Decarnation is a psychological horror videogame, it´s an indie game focused in puzzles and narrative. The story begins with Gloria, she´s a dancer in a place called ¨The Blackswan¨, she´s 30 years old and even so she still wants to dance, but she´s told to just teach to the new generations, she gets frustrated for obvious reasons, they want to get rid off her because they want to have younger women dancing, dismissing her value as a dancer only because of her age (she isn´t even old to be honest), besides that, her girlfriend breaks up with her, you could say her life it´s falling apart. Gloria in Decarnation is shown as a sensible woman who overthinks too much so even if she wants to be strong, let´s say she isn´t at her best moments mentally speaking.
Gloria receives a call from an important man who says he´s willing to give her a better job, she´s not in a well condition mentally speaking so she accepts, despite being weird to receive a call just like that. She decided to go the place she was told to, once she arrives, she´s knocked and as you can guess, she ends being kidnapped by someone we don´t know.
Gloria awakens in a small room, she is not handcuffed or something so she can move freely through the small room, though there is a door which is impossible to open if you don´t have the keys. Gloria learns that she was kidnapped by someone called ¨The Master¨, there´s another character named Bob too, he´s the butler of the mansion and he´s in charge to feed Gloria with food and seeing she´s doing ¨well¨.
In psychology, there is a term called ¨Dissociative disorder¨, it´s basically a defense mechanism, when you are going through traumatic stuff, your mind can just disassociate you from reality, of course it´s more complicated than that but I think that´s what happens to Gloria. As I mentioned before, Gloria is a sensitive woman who overthinks too much, so when she realizes she can´t escape from the bad situation she is in, she just locks herself up, to such an extent that we play as her through her nightmares when she is sleeping, in said nightmares we can explore her mind and to see her mental health is pretty deteriorated for obvious reasons, and when we are in reality, we can see her concept of reality is pretty distorted, she suffers from delusions and an extreme destachment from reality.
When we play as Gloria in these awful nightmares, I´d say the game earns some extra points, Decarnation is a beautiful game visually speaking, the art direction is amazing and you can see this just by walking through the screnarios of her mind, disgusting monsters that go beyond our understanding, as well as structures that are disturbing at first sight, due to the surrealism that can be perceived in them. To be honest, the game looks beautiful, not only in the nightmares, but outside of them look oustanding, I don´t know, the pixel art is beautiful, the visual style of this game kind of reminds of games like Mother or Earthbound.
Decarnation kind of have a problem to me, and that problem manifests itself when Decarnation remember is supposed to be a videogame, I mean, the gameplay sections that the game brings you to the table are mediocre, and with mediocre I´m not saying they are bad, when I say mediocre, I mean that they are just meh, they are not that good but not that bad either, sometimes we´ll have to participate in a minigame based on rhythm games which is pretty cool but I think there is some kind of input lag, no matter how hard I tried, sometimes the minigame just didn´t respond in the best way possible, there are even stealth sections and I´m not gonna say they are terrible but it´s okay, nothing remarkable, there are even some puzzles out there that are fine but that´s kind of the problem you know, most of the times I solved them, not because they were great, mostly because the story was so good and interesting that I just wanted to get rid off them so I could progress with the story.
The thing is that Decarnation shines through its story and characters, I really think the story is pretty well written and the characters are good as well, specially Gloria which is great, this game is basically a psychological profile of Gloria. Decarnation talks about complicated themes like psychological abuse, sexual harassment, how show business extract from you every last drop of sweat and then get rid of you like you are nothing just because of your age, the true meaning of freedom, stockholm syndrome, what you are willing to do in order to get fame, how mental breakdown can fuck you up and I can keep going.
Decarnation has a splendid atmosphere and it´s incredible the way how it makes you feel part of the story and not just some intruder, partly thanks to the visual aspect. There were a few moments when Decarnation kind of shocked me through its story, for example, there is a point through the story that Gloria gets used to being kidnapped and she actually is thankful for it, then a little girl shows up, said little girl is Gloria but when she was a kid, the little Gloria keeps telling to the older Gloria that she wants to get out, the older Gloria gets frustrated and ends up killing her younger self by strangling to death to the little kid. In the game, besides you, there are others you like your younger self and another one which is pretty old, I´d even go further to say that this game uses the Ego, Super-Ego and ID thing, I mean, in this case, the Gloria we use is the Ego, our younger self would be ID (our most instinctive self) and the older Gloria would be the Super-Ego, of course that would complicate things a lot but that´s a way of seeing it.
There´s another part of the game when you have to fight yourself, there is another Gloria and said Gloria is the one that feels satisfied of you being kidnapped because you can get free good, there´s no need to work and the social isolation is so heavy that the most ¨cute¨ thing that the butler says feels like heaven, said Gloria you have to fight kidnaps the younger Gloria which I like to call ID, let´s remember the younger Gloria is the one that keep telling to get out of your prison, she´s a dangerous person to the Gloria you have to fight, she doesn´t want to get out and she is fine with her current life even if it´s destroying her, that´s why she´s represented as an obese Gloria who has lost control over herself, she only cares about eating cakes and nothing else. It´s a significant moment through the story because I think maybe we all have been there, there´s been moments where everyone has been in the bottom and even if we don´t want to, we have to fight ourselves, a part of us that feel satisfied enough but sooner or later it will lead us to self destruction.
I keep thinking that Decarnation is lacking regarding gameplay, but everything else, it does awesome.
All of the screenshots were taken by me