murder as virtuous. You can only imagine the panic of sending an 8 year old to this time to investigate, which you are basically forced to do as soon as you start the game.

All sorts of other ideologies and regimes fight for dominance the more you split things up. Wandering into the past to find more context for future events, showing literature from one fork of the timeline to stir another into revolution. Artistic sensates who live for nothing but pleasure somehow taking the reins of society and entering into a cold war with technofetishists or occultists. At different points you will see even the most horrible ideologies shine in some special way that makes some kind of sense, and at other times see them bring the world to doom through their ideology brought to an extreme. The endings of the game all sort of tie into the same idea that no ideology should hold hegemony over others. Though, I would not say that this is any kind of centrist game. It is collectively minded, and you do quite a lot of murdering.

Playing it was really a sickening and awful experience for me. Something highlighted by the experimental and glitchy art. It would love to make use of clashing and sort of sickly color palettes, stock footage distorted and interposed. Electronic dance music blended with prose poetry showing you your own doom for dooming and saving and saving and dooming and never ending up in a happy enough timeline. It feels like a heavy, crushing weight to be doing anything in this game. Even trying to skip through dialogue you've already seen before to get variations and sort out that ideal ending feels like you diegetically are just ignoring the emotional struggles of the children you've been sending out and aging for the agenda of a new humanity.

I've been feeling a negative type of way for the past week, and I feel like this game of all things completely knocked something loose. Agonizing over lost childhood and a life stifled by an abusive and exploitative society, seeing children take on such a heavy burden in a much more extreme microcosm of these sorts of feels felt.. like it just put things into perspective. Like for how terrifying the future of the world we live in now is, for how depressed I can get with the understanding many years were robbed from me because of how I was forced to live, there is still plenty to be living for, and a lot to hope for. A faith we can put into each other that we can pull together and do great things for each other in spite of our clashes of personality, individual needs and shortcomings and hang ups.

It's been a week filled with listening to David Tibet deliriously screaming about horses, the holy ghost, nihil, and dead cats, and this could only have a worse impact on my mental health the more I dwell on it. It can only make me feel like I'm spiraling, unraveling as I play this game over and over again as it rejects and breaks apart at the seams denying me the good ending I'm looking for. Forcing me over and over again to see the mock endings of humanity dooming itself for the same myopic reasons, the same destructive systems and concentration of power manifest through the passions and ideals of dangerous people in positions of consequence at the wrong moment as the systems are breaking apart and prime for exploitation.

But I'm not in such a bad position as I can finally take a step back from all of this and breathe. That I was struggling with a complicated group of feelings that could only be resolved through self reflection and self care. Creatively, artistically fulfilled and nurturing the positivity and connections to other and good things in my life. This game is cathartic in a way I never could've expected. I couldn't be satisfied, I was stuck in a loop because I feel like I needed perspective about what it's all for. What good things people need, I need. There is no light without darkness, no dark without light. I can't say I've felt depressed, just pensive. I feel loved, appreciated, surrounded by good things and with a positive outlook. But anyone can feel stuck and stagnant.

This game is truly horrible. Like Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil made manifest into an interactive fiction game with time travel mechanics, as you see a cycle or perhaps a spectrum of beauty, ugliness, temptation, responsibility, the mundane, exception, good, unspeakably evil, innocent, sexual, delusional, hopeful, everything. It is the sort of way you should feel utterly mentally and emotionally broken trying to comprehend the trouble of time travel. This is art. But this is also words words words words words words words words words words words words JUST how I like it. FIX YOUR GAME!!

The time for negative introspection is over for a while. I'm over it. Spring is starting. Good things are in motion in my life. The geopolitics of the day will always be frightening, and the policies relating to my own existence and status as a minority too. Things about my past I can't change. Really, I can't change any of these things. I'm sort of okay with that right now. I can change a small amount of things, but not inconsequential things. It was never a bad thing in the first place that people had such little control over each other. It's wrong that any one person could have such control over others on the scales of our society, the way I see it.