YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

Intro

YIIK is a video game i've been interested in for a fairly long time now, specifically since around june 2019 when i saw one of the several negative videos surrounding the game. while i stayed away from the game personally, scared off by the insanely slow combat it had at the time, i always held a bit of a fascination with it - the unique and stylish visuals, the winding confusing story, the supposed "lost potential" inside of it, made me keep thinking about the game for years! this developed into an outright fixation once the extremely promising overhaul known as I.V was announced and teased. eventually, unable to wait for the full revamp, i simply played YIIK 1.25 myself and found out that all of the youtubers were wrong and the game is actually great already, enough to inspire me to write out a whole big review for it in its defense! so now, instead of wringing our hands about what could or will have been, how about we look at what's actually there?

Presentation

i'll get into my HARDCORE HOT TAKES about the plot of this game later, but i think i should start off with the least controversial and most immediately striking aspects of YIIK - the graphics!

most people don't really go this far with it, but i will - YIIK has some of my favorite graphics in any game ever. the style is spot-on, with its ultra-vibrant flat-colored polygons able to make anything look excellent, but more than that the specific ways which it uses its style are just incredible time after time. of course the game's main town frankton is wonderfully dense, and wind town has a gorgeous permanent-afternoon setting, and even the most boring dungeon (that bit in the mountain) has some really nice blue colors and a strikingly-designed setpiece near the end, but where YIIK really shines is in its more surreal and even unsettling passages. as an early example, alex (the game's main character) is stalked by an alien which only appears in dimly-lit flashes as he walks around his idyllic house, blasts of dissonance quickly putting you on edge early on even before you and alex start to really dissociate from what the game presents as its default reality.

really, just as much as the graphics the pure atmospherein YIIK is one of its best qualities, and one that you can only really get a grip on by playing it for yourself. the plot does add a lot to this atmosphere as well, focusing on the supernatural and macabre in an often jarring way, its twisting focus disorienting the player and forcing them down the game's conspiratorial rabbit hole. through sequence after sequence the game only seems to get weirder and more off-kilter, culminating in an extended dungeon filled with unnerving and even horrific imagery, the screen covered in technological grime at all times and ending with what i will for now simply call an unpleasant revelation. near the end it completely collapses, the dissociative feelings present throughout the whole game crescendoing into a full break from reality after which everything may just be metaphorical. the ways YIIK disorients you, forces you into increasing dissociation from its quirky chipper reality with its increasingly dark sequences, are something it does uniquely well.

the music adds a lot too of course, being one of the other things most people agree is great about YIIK. there's a lot of variety here and i really love how many directions it's willing to go and how hard it commits to all of them, sometimes contributing to the game's surreal atmosphere simply by being stylistically jarring or unexpected. with maybe a couple exceptions i think all the songs are pretty great on their own merits too, not even getting into how well a lot of them communicate the game's story, sometimes even better than the game does otherwise (such as the Divorce Themed Low Fi Hip Hop playing in alex's house during the second half communicating the emotional baggage there more than the story itself ever does). even in the still sometimes-tedious combat, i was always fairly engaged at the very least by the soundtrack, which took a lot of the edge off of what was already a pretty big improvement over the original release gameplay-wise.

the only bit i'd really say YIIK's presentation falters is in the cutscenes, those being mostly presented with talksprites and voiced text. the voice acting's not that bad at all, and the talksprites are pleasing enough, but i don't think they really fit in with the game's overall visuals that much in their somewhat bland gradient-y softly drawn style, and the way the dialogue is presented makes everything feel much more flat than it could've. i know this because 1.25 does have an actual cutscene in it, one added as a replacement for the original's infamous golden alpaca scene, and it's easily one of the best moments of the game and is a major factor in the rory/wind town arc being one of my favorites! this is something set to be improved upon a lot in I.V, which i'm very excited about, but it's still worth noting as a shortcoming of the original and one that i think turned a lot of people off whether they realized it or not - it's harder to appreciate on their own terms the game's goofy dialogue and insufferable protagonist when they're presented in such a rather vanilla, low-charm style. (other than that one pose of alex screaming for his life of course, that could never be replaced.)

still, the graphics and atmosphere absolutely kill it and make YIIK worth playing regardless of anything else. they're incredibly unique, engaging, and the more surreal bits hit a dissociative note which resonates with me a lot.

