I’m not sure if the game mechanics show the guilt that the mother feels through jealousy, but the story attempts to do that. For the game, I wanted to focus on depicting two people who were isolated from each other by mental illness, and humanize the character suffering from schizophrenia by using their shared memories to bring them together.

I’ve had similar experiences with my mother, and also from the other side of things, with other family members and friends. It’s hard to feel helpless when someone you love is dealing with things like that. The mother in my story/game does try to fix things by cleaning, but that’s ineffective because her son really just wants to feel an emotional connection with her, to spend time with her that isn’t focused on his illness.

“She expresses that guilt through jealousy of the psychiatric workers that care for her son.”

How is this envisioned by the game mechanics? Does the mother kind of force her son to clean the apartment, by refusal of continuing the game if the son doesn’t? What does this imply of her behavior? Of the motivation of her son? Could we see the psychiatric workers as memories? Where are they now?

My mom has guilt for my feeling awful and suicidal at time, and keeps asking me what she did wrong. She feels helpless, and does what she always tried to do; take care of me. But it doesn’t help, not the way she does it. No matter how many times I tell her that she shouldn’t buy me food and sweets because I have an eating disorder, she continues to give these things to me, inflicting me with guilt if I do not accept her gift, because that way, “I don’t want her help” and “what can she do then?”.

She also says that someone who hasn’t got a clean house obviously feels bad, even though I have a pretty clean apartment, just filled with dark colors. So she cleans it for me, and I feel guilty because she complains that her body is hurting and that she won’t last another year. But she seems to believe that if she leaves a clean house behind her, the problems will go away, swept under the rug.

I had a point with all of this, but I guess I picked a subject to close at heart and got carried away.