THAT WHICH IS EXEMPT FROM RESURRECTION

TW:  guns, violence, gore, death, trauma, grief, cannibalism, suicide

ARTIST STATEMENT (particularly for those new to my brand of games):

i was inspired to make this game in the 4hr window for ectocomp 2023 - la petite mort which requires you to make a game in a limited timeframe. this is what i ended up with.  if you are familliar with my work, then you will recognize many of the names, particularly yuuichirou, but if you are not familiar with my work, then you may not understand "how" to play my games or "how" to read my work.

undeniably, it is INTERACTIVE FICTION. it is a multisensory experience of fiction far removed from the prosaic standard of "static black text on white paper."

the FEYXUAN/SWANCHIME style of games is all in media res and it is designed to be a forbidding, symbolically cryptic / encrypted,  intense, and chaotic experience that reflects that traumatic heart of every game.

if you read THAT WHICH IS EXEMPT FROM RESURRECTION, or any of my games, attempting to seek out "the 'real' or 'material' truth," you will be utterly disappointed and confused. the sequence of 'real' or 'material' experience isn't the emphasis. the emphasis is on replicating the pandemonium and internal chaos and intense, heightened disturbance of C-PTSD and that one disorder that starts with an S and contains a Z and ends with an A that if you can't surmise, I refuse to utter.

THAT WHICH IS EXEMPT FROM RESURRECTION is designed as a purely emotive experience of grief so severe it destroys you utterly in irreparable ways.

• DO YOU WANT THE PLAIN AND SIMPLE TRUTH? yuuichirou, after hotaru's suicide, begins to stage alternate realities like little plays he conducts reliving situations where hotaru did not die. the stage is his toy garden; he calls his actors in his plays "paper dolls." yuuichirou inhabits in his mind these realities where hotaru is still alive, though he may have different names / genders / faces, but the souls in "yuuichirou's stageplays" are still yuuichirou and hotaru. in different imaginings, costumes, and fantastical universes.
• TWIEFR opens with "tenshi, a ghost in  the shell; an android with a human soul," who is yuuichirou's "actor," and "minh thu, the AI / android scientist," who is hotaru's "actor,"  in this current stageplay within yuuichirou's toy garden (the scenery of the game)
• but that role quickly dissolves into yuuichirou / hotaru and yuuichirou reliving the memories of yuuichirou's original life and reality riddled with gore, death, and other such unspeakable horrors
• the game transforms into yuuichirou's chaotic recollections of the severity of grief and love and the nature of a lie.
• A LIE IS CREATED IN THE SILENCE OF DISBELIEF. 
• so it's up to you to believe whether, and how much, of this game is a lie.

if you believe hotaru exists, he did.

such things go for yuuichirou as well.

THE (PHILOSOPHICAL) PREDICAMENT OF WHETHER (AND TO WHAT DEGREE) TO BELIEVE AN UNBELIVABLE THING...it is up to you, ultimately.

that is not my predicament; mine is whether to speak at all.

how much is true is up to you. but i wrote this egg to house my own soul.

october is a month to remember the dead.

this game is a candle i lit in remembrance.