Sometime in 2000. I am in fourth grade.

I go with my parents to a Costco on a rainy afternoon, simply for something to do, and I find this game in a bin for a few dollars. After the outing, we head home and I boot it up to play, hiding away in my bedroom with the lights off and the fan on. But no matter how much I focus or how much I turn the sound up, the screaming never stops.

I can hear them outside in the hall, in the kitchen, in the living room. Wherever. Always fighting. A lot of times fighting about me. I want it to stop. I try to concentrate on the game. A chicken running around various vaguely farmyard themed levels collecting things, avoiding enemies, but it isn't enough. A bad game for a bad life. Mort is released in 2000, two years after Spyro, and considering the premise is an animal rescuing members of your species from an enemy and their army, it's easy to believe that they were simply trying to capitalize on the whole "animal themed platformer" craze that was of the period.

But maybe that familiarity is what enticed me. Something so similar, so recognizable, so safe and predictable in a house full of danger and unpredictability. Maybe that's why I gravitated towards it despite knowing full well it was going to be a bottom of the barrel garbage game. I mean they couldn't even come up with an original enemy. It's a farm game, they could've had an evil farmer or perhaps another animal - a wolf, maybe - be the antagonist, but instead it's just a bunch of multicolored cubes. For god sakes, that's as lazy as one can get. Mort the Chicken is the video game equivelent of a direct to VHS movie filmed in two weeks simply to capitalize on the latest genre trend. Then again, the creator also made the Ecco series, so perhaps animals in strange situations are just something he likes working with.

So why did it bring me so much enjoyment? If its faults are this glaring, its downsides this obvious, why did I turn to it with such regularity? It had to be the comfort of familiarity. That's the only answer I can scrounge up.

Because, as I said, when nothing in your life is stable and things seem to change constantly, to have something so familiar is comforting. I'm in fourth grade. I'm starting to do bad in school, and I'm having crushes on girls I know. Everything is changing and I'm terrified. My parents are fighting constantly about whether or not to continue putting me in therapy because of my obvious depression over my dad continuing to make promises then breaking them. Nothing is ever the same, day to day, so something like Mort, even with its clear issues, is good for my mental stability because at least here is something I recognize as not only familiar but never changing. Everytime I load it up, it'll be the same. Even when the game ends and I start a new save file, it'll be the same. Repetition is one of the only saving graces I have anymore.

That's the thing about video games (and why it's such a weird thing to complain about when they're all inevitably this way and always have been) is the repetition. That's how every game is. You're given a concept and a set of controls that very unlikely to change, and told to do essentially the same thing over and over again. Even in larger more story based fare such as Mass Effect you are, invariably, doing the same thing again and again. That's just how video games work. And that repetition brings a calmness to my otherwise overworked autistic brain. In a world that is constantly changing and shifting, it's nice to know there's a safe place I can retreat to where everything will always be the same no matter what. Jump will always be jump. Mort might be awful, but it's a safe space purely because it's the same thing every time.

I don't think I ever beat Mort the Chicken, and frankly who could blame me? Who would willingly suffer through this, even with the level of security it might've brought me? But you know what? I still own it, jewel case and all. Not because I appreciate it, even in a comically bad sense the way MST3K appreciates bad film, and certainly not because I like it, but because it brings me still a sense of comfort, remembering when something so obviously shitty could help a scared little girl find solace in a household full of anger. Do not conflate my warm nostalgia for a sense of enjoyment. Mort the Chicken is awful. It's an awful, terrible, horrible game. But...

...like many games, it allowed me to find a way to escape something that was suffocating me at a time I needed that most. And while I'm not any better because of it, like I was thanks to games like Night in the Woods, I do have to give it some gratitude for simply being there when everything else sucked. And maybe that's why I continue to game, because life has never gotten better and never will, but games are still great, and still there to distract me.

God I need help.

My name is Mae. I write & make art for a living. If you like this review, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can tip me for my work at Ko-Fi.