Behind Every Great One

A complex study of marriage and family dynamics. PC | FREE BIT.LY/BEHINDGAME

Here you explore life from the point of view of a woman lost in her selfobsessed artist husband’s shadow. It’s a game about the more subtle, insidious side of sexism, where it’s felt in the atmosphere, and rarely brought to the surface where it can be confronted and, hopefully, tackled. Each day in this brief adventure is a procession of futile tasks – no matter what you do, whether it’s the cooking or dusting the floor, every day you’ll be belittled and criticized by your family.

As you can imagine, it gets fairly tiresome, doing all that housework, day after day – and that exhaustion is mirrored in the behavior of protagonist Victorine. At some point most days she’ll break down and burst into tears, before wiping her eyes and carrying on with her lonely life.

But Victorine refuses to break down in front of her family, so you will need to steer her to an empty room in order to cry. These scant moments of expression are desperately sad and they build over the course of the game towards a perfectly judged, cathartic conclusion. Tom Sykes