A memory blue starts with a phone call. It’s a vibrating ring that we won’t respond to, at least not right away, although we can move the cursor around to mimic a sweep. In this game, communication is internal, a dialogue between the player and a character lost in thought. Soon, the young woman we just met will drown in a family room full of water, a house transformed into a fishbowl. Grab a boombox, smash the ground and soon we’ll be on a train.

Reality is abstract in the parameters of A memory blue. Emotions, however, are ingrained.

A memory blue, over its 90 minutes, wants to lull us into a dreamlike state, telegraphing us scenes that are an integral part of a woman’s life and making them a little magical. Specifically, the game will focus on a relationship between a mother and a daughter. We are going to make it move forward, because throughout we are led to interact with the images of a newspaper, the lights of a city or an object as simple as a stamp. This is an interactive short film where the game exists to calm us down. We don’t solve puzzles, but we bring memories to life. We are not challenged, and in our turn we are free to contemplate, to see an image from a change of perspective.

I smell A memory blue is a game that will feel deeply personal to those who play it. The relationship drawn here is filled with unique details – we open as our protagonist is revealed to be a championship swimmer and seemingly lost in wistful thought about victory. But without dialogue or text, A memory blue relies solely on a mixture of 3D and 2D animation, allowing us to graft any parental relationship to it. On a simple level, it may inspire you to call a loved one, but where A memory blue excels is to use its magical realism to create contrasts, to show us, for example, both the wonder of the lights of urban constructions and the loneliness of looking at an empty building.

When you see an apartment in town, for example, it’s just as claustrophobic as it is charming. We walk through the story through the mind of a daughter, now an adult, but in the game we are also her mother. We feel as much the stress, exhaustion, and isolation of adulthood as we do the longing for companionship and the celebration of imagination that come with childhood. Ultimately, A memory blue wants to meet us somewhere in the middle, to show that these affections fit together like puzzle pieces in a game that lacks them.

A memory blue, published by Annapurna Interactive, the subsidiary of the film and television studio’s games division, and developed by the small team at Cloisters Interactive led by Shelley Chen, is described as an “interactive poem”. That’s not incorrect, and Chen told video game publication Polygon that she wanted the game to evoke the feeling that comes with crying. Not necessarily the sadness, I don’t think, but rather the liberation, the realization, finally, of seeing childhood through the eyes of an adult.

Games are particularly well suited to this kind of magical realism. While A memory blue would work as an add-on piece to, say, Disney/Pixar turn redwhile both deal with how family ties can get in sync and out of sync, our minds enter a state of curiosity when we know we can interact.

When we turn a coral reef into a symphony or move ice cubes to reveal bright orange saltwater fish in a drinking cup, we ourselves enter a state of vulnerability. Games are often said to give control to a player – to move, to fight, to shoot – but in games without such tricks, we give up control and let interactivity take us by the hand. In A memory bluewe’re just uncovering memories, but as we wonder how or why, the game is less about turning jellyfish into an orchestra (there’s a lot of music in the game) and more about digging up our own obscured memories.

A particularly thoughtful scene begins with a boat ride and a broken bridge that we rebuild by bringing it back together. Here the ocean is the sky, the water of the game forever obscuring the past and making us swim or dig through to bring the hidden imagery back to the present. Once reconstructed, we see younger versions of mother and daughter, each at different points in their lives. There are always unknowns, of course, but if one sees the adventure – the girl is simply enchanted by the lights surrounding the boat’s helm – another just struggles to make sure reality doesn’t intrude. on this bewitching vision of the world.

For A memory blue is first and foremost a study of the sacrifices we make that often go unnoticed. The game doesn’t dwell on a breakup or the challenges of being a single parent; instead, it shows us new neon-covered apartments materializing at the bottom of the ocean. We see the late nights of the mother in the office and the hours after school of the child in the swimming pool, but sometimes we find ourselves wondering who does what for whom. Does swimming, for example, really make the young girl happy?

It is not a question A memory blue wants to solve. Shortly after this boat ride, we recreate footsteps and descend an escalator into a now abandoned aquarium. It doesn’t take long before we’re underwater again and running or swimming to the next memory, our adult 3D woman often gazing curiously at her 2D child. The game doesn’t prompt us to take a break, but you probably will anyway. What we see when we scan through one seaweed-covered memory after another isn’t so much an interactive poem as it is a thank you card, a card dedicated to everyone who has simply done their best for someone. ‘they loved. — Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service