PRIDE 2020: If Found Please Play This Game
“I think Ireland is pretty fond of burying and erasing injustices in general… we struggle with holding ourselves accountable and there’s always a temptation to sweep things under the rug”. This is what Eve Golden Woods, writer and producer on If Found…, told me via email.
According to her, If Found… is a game “about growing up in the west of Ireland as a queer person”, there’s a secondary plot going on in the background but I don’t want to spoil that here. However, “on a more technical note, it gets called a visual novel, which isn’t entirely wrong… But it’s not entirely right either”. Because yes, while it is a linear, narrative-driven game filled with dialogue and lightly animated images, it’s also more interactive than most visual novels. In a powerful bit of direction, the main verb of the game is erasing, as Kasio destroys her diary chronicling her returning home to Achill from college in Dublin in 1993.
If this game wanted to be even more Irish, everyone would be calling this a rubber and not an eraser.
Kasio is a trans woman in a time and place where that just wasn’t a thing most people had considered even existing, and it quickly leads to a falling out between her and her family. The rest of the game follows Kasio as she moves in with a punk band (other outcasts of this remote community that have gathered around music) in a derelict house.
The game trades largely on its distinctly 1990s Irish atmosphere and its depressingly relatable story. It plays these two things off each other to make Kasio, her family, her new friends/fellow squatters and an elderly woman called Maggy feel like people you’ve probably met.
The team was small, with only five core members; Llaura McGee wrote, directed and produced the game, Eve Golden Woods wrote and produced, Tim Sabo was the sole programmer, with Liadh Young being the lead artists with support from Brianna Chew. Despite this, the game managed to attract the attention of darling indie publisher Annapurna at GDC 2017. You can hardly blame them, the game makes a stellar first impression. According to Eve, “Right from the start Liadh’s art was foundational to the game’s direction”.
The full soundtrack can be found here or on Spotify.
The music by 2Mello is the other standout aspect of the game’s presentation. However Eve says, “[that] took much longer, as we searched for the right person. But once we found 2Mello we knew we had hit gold”. His mixture of alt-punk does a particularly great job of establishing that stellar sense of time and place, while his synthy-er numbers accompany you as you delve into Kasio’s thoughts, and with the game being such a personal story these tunes really help ground the character.
The game centres around Kasio and her struggles coming out as trans to a family that never considered queerness as anything other than a foreign idea. And you certainly feel the weight of the message the team was trying to convey throughout. It’s a game of common struggles of the queer community portrayed through personal anecdotes. Kasio coming home and quickly becoming homeless, and her mother not knowing how to react to her daughter’s gender identity are both portrayed in a very deliberate fashion. Eve puts it like this: “LGBT youth in Ireland, especially young trans people, are way more likely to become homeless… And a lot of parents, even the ones who support LGBT rights in principle, have a much harder time accommodating their own children.” For that reason, these became tentpoles of the narrative.
If Found…’s supporting cast certainly aren’t caricatures but they definitely all play into archetypes that all queer people in Ireland have met. Kasio’s mother is well-meaning, if naive, and uneducated to the new world of identity her daughter has introduced her to. Fergal, her brother, is “definitely based on experiences [Eve has] unfortunately”, as he fulfils the role of a family member that refuses to accept the reality they have been confronted with and winds up lashing out at Kasio on a constant basis. While the local odd-lonely-woman-up-the-road is a clear stand-in for the forgotten generations of queer people that lived with their perceived sin in secret. Eve calls Maggy “a reminder of the continuity of [the LGBT] experience, that we have a past as well as a future”.
When I asked her if it was difficult to go from writing warm people like Maggy to, as I put it, “a real POS” like Fergal, she gave me a true Game Writer’s answer. “You write Fegal saying something horrible, and then you look at it and go ‘Oh man that’s really horrible, the players will HATE him’, and then you feel like you’re doing your job well”. Eve says it's a surprisingly cathartic experience, writing characters like Fergal, “you end up kind of happy in a weird way”.
The game is set on Achill Island. This is the largest of Ireland’s isles, part of the rural country of Mayo and its choice as the setting for If Found… was no coincidence. While none of the team grew up there “the sense of remoteness and isolation that [Achill] offers and the self-contained nature of the space was really appealing”. It’s clear to see why, as this isolation and place out of modern time plays a pivotal part in Kasio’s struggle.
This is the closest Ireland will ever get to a space launch.
This purposeful Irishness extends to one of the most fascinating features of the game, an Irish language key. “As we were working on the script we had a lot of conversations about specificity, and wanting to dig into a real time and place”. To do this the team decided to let language play a pivotal role in the game. This is done not by forcing the player to play the game in Irish (although that is an option) but by leaning into Irish mannerisms, phrases and even cultural touchstones at every turn and then leaving annotations to explain their meaning. If you’re Irish suddenly every reference hits close to home and if you’re not, you quickly find yourself sticking out like a sore thumb, like Kasio.
Although Woods and McGee were delighted with this feature giving them free rein to get as Irish as they liked, it has caused a fair deal of headaches. I brought up the game’s suggested pronunciation of Oíche Maith(Goodnight) as “EE-ha Wy” being especially contrary to anything I was ever taught in school. “Irish pronunciation is complicated! There are three dialects - Ulster, Connaught and Munster. And Ulster is very different to the other two. Llaura speaks Ulster Irish, and I speak a mix of Connaught and Munster. And the Achill is on the border between Connaught and Ulster. [It’s] all very messy”. This resulted in them spending a lot of time trying to get things right. But a few things slipped through, like Debs (the Irish word for prom) needing to have an explanation patched in.
Loneliness and isolation are a big part of If Found… and despite being set 27 years ago much of what the game has to say about rural Ireland still rings true. “The internet has made a difference for sure… I know from talking to my teen sisters that there’s still bullying in school and pressure on kids to conform, but there are also students in their school who are open about their gender and sexuality in a way that would have been impossible when I was young.” Epitomising the Irish Goodbye, If Found… doesn’t try to go out on a bang. “We always knew that the note we wanted to hit was optimistic, not perfect but hopeful”, it leaves itself when the time feels right, not when all the questions are answered and all the problems solved but when it’s good enough… for now.
McGee echoed similar sentiments to Woods when it comes to being queer in Ireland but wished to bring up some aspects of being trans specifically. “It is definitely a lot better than the 90’s, so many more people realise they can transition… However, it’s 30 years later and there is still far too much bigotry.” While organisations like BelongTo and TENI do their best to help those transitioning and there is generally more acceptance of trans people nationwide, there are still massive problems that need to be addressed. Llaura brings back up that “trans and gay young people are more likely to be homeless, and this is 100% because of their family situation[s]”, on top of this currently in Ireland “there is no legal support for young people and transition medically in any way is impossible until you’re 18, forcing trans people to undergo puberties which are incredibly distressing and damaging. She also brought up that for as much as the government claps us on the back for marriage equality there is still a lot of scare stories and bullshit in the media. “Thankfully we have a very inclusive and united feminist movement and all the most notable Irish transphobes are in the UK [now] for lack of oxygen they get here.”
I could try to tie in this final quote from Llaura, but I think I’ll just let it speak for itself.
