FETCH

A solo journaling game.

A year ago you found out that you were never real. 

They took the actual version of you, the original, and spirited you away to the far side of the woods where you play with pixies til sundown in crystal spires and drink dew-drops from rose-petals. 

You are a bundle of twigs and string; you are rabbit skeletons and tattered strips of rag; you are a hollow-bone wretch, a fake and worthless thing, devoid of a soul. Your heart is a captured bird that flutters and spasms against your ribcage. Your skin is bark, your hair leaves, your teeth beaks and pebbles; your face a brutish artifice by the uncaring fae that wrought you offhand.

You know why people don’t like you, now; you aren’t one of them. You are a tool discarded. You barely exist.

What will you do, now you know? Will you moulder and rot, living your facsimile existence one grinding day at a time? Or will you sell what little life They gave you dearly, and burn the distant realm of crystal spires to the fucking ground even if it kills you?

If you decide to play Fetch, please take a look at the safety guidelines below:

CONTENT WARNINGS: Depersonalisation, body horror, pervasive unreality, psychosis, suicide.

GRANT: This is not my usual sort of game! It’s personal, introspective, and raw. It comes from my own experiences of depression and suicidality. It has a lot of potential for bleed, in that it can trigger emotions that could potentially upset you outside of the game itself. If you have history of serious trauma, psychosis or suicidal ideation, it might be sensible to talk the game through with someone that you trust before and after playing – or just skip reading and playing altogether. There are plenty of light-hearted games I’ve written; have a go on those instead.

Here are a few safety measures that I can recommend you put in place:

1) Remember that you are not the person in the game. You are a real person with thoughts and feelings and bones and everything. You are human. When you play Fetch you’re taking on the role of a non-human creature, but it’s just that – a role. Playing the game as yourself can be traumatic and is not recommended.

2) Each time you finish playing, return to yourself. Centre yourself in the real world. Look around you and name five things you can see. Press your feet into the ground and feel it supporting you. Say your real name out loud. Remind yourself who and where you are.

3) Write a paragraph about the experience in the third-person past tense – this is something which happened to a fictional character, not you. Think about what you want to take from the experience into the real world and what you want to leave behind.

My thanks to Jessie Holder who contacted me about this, and some of whose techniques I have copy-pasted verbatim into this warning. For additional resources on safety with respect to de-roleing and bleed, take a look at Black Armada’s safety guide or Beau Jágr Sheldon’s Script Change toolbox.