Paperknife

Exploration games come in a wide range of styles and focus your attention on discovering virtual places and pieces of a plot that’s more or less complex. When it comes to most of them, in the end, you are rewarded for your curiosity and perseverance, but shortly afterwards, the entire experience of the game fades away.

Paperknife is a different kind of exploration game. One in which your perspective will be that of a female child psychologist who has to carefully tread through the fragile minds of her patients.

Your character is the doctor’s projection into a hand drawn maze which represents the conversation between the two. Each segment of the interaction is represented by a corridor, with the dialog written on the walls, in black for the doctor, and red for the child.

At certain moments, the corridors split into others, situations in which you will have to analyze the information you have obtained and figure what new questions you want to ask, or in which direction you want to point the discussion.

Each choice you make pushes the story to a new path that can either end in success from a psychiatrist’s perspective or can further upset an already troubled mind.

Paperknife is meant to have you explore several real events and thoughts that ultimately shape a child's mind and spirit. Every question you ask, every path you take leads to new information about the child’s past, current state of mind and can help you figure out how to help them.

The game talks about traumas, reasons for which children end up fearing their parents and reveals to you how little it takes for a child to be overcome with uncontrollable anxiety. There is actually a lot you can learn from Paperknife if you pay close attention. Nothing in it is put there by chance, there is reason and meaning in every single word.

For a game that reaches out to such delicate subjects, you would expect it to also manage in creating an atmosphere that resonates with what the child is feeling. Paperknife flawlessly succeeds in doing so.

Whenever you reach a point in the conversation that triggers anxiety in the child, the game’s impressive soundtrack takes over and with a few visual effects, it’s hard not to feel that anxiety projected outside the computer screen and into you.

The game tends to connect with you rather than the other way around.