If Found… Review: A Game By and For Trans People
If Found… captures the fragile experience of trans isolation and community through unique mechanics and a sci-fi spin
This review contains spoilers for the Annapurna Interactive game If Found…
Trans people experience many lives. There’s the life we lived Before coming out, the life we live After, and the lives we continually find ourselves stumbling into, whether we find them or they find us. As a 23 year-old nonbinary person, I meet a new version of myself nearly every day. I look back at old photos and scribblings in journals and feel a complete disconnect to my own past, even though I was the one who lived it. I’ve had to separate myself from people who cannot accept that that person, whoever she was, no longer exists. For me, my past feels like a little sister who’s passed away, whose memory I still honor in my day to day life. For other trans people, the past haunts, comforts, or serves as a metric for their growth (as anyone who’s cried over a transition timeline YouTube video will no doubt be familiar with). The past is many things, but it cannot be erased. In DREAMFEEL and Annapurna Interactive’s If Found…, however, you try to do just that. Literally.
Oh, and you’re also facing the potential end of the world via blackhole. No big deal.
Released on PC in May of 2020 and again for Nintendo Switch in October 2020, If Found… tells two stories: That of Kasio, a young, shy, nerdy girl returning from university to her hometown of Achill Island, and Cassiopeia, an astronaut slowly losing her control and her nerve as she faces a black hole that might swallow the earth. The game is a beautiful exploration of the complicated dynamics of family, both biological and chosen, and of letting go of (but not forgetting) the past. The main mechanic of the game is erasing, as your mouse is replaced with an eraser that grows smaller as the game goes on. The only way you can progress in the narrative is to keep scraping away at the environment, at Kasio’s drawings and journal entries, and at the fabric of space itself. The ramping tension as Kasio grows more vulnerable and yet more insular around her friends and family serves to heighten the stress Cassiopeia feels as she struggles to figure out how to change the fate of the world. Similarly, Cassiopeia floating in the endless void of space, alone, (save for a gentleman whose name we do not learn until the very end of the game, his attempts at connection cut off by static) perfectly reflect Kasio’s melancholy and self-imposed isolation from those who wish to change her, but also those who wish to help her.
We are brought into Kasio’s story in the aftermath, finding her journal and reliving memories of awkward and volatile family dinners with her mother and brother, nights of giggling and music with her friends, (Colum, Jack, and Shans respectively) and the night she decides to incinerate her journal to ash, having spent the last several days in a freezing house with no contact from the outside world. Even with the love and support she does have, the urge to hide is still inherent. Who Kasio is presently and who she was when she left Achill are being forced to meet again, and having to reconcile these two sides of her life proves to be a heart-wrenching experience, both for her and the player. It’s the old song and dance of trans experience.
What’s particularly special about If Found… as a trans narrative is the fact that Kasio never feels the urge to hide or be ashamed of the fact that she is trans. She makes rash decisions, surely, as a consequence of being overwhelmed by her past (and, frankly, as a consequence of being in her 20s) but it’s never fueled by hatred of her gender identity. It’s also not a story bereft of hope. Kasio gets to tearfully hug her accepting mother at the end of the game, her friends still love her, and she struggles, but now she’s learned she doesn’t have to struggle by herself. (As an added bonus, if you really don’t want to have any sadness in your trans stories, the game gives you an achievement if you go from the beginning and skip straight to the happy ending. The game gets it.) This is, no doubt, a result of the dev team for If Found… largely being made up of queer, trans, and nonbinary game devs telling stories about queer, trans, and nonbinary characters. This includes DREAMFEEL’s lead dev Llaura McGee who, in an interview with Gayming Mag, stated that, with regard to If Found…, “[She’s] not making a game for cis people.” And that is abundantly clear in the most loving and thoughtful ways.
Towards the end of the game, your eraser is replaced with a pencil as both Kasio and Cassiopeia (having survived the black hole, united with the gentleman we now know to be Mac) write out the endings to their stories. The threat of the death of earth is no longer, the frazzled relationships in Achill have been re-strengthened, and we get to leave Kasio and Cassiopeia living in peace. The focus is now on what comes next, rather than what has been left behind. The game acknowledges the difficulty of self-acceptance within the trans experience, but it gives the player the most important gift of leaving the protagonists happy. The suffering rings true, rather than unnecessary, and the reward of the ending leaves the player’s heart tender instead of shattered. In a world of narratives built around the drama of trans pain, If Found… comes to rescue us (and rescue me, a young nonbinary person who saw themselves in every stroke of the eraser) from our own dark and foreboding space.
(The avatar making game at the end is cute too.)
I give If Found… 5/5 stars.
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