If Found 48 iOS, PC
Black holes and revelations
Reading somebody else’s diary feels illicit enough as is, but If Found takes it a step further – you’re erasing it. Technically, it’s your own diary: you’re cast as the artistic Kasio, who has filled her journal with all manner of sketches, musings and scribbles about her life. And, for reasons currently unknown, is now taking an eraser to the lot.
Creating a game set in a notebook had been on the minds of artist Liadh Young and creative lead Llaura Ash McGee ever since they first met in 2014. “Early on, we had this idea for a witch’s spellbook,” McGee tells us. “I was obsessed with marginalia, like writing in the sides and all that kind of stuff.” The initial plan was that every chapter of their game would feature a different mechanic. “But all the mechanics were kind of crap, except one!” she laughs.
That would be the erasing, a method of interaction as startlingly eloquent as it is simple. We orchestrate our own transitions between scenes: swiping over a sketch of our heroine walking across a field gradually uncovers the interior of the house, as she arrives back at her family home in Ireland. A little later, when we reveal the second half of a sentence before the first, we’re reminded of the individual ways in which people read graphic novels or ’zines, their eyes sometimes drawn to other areas of the page against the intended chronological flow.
“We’re putting faith in the player being able to tie things together,” McGee says. “Some of the writings in the diary sections are almost stream-of-consciousness: they’re not necessarily like, ‘I am writing this for someone to read’.” Kasio’s doodled musings on her relationships with others and herself, and the mysterious black hole that threatens to swallow the universe, are scattered across the pages. “You have these inconsistent takes on a character, and you can hopefully start to build up a bit more of a three-dimensional image of them.” Some entries have even been amended, covered by angry black scribbles or laid over with bolder notes, meaning we end up undergoing a kind of archeological dig through Kasio’s changes of heart.
This messy authenticity is something McGee and her team have worked hard to preserve. “Having multiple narratives layered on top of each other, and kind of fighting with each other, it’s cool seeing different people work through it differently,” she tells us. Even over the course of the demo, we find the nature of our interactions shifting according to the story. It’s satisfying to wipe a planet into existence, or rub out Kasio’s more selfdestructive observations. We become uneasy, however, when we’re obliterating positive thoughts or friends’ faces – worse, when the power to reveal is taken out of our hands and the erasing is done for us.
It’s a refreshingly candid, almost punk depiction of a outsider’s struggles, with the recognisable backdrop of McGee’s home country (she grew up in Donegal) lending believable texture. Through it all, that central mechanic poses questions: is this an act of self-liberation, or self-annihilation?
“When you’re playing a game, and all you’re thinking about is the mechanics, you stop seeing the characters and the story and it’s just like, ‘Okay, how do I progress to the next thing?’” McGee says. “So I wanted a mechanic that was spread across the whole thing, that would maybe start to creep under your skin.” And while If Found isn’t autobiographical, there’s plenty of its creators present in both its story and that erasing mechanic. “I have this history of feeling disconnected, wanting to kind of burn it all,” she laughs. “So yeah, there was a lot of that stuff in there when we started out, and then it naturally kind of grew and mutated.”
Erasing: a method of interaction as startlingly eloquent as it is simple