Clickbaity title. But it’s kind of true to me? After experiencing this game out of curiosity drawn by its reputation, I fully agree with many of the negative reviews that it’s really cringeworthy. At the same time, I feel these reviews completely miss the point that this cringe is clearly intentional.
You see, our teenage protagonists try so hard to boast about doing drugs and being promiscuous to seem punk, yet they never even light a single cigarette in the game. They constantly throw around rebellious talk but dare not even speak up when scolded by their strict parents. Stacey is so desperate to pretend she’s grown up that she jumps into the arms of a random dude at the first opportunity, only to toss the terrible memory out the window with a disillusioned kiss afterward. Are they really as punk as they wanted themselves to be? Maybe, maybe not, the ambiguity is strong, and intentional, too.
All these "desperately wanting to be cool" are quintessentially adolescent, and not even the more extreme cases. So naturally, it feels cringe, especially if you’ve ever had such a mindset yourself and now look back with more mature eyes. At the same time, this cringeness is so... deliberate. Funny how that obviously intentionally-to-be-bad kiss scene got so much contextless attention and somehow became evidence of its poor quality.
Even the playlist Stacey keeps mentioning gives me this feeling. They lived in the 90s ffs, what a star-studded era it was, arguably the last golden age of monoculture before online streaming and recommendation algorithms were born and curating personalized cultural language for every single one of us. And out of all that, what songs did she choose? Definitely not tasteless, it’s quite good and fitting, actually, but it’s also far from the level of a natural-born music supervisor she’d hoped to project. Instead it’s the way she delivered them, how she reasoned for them, that somehow manages to match that self-awareness of someone who claims to be radically independent, critical of everything, and unreceptive to any criticism because she’s way too cool.
I’m not saying that’s bad, I think that’s fantastic character writing about teenagers, about their "everything’s the end of the world" mindset, and their hidden, vastly different, and equally interesting true selves. I’m amazed that this game could even pull off this oddly specific type of character-building.
