Thoughtful Indie Game About Grief Finally Adds Player-Requested Machine Gun DLC
Indie developer Gossamer Thread Games has today announced that their confronting debut game I Yearn To Be Whole Again, which presents players with a moving examination of the weight of grief in the wake of a terrible loss, will finally be updated with an in-game machine gun that will allow players to “commit indiscriminate slaughter”.
Trevance and Cynbeth Melchor, the brother and sister team that created the game in tribute to their late parents, have finally caved in after a petition demanding that they make their artful puzzle platformer “less fuckin lame” earned 60,000 signatures.
The game, which sees players navigate an abstracted mountain that serves as a large-scale metaphor for the unbearable emotional journey of loss, will now finally let you shoot the residents of the mountain who assist the player as they scale it. According to the patch notes, this will make it harder for players to “properly come to grips with the devastation the game is going for,” but will also address a player-concern that the game “doesn’t even have any combat”, thus making it “poor value for money compared to something like Contra”.
“At the end of the day, you have to appease the player”, Trevance told us. “As customers, it simply makes sense that they have more right to dictate how the extremely personal exploration of our very real grief plays out in-game than we do.” Cynbeth agrees: “The purpose of art is to turn a profit,” she says, “and god forbid that this modern fable of our own torturous emotional redemption turn players off by not letting them brutally murder the innocent, compassionate characters we crafted.”
Publisher Hot Ass! Video Gaming, which picked up I Yearn To Be Whole Again shortly before its release and promised “not to change a thing about this very special game,” is reportedly making the duo work on additional gun DLC after the machine gun greatly boosted the game’s all-important Twitch viewership figures by 500%. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, and rocket launchers are expected to be available for a small fee in the future.
“The great thing is, players can get their first gun for free right now,” CEO Jeggory Snitz told us. “And after that, it’s just gonna be $3.99 for a pack of three keys. Each key has a 25% of unlocking a gun box, which you buy with credits you can earn from posting screenshots of the game onto social media. You earn a credit for every 50 likes, and a box is just 20 credits.”
Credits can be earned now; Sntiz points to a tweet from Admiral_Stainz featuring a close-up of the player character’s face with a tear rolling down their cheek and the caption “when u nut but bitch keep suckin”. It has earned over 6000 likes so far, and presumably somehow assisted Admiral_Stainz with the grieving process.
In their review of I Yearn To Be Whole Again, Pasta Sauce Gaming praised the game for its “exquisite, unflinching, extraordinarily personal exploration of grief, not only as a force visited upon you, but as an experience that ultimately has the power to transform you, reshape you, break you down and build you back into someone you no longer recognise, but now must live with forever.” The game earned a 7/10, with critic Borbo Blonce going on to point out that the game was “only three hours long” and “didn’t feature many unlockables”. Thankfully, that’ll change soon.
Do you think you can nail grief with a headshot? Let us know in the comments.
