My Favourite Games of the Year
By: Curtis Love
Tags: 2020, Games, Videogames, Lists

I can’t really recall the last time I played a game and felt like I could say “this is something that I can actually relate to”. I don’t know if I’ve ever said it for a game. If Found might be the first game I can ever say that for as it was one that hit close so many times throughout. Being born and raised for a short time in Ireland I obviously have a connection to the country, whilst it was short one and soon went to Scotland after it has been a place I’ve visited whilst on holidays in recent years. It’s allowed me to learn a lot about the country where I was born, its culture, its history. Having a family that is both Irish and Scottish has taught me a lot of the dialect and I’ve never really come across a game that represents somewhere I was born in any substantial way. Irish developer, DREAMFEEL has done that.

If Found is a game about identity, you play as Kasio who lives on an island on the coast of Ireland, Achill. She has come back home after time away at college. Without giving away too much about the story, you realise everything is not comfortable at home, Kasio has issues with her and more with her brother. She feels distant from them as they don’t make the steps to understand her and who she is, whilst she also struggles to come to terms with who she might be. She moves in with some friends in an old abandoned home, it reminds me so much of the ones I’d see down south in Ireland that I could immediately assume how it’d be structured. That feeling of familiarity made the experience so much more engaging. They use the dialect I know and the game will allow you to understand certains terms in Ireland. For example the word “eejit” being used, eejit is commonly used in Ireland the way you’d call someone an idiot elsewhere. It’s gratifying to be able to understand what is being said without having to read what a word might mean and shows the routes of the creators.

In other visual novels you’d press a button to progress, whilst in If Found you will have some instances of that, the majority of the game you will erase words and images to progress. Your cursor is a rubber that over time will start to get smaller, rubbing out less and leaving marks of it across the page as you’re going through Kasio’s diary for that majority. For such a simple mechanic it is so intimate and moving. You are erasing to move forward, to erase the memories that will still leave a mark as they do on the paper. To erase is to forget but not everything can be erased so easily as the game shows. You erase so much in the game you’re uncertain how much will be erased, the final moments of If Found are so overwhelming and moving that when you start to write instead of erase it just all hits at once. Seeing an icon of a pencil has never been so hard hitting.

Kasio struggles so much with knowing who she is that it affects so much of her life. She struggles with her family, her friends, that she feels so alone and lost is hard to witness. But If Found handles it perfectly, the ugly moments of the story make those sweet and uplifting moments all the more moving. If Found is an unforgettable game to me, I managed to relate to a lot of its themes and it being based in Ireland made it all the more relatable. When I struggled to figure out who I was, that unknowingness bled into other parts of my life. I couldn’t grasp what was me or what wasn’t and it made it so much harder to figure out what I wanted, who I liked or if who I was was actually who I wanted to be. I saw moments of myself in Kasio’s story and I’m sure a lot of other people did whilst playing and it makes it all the more reassuring when you see the end of that journey that she went through.

1. Umurangi Generation