Inside all of us is a child that just wants love and protection.
This is the premise of Blueberry, where you get to communicate with this child, walk in her shoes and help her to finally feel safe.
A Deeply Personal Game
I suppose you could say I had a very difficult childhood. I grew up in a big family, where every moment seemed chaotic and unpredictable. My parents were completely overwhelmed with the task of handling so many children. Who knows if there were preexisting mental health conditions for them or circumstantial difficulties or both that caused it, but it turned me into a person with a lot of mental health troubles – from depression and anxiety to suicidal thoughts and self-harm – I didn’t have a good time. After leaving my parent’s house and starting my own life, lots of self-searching and therapy, I think I managed to become reasonably “normal”, despite all of this. But there is still a lot of baggage to carry around, as you may imagine. It also made me think a lot about what caused all these problems, why my family’s dynamics were so difficult and why my parents were so helpless.
The Story of Blueberry
Blueberry is not about me, but it contains a lot of personal themes and anecdotes, as well as unpacking major questions about hope and dread.
The game starts out with the titular main character as an elderly lady, who is facing estrangement from her son Emilio. She asks herself how she got here and starts wandering down memory lane. This is where the actual game story starts out with Blueberry as a child in a wonderland full of talking toys and fun platforming levels. But it is soon clear that her parents are both having trouble and that little Blueberry is right in the middle of it. She tries to manage her parents’ emotions and while doing so, can get quite overwhelmed with managing her own, depending on your dialog choices.
Managing Emotions and the Everchanging Nature of Memory
One of the main things you deal with in the game is something I call the “blues bar”. It is a bit like an inverted health bar and your goal is to keep it as low as possible. The higher the blues bar gets, the more the colorful world around Blueberry turns blue, draining it of all other colors. At some points in the game, other characters will also have blues bars, resulting in word battles, which put you in front of difficult decisions of whether to sacrifice your own mental wellbeing in order to keep that of your parents at a healthy level.
Emotion management is only one of many evocative ways Blueberry shows this conundrum of growing up inside a dysfunctional family. At the heart of the game are the memory scenes, which are minigames showing impactful moments in Blueberry’s life. Putting together the pieces of Blueberry’s memory puzzle, you will receive a new piece for each played memory. But the puzzle will have a lot of gaps at first, which you can only fill by revisiting old memories. These will play out differently as Blueberry ages. When she revisits these parts of her past, she will be reminded of the lost pieces that can then be retrieved.
Using Real Psychology to Design a Deeply Psychological Game
To make this experience as accurate and nuanced as possible, I worked with three psychologists who teamed up as Behind The Screens. Together they do consulting for game developers and give them advice on all things psychology in their games. We worked on the content note, which lets you keep full control over and decide how much you want to learn upfront about triggers in the game. We also refined and improved the mechanics and depiction of depression, trauma and addiction. This was important to me since I have my fair share of experiences with these topics as well. I was also very interested in how memory itself works in the human brain and how especially traumatic memories do not function like others in our minds. I found out that memory is not static, like a file on a computer. Instead, memories actually change every time we think about them. Our imagination is what shapes our memories and in the brain, this has the same mechanics as if you were inventing a story. Meaning it might as well be completely fictional and therefore kind of unreliable.
For traumatic memories, this functionality could be seen as broken. When invoked, they can feel like they are happening right now and your body will respond to this with a strong fear reaction, such as elevated heartbeat, sweating and heavy breathing. This is what flashbacks are. I found this really interesting, which is why Blueberry usually turns into the version of herself from the respective life phase when she finds her missing memories. When she finds the memory of her parents having a big fight right before their divorce for example, Blueberry turns into a little child again, although we are already in the teenager chapter.
All of this nuance and accuracy served two goals. On the one hand, I wanted players to feel less alone with their problems and feel seen and understood. But Blueberry is also meant to show people who have no experience with these kinds of troubles the effects of depression and trauma. The reception of Blueberry so far makes me think that I was able to reach these goals and this alone makes the whole development journey, which itself was marked with lots of ups and downs, completely worth it for me.
If you manage to amend your relationships throughout the game, you will be able to help Blueberry reintegrate the shattered pieces of her mind and make peace with the past. But as it goes in life, she also may not be able to.
Change is very, very hard, but thanks to the neuroplasticity of the brain, healing is possible, even at a later stage in life. Blueberry is available now on XBOX.
Blueberry
Hidden Trap
$12.49
Blueberry is an evocative narrative platformer that invites you to climb the Tower of Life, experiencing the life of a woman as she navigates love, loss, and self-discovery.
PIECE TOGETHER MEMORIES
Play as Blueberry and live through key memories from childhood to old age, piecing together fragments of her past in a deeply emotional story about trauma, resilience, and forgiveness.
MAKE MEANINGFUL DECISIONS
Guide Blueberry’s journey by making choices that shape her emotional growth. Help her find peace by managing her “blues” and making decisions that support her healing. Each choice impacts her story, leading to different outcomes in her story.
KEY FEATURES
– Climb the Tower of Life: Journey through Blueberry’s life stages in an interactive platformer that combines exploration, mystery-solving, and memory reconstruction.
– Choices Matter: Face moments of choice that impact Blueberry’s emotional journey, leading to multiple endings based on how you choose to guide her through her past.
– Pivotal Life Moments: Steal cookies and cause kitchen chaos as a child, engage in spirited word battles with your mom as a teenager, and embrace the joys and challenges of motherhood as an adult.
– Emotional and Philosophical Depth: Experience a moving story that explores themes of trauma, motherhood, forgiveness, and the impact of memory on identity.
– Surreal Art and Atmosphere: A colorful yet introspective world that shifts with Blueberry’s emotions and memories, creating a visual journey that mirrors her mental landscape.