Don't look up "kaschei" on Wikipedia before playing

Image credit: Bagenzo / Middle Sea Software / Rock Paper Shotgun

I too often default to thinking of videogames as singular, monolithic things, rather than hives of collectively made functions and assets, secreted behind a launcher icon. Kaschei, an experimental visual novel created for Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2, is an openly piecemeal arrangement of mutually informing or sabotaging fictions, stretched across different interfaces and timeframes, held together by a lot of lovely and hateful emotions. A really good kind of carefully networked, absolute mess. People and pieces in orbit.

It's a story of belonging, hollowness and resentment pursued by way of linked artworks, almost akin to a forensic investigation game like The Roottrees Are Dead in places, though its capital-C Choices are few - they mostly boil down to what you open next. It invites you to perform a formal analysis by steadily overlaying itself, introducing fresh incarnations of itself that feel both binary and consecutive. While broadly a mystery, written in the style of an instant messager conversation, it covers a handful of styles and genres, from epistolary fiction to sci-fantasy.

It has fun with a few interface conventions – there's a wonderfully condescending, menu-level characterisation of the player as an inexplicable basement dweller - but it's not just a spoofy dismantling. As with many a great visual novel, it express a lot by way of deceptively simple questions of font, text colour and text SFX. It also has very cool music.

New to "toxic yuri"? Here are some framing excerpts from the jam page: "This is a jam for stories that really dig in to [and] tackle trauma and problematic relationships. Stories that show despair, jealousy and rage. Stupid girls that make each other worse. Sadistic girls being manipulative on purpose. Societal trauma and the destructive ways it manifests in girlthings. You know, all that stuff. Basically, we love it when girls suffer, yaaaay!"

Further down, the organisers add that: "Toxic yuri can be interpreted as anything from idiots navigating awful inexperienced romance to intentionally abusive violent criminal relationships. There isn't a strict criteria for what counts as toxic and it is a very vibes based interpretation. The jam is still created with the expectation that we can have a place for people to submit games leaning further towards the more intense themes."

Speaking as Johnny Squareman, Esq of Cisgender Towers, I'm nobody's ideal interlocutor for stories about "stupid girls that make each other worse". But I am very intrigued by how Kaschei works the chop and change of its relationship angst into a series of internal estrangements. The game is often so busy talking to itself, interrupting itself, that it needs a kind of 'reception' layer that is amusingly upfront in addressing the player.

My one complaint is that it ends rather abruptly (I finished it in a couple of evenings), which perhaps reflects the gamejam timeframe, but may also reflect my not picking up on certain pieces of foreshadowing. There's so much to get into, here, but I've blathered enough - you can get into the rest yourself. Download Kaschei for free from Itch.io.