Mothered: A Short Horror Experience With An Unforgettable Aesthetic
Mothered is a brief 1–2 hour experience that is unsettling, uncanny and has some of the best atmosphere I’ve seen in a game in years. It’s hard to articulate just why it’s so unique, but it doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve played in the horror genre recently.
A lot of it has to do with the graphics. Everything here is done in this uncanny kind of Bryce 3D style. Playing this feels as if you had wandered into the corridors of the art on the back of an old compact disc.
The lonely setting of a house in the middle of an almost barren landscape is deliberately fake looking; as if the world has been created in an outdated 3D software rendering program, which is what’s so interesting about it.
The only request made of you as the player is that you spend a week with “Mother”. As soon as you are dropped off at the house on a dark and stormy night, you know something is wrong; you aren’t allowed to enter most of the rooms in the house, and you go to bed by yourself. Without spoiling things too much, neglect is simply one of the themes at play- and the forced nature of your relationship with those who live in the house.
One of the things that felt eerie was the way you are told to eat your breakfast; but it turns out you’ve been eating dirt. It’s done in such a way though, where you feel like you have to perform the act of eating breakfast and it’s not about what it is. It’s kind of sickening.
It asks you to examine the roles in which you are forced to play in this strange house, and I don’t think I’ve ever really seen a narrative where you are afraid of something, but it’s also kind of afraid of you and that’s the horror. Are you the protagonist or the antagonist in this house?
Some of the imagery is as beautiful as it is unnerving.
Mothered is definitely a game I instead look forward to going back to and reinterpreting again. The one thing it does that I think so far only videogames and music have done, is make use of an uncanny, vaporwave aesthetic. You can read elsewhere about why this genre is so pervasive online, whether it’s nostalgia or parody, but it’s post-modern drawing attention to simulated realities is more at home in videogames and music than it is in film, so far a least, though I imagine it’s only a matter of time before this kind of thing enters the zeitgeist.
Maybe it works well in videogames because there are certain rules established between the player and the medium, they haven’t been broken as extensively as other art forms where deconstruction has already been a trend for some time.
I do think Mothered is one of these games if you’ve got the right mentality going in, and you like horror games, it may leave a very strong impression.
But for all it’s bold narrative ideas, which at times turn in on itself; and some that have even been done before, it’s the actual visual style and mood which will stay with you.
Anything that makes you feel something new in the horror gene is worth playing, and you can check out Mothered on Itcho, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One/PS4. I recommend the Switch version as the graphics and lighting seem a little more stripped back, in a good way that suits the game better.
