We finally finished the game with a near perfect meta score.

Writer’s Note: While previous diary entries have steered away from the big spoilers for The House on Fata Morgana, this one hasn’t, because it’s hard to talk about the topics without details. Be careful!

As a content warning, topics discussed in this article will include trauma, gender, abuse, and coming out.

Finally, please note that this is not a review, it is the last entry in a four-part game journal. before a review, a short series that allowed us to really delve into the themes of a game that garnered so many 10/10 reviews that had a perfect score of 100 on Metacritic for a while.

For those of you who still want to know more about Fata Morgana: Welcome to the final entry …

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I did it.

I finished The House at Fata Morgana.

It took me over 40 hours over four months to see the end of this long, tangled, time-skipping story. I mean sure, I haven’t finished the DLC yet, but to be honest, after four months of playing this game every time I have time, I think I have reading fatigue. I feel like I should get an award. Ending Fata Morgana feels as monumental as ending my three-year degree. I am a changed woman.

Here’s what I like best about Fata Morgana – I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where I know all the characters so well.

At the end of the main story (which includes an epilogue, another epilogue, and a prologue), this is what I like best about Fata Morgana – I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where I’ve met all of the characters. this good. I know them better than their own mothers. Better than your therapists, even. I have seen the ugliest parts of them, their hidden hearts, their desires and fears; I know what motivates them. This can only be achieved through brilliant writing, and that is exactly what you will find in Fata Morgana – yes, there is one. lot writing, but almost everything was exciting and beautiful.

At first, each and every character is deeply unpleasant. He hated the weak-willed Mell and his smug sister, Nellie. I found The Beast, a cursed and miserable creature, intriguing, but who felt sorry for herself. And Jacopo, the arrogant, short-sighted, power-hungry tycoon, had absolutely nothing nice about him, except maybe his pretty coat.

Woven through all of these stories was the White Haired Girl, a kind but pathetic young woman who let everyone trample her, to their eventual detriment. He was mad at her: why don’t you defend yourself? Why don’t you yell at anyone? How can you be so subservient to people who don’t deserve your respect or kindness?

Well, I got my answers towards the end of Fata Morgana. In fact, I got a lot of responses at once, and it was very overwhelming and a little confusing, but I think I have it all figured out now. You see, the answer is, as you may have guessed from my last journal entry, trauma.

I said earlier in this article that I know these characters better than their own therapist, but the fact is that none of them I have therapists, probably because the medicine in their time periods consisted mainly of “I don’t know, try to bleed them again?” A good old psychoanalysis would have perhaps resolved everybody of the problems presented in history, but the purgative mansions that travel in time will have to suffice.

Oddly enough, it reminds me of a fairy tale I read when I was little, in a book full of strange stories. It was about a boy whose tooth fell out and wrapped it in glitter paper until it was the size of a beach ball, but when he unwrapped the ball again, the tooth was missing.

Trauma is a bit like that tooth. It is a small canker in your heart, and when you try to wrap it, it will leave lumps and lumps that will rub against other people’s hearts and hurt them. Sometimes what’s at the heart of the ball dissolves on its own, but the lumps are still there. Those bumps are coping mechanisms – learned behaviors that affect the way you deal with other people and the world at large. Lumps are what matters in the end. Not the trauma at the center of it all.

If your trauma is about feeling helpless and powerless, then you may overcompensate by needing to be the one. the majority rich and powerful person, and even if you’re doing it to make sure your loved ones never suffer like you did, you may end up neglecting them in search of more wealth and strength. If your trauma is that your trust is betrayed, you may never trust again, even with deserving people, that they could heal you.

That’s Fata Morgana in a nutshell: unwrapping that ball of teeth, dealing with the lumps as they occur, and as it is a painful process, calming the person involved. Fata Morgana is an emotional surgery and it is not always delicate. But in the end, he wanted to do nothing but dig with a scalpel and remove all the pain.

It is a great testament to writing how far it goes from the difficult and repetitive first hours. I really hated almost all the characters in the beginning, and in the end, I wanted to give everyone a hug. They felt almost real: deeply flawed people with complex feelings and relationships, and an excellent characterization that made them all incredibly believable.

