"Why am I so hell-bent on forgiveness?"

"My Brother; The Parasite" by Qrowscant can be read/played here.

There's an online aphorism about trashed public bathrooms and how they represent a flailing grasp at control, how the clogged toilets and shit on the walls are at least clear evidence that a person can have an effect on the world around them, that they can cause one ripple in the indifferent sea. It suggests that control is a muscle that can cramp and atrophy, and that it can be asserted against many subjects in search of satisfaction. Some subjects are far more satisfying than a public bathroom; some subjects can bleed.

In "My Brother; The Parasite," a ghost fluke infection can temporarily animate the dead, stimulating neurons until rot suffocates the echo. The text-game format enforces a brutally contemplative pace. The portraits are uncompromising, and the background illustrations occasionally flash into a pulsating, organic mass, like what you see through the closed skin of an eyelid, or like flukeworms in dirt.

You play with your focus primarily on the perspective of Ines. Ines talks to her brother. He died after choking on his own drunken vomit. He had a best friend that died of an overdose. His mother, their mother, is dead from cancer. There seems to be few handholds left in the world for him, nothing for him to squeeze in his grasp until something, anything happens-- save for his little sister. But he's dead, and she's not, and now she has to navigate the sudden disappearance of a pressure that has held her all her life. The process is about as pleasant as going through the bends.

I appreciate the story's approach to forgiveness, and the lack thereof; vengeance, and the lack thereof; death, and how that does not make things easier to forget. I appreciate how it blurs the border of life in the same way it blurs the border to a self. A worm presses itself into hard contours, and the hard contours curve the soft body of the worm.

The story hits its climax when Ines puts her brother to rest with brutal, biblical violence-- reversing their roles-- as if she is another fluke sidling into his emptied niche, to find out what it feels like, contaminating itself with the contact. She is able to consummate the threats he always made. But Ines doesn't need to cultivate power over him; she doesn't crave his fear as a way of proving that she exists in the world, as an obligate abuser. She wants to transmit the truth, once, and have it be received. So she beats it into his head. But what she achieves is a barely a catharsis. He's already dead.