“✨💻ENDLESS SCROLL💌✨” by Cecile Richard & Rory Green.
“[A] game about high school memories, growth and being online late at night[.]”
I am sure that many of you will know that feeling: You just want to sleep, you are exhausted, you are lying in your bed, but your brain is still working. Your synapses are overflowing with dark memories and guilt. Not because you have done something bad in the last few days, but years ago. Maybe you refused to help a friend in need, maybe you accidentally destroyed a favorite object of a loved one, maybe you told a lie to somebody. The exact reason does not matter; you are thinking of past mistakes, that you cannot make right anymore. Thinking about this stuff might feel like an absurd waste of energy in the first moment. However, the wonderful Bitsy game “✨💻ENDLESS SCROLL💌✨” tries to put those things in perspective and to communicate, why they still can matter in a positive way.
You play as a person chatting with an old friend late at night. Your high school reunion is coming up, and suddenly you start to talk about various moments of those times; for example, how you felt weird for not enjoying parties with alcohol or how you participated in mobbing a girl, because you thought you could be the next target if you did not. Each memory will allow you to choose between two paths, though none of them actually leads to a really positive outcome. Instead, different scenarios will be shown that will explain the negative feelings about the situations in another way.
That does not make “✨💻ENDLESS SCROLL💌✨” a pessimistic game at all, as the ending proves. There, a mystical creature interrupts the online conversation and offers you a choice: To forget about it all. You would never again be tortured by the guilt you feel, you could be free of it all. The character decides that they do not want that. They want to remember, as those memories are a part of their identity. To forget about their mistakes would feel to them like handing over all the responsibility for their deeds to the void. By keeping the memories and even the guilt, they can learn from them, making sure they will avoid to do such things again. They want to grow – and they will. [PLAY]