Get ready for the big spoilers now, okay? You have been warned.

The best characters of them all are the ones that you don’t even know until the end of the game. Michel, Giselle and Morgana are the true trifecta behind what to think It’s the trifecta – Mell, Beast, and Jacopo – and it’s the tension between those three that makes the second half of Fata Morgana so grip.

Each one of them comes from the tragedy, and each one faces it differently: Michel turns inward, pushing everyone to avoid the pain of love and loss; Giselle is cheerful and loving, but she hides her pain deep in her heart, afraid to show it to someone for fear that they will reject her and treat her as “damaged goods”; Morgana, who has possibly suffered the most, endures it all in a holy way, letting people hurt her over and over again because she believes it is her duty, until she fractures her sense of herself almost hopelessly, leaving only the part behind. looking for revenge.

Michel, Giselle and Morgana are all invisibly united by their own nature: each of them is marginalized in some important way. Giselle and Morgana come from poverty, and both are women, mistreated over and over again by men who seek to use them as objects; Throughout the game, they come to find their own power, but it takes them a long time to overcome what others have inflicted on them.

Michel, slowly morphing from a cold, unfriendly, and ominous man into a soft, caring but clumsy darling, is easily my favorite of all, and his dialogue and story make up a big part of the essence of Fata’s backstory. Morgana. Michel was born intersex in the early 1000s, and his story is brutal, cruel and dark, as his mother tries to disown him, and his former crush tortures and degrades him. But Michel’s existence and identity are not treated as a freak show or a shocking twist; instead, we see him, Giselle and Morgana treat each other with delicacy, care and kindness, even though the rest of the world did not.

Fata Morgana is about choosing a family and moving on to a kind of happiness that comes after utter despair; It is not “misery porn”, and it does not wallow in despair

The point is that, in real life, this is exactly what queer communities do: they come together, supporting each other through worse the pain and trauma of their lives: family exile, isolation, illness, rejection, fear, and denial are all common experiences. But in my experience, the people who come out of it are determined to be kind and fierce, as protective as a mother bird and ready to form chosen families that provide the love and care that perhaps (but not necessarily) were denied.

Fata Morgana is about choosing a family and moving on to a kind of happiness that comes after utter despair; It is not “the pornography of misery,” and it does not wallow in despair. Instead, seek to keep moving forward, even if the journey is tough, even if the tide is against you. Michel’s story is not about his identity or his trauma, but about how he heals and how he finds membership. I have never seen a story of gender identity and weirdness told with such care, love and detail before. Despite all the supernatural weirdness that swirls around Fata Morgana, at its core, it’s a story about people: messy, imperfect, but ultimately good people, trying to do the right thing and also trying to understand themselves. .

In keeping with that theme, little by little, very slowly, we discover that the “bad guys”, Mell, Beast and Jacopo, also come from the tragedy. However, his tragedies are largely self-inflicted; where Michel, Giselle, and Morgana are used and abused by others, the three men are frustrated by their own fatal flaws and end up hurting other people in the aftermath. Happiness is there for the taking, and yet it eludes them because they are unwilling to leave themselves vulnerable. Of course, they also get their own happy endings, but not after being punished for their mistreatment of others.

But like I said, all of this is packed into 40 hours of story that moves between fast-paced, action-packed chapters and slow, occasionally tortuous periods of inactivity. It’s just … Bye. There is a lot of that. Sometimes that works in your favor – a tense, prolonged reveal hits the hardest when the tension part lasts for 20 hours, after all, but many times, especially with the large amount of to pronounce The misery and despair in the story (you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and you can’t tell a story about healing after trauma without, you know, the trauma), it can be a bit exhausting.

In that way, Fata Morgana is a lot like therapy. You will expect it to be relatively easy, but by the third hour you will regret your decision to start; In the tenth hour, you will think that maybe you have everything figured out, just to make a great discovery that takes you back to where you started; When it finally comes to a satisfactory end, you will find that therapy is about reliving and reexamining the worst parts of your life and finally getting over them.

Fata Morgana is a difficult game to play and, many times, it is hard work. But just like therapy, it’s worth it all in the end, and it will come out raw, but new.