Gameplay

yeah, uh, i'll be real, i'm not actually that much of a gamer? when playing it i approached YIIK as more of a narrative experience than anything else, and i really don't think the gameplay is the main draw to it. it doesn't even really have a final boss. i do think it's at worst tolerable and at best kinda fun - the elemental system adds a basic level of strategy that makes every fight at least a tiny bit engaging once you have more characters, the action commands can be somewhat fun to try and get better at, and with the balance tweaks in 1.25 encounters no longer take a ridiculous amount of time each as they did during YIIK's initial wave of reception. awesome!

yeah, it's not the best thing in the world, but whatever man it's a unique enough game and the combat is good enough that to me it's worth getting around. sure, i wasn't a huge fan of the level system, but it wasn't that big a deal for how quickly it went by at the end of the day. and hey, the puzzles can actually be pretty fun, especially in the two mind dungeons! ultimately though this kinda thing just isn't my gaming wheelhouse anyways. i'm here for the ART. for the STORY. for the RED HEADED DOUCHEBAGS. the gameplay was rarely cumbersome and got genuinely fun at points even with the game's imperfect combat, and that's all that matters to me.

Plot (Contains Spoilers!!)

the plot of YIIK is where it loses most people, both for the contents themselves and for how they're presented. see, YIIK has some pretty infamously goofy dialogue, especially in the case of the main and most talkative character, alex, who monologues constantly in occasionally truly stupid ways. it's definitely intentional, at least to some extent - alex is supposed to be a self-obsessed dumbass, it's one of the main points of the game even, but this can be hard to immediately pick up on. the game begins with several monologues in a row from alex, and even when he meets a character who calls him out on his absurdity this plays into an early fundamental miscommunication it makes to the player!

(as a quick aside, while the dialogue in YIIK is indeed goofy i don't mind this all that much. despite the constant accusations of pretentiousness i really don't think YIIK takes itself too seriously and the comedy here, intentional and otherwise, helps add a varied tone, makes the characters fun to watch, and matches the colorful retro aesthetic. frankly, if YIIK was written with the grace of a novel, things like alex's constant naval-gazing might've actually become MORE obnoxious?? if nothing else, it could've been a lot more of a drag, and i'm willing to take a couple tone-breaking lines over an alternate version of YIIK that treats itself like fuckin' war and peace or something. beyond that, i think the game's underlying plot and emotions are strong enough to make up even for the sometimes bland expository dialogue, and if you go into the game willing to give it a chance its more serious moments can still hit. anyways!)

you see, the character alex first meets here is sammy pak, a not-super-veiled stand-in for elisa lam, a real-life dead person subject to endless true crime content and conspiracy videos and the like picking apart her final moments for nonexistent clues. this is not off-limits for art in my eyes, especially in the case of a game like YIIK which actively analyzes and critiques the faux-supernatural circus surrounding her death, but early in the game it makes a major mistake in communicating this.

you see (again), alex actually does not meet sammy pak but rather projects himself onto the imagined final moments of a girl who goes missing and who he sees in a choppy series of .gifs on a conspiracy board. alex is not a brave hero attempting to save a girl who died in front of him before getting bizarrely derailed as people often misinterpret (thus bashing the game for its awful morals), but rather a conspiracy theorist who wants desperately to be involved in something beyond his terrifying new normal adult life and so goes on a stupid and misguided quest which slowly but surely goes off the rails as he is manipulated by forces beyond his understanding. this is a pretty big gap between intention and common interpretation, and it really just comes down to the hints the game uses for alex's unreliable narration not being that in-your-face, enough so that - after experiencing the surreal first dungeon and her kidnapping "firsthand" with alex - i think most people are just willing to accept some weird inconsistencies as simply more supernatural oddities.

this is pretty unfortunate, but once you realize the intention here the rest of the game's storyline really does fall into place in my eyes, and i think overall YIIK improves a lot as more characters are introduced to counteract and call out alex's douchiness and as its story beats become less muddled. in a way! as i referenced earlier the game's storyline resembles a kind of rabbit hole, directly putting you in the manic perspective of a conspiracy theorist digging for any leads. because of this, i don't think a direct synopsis would even be too helpful here, given that the plot often makes more sense from a symbolic perspective or simply a visceral feelings perspective. my favorite example of this is the twist at the end of the essentia's mind dungeon which a lot of people take issue with - at the end of an ominous, even emotionally gruelling three-hour dungeon alex finds out not only that the world is ending, but that he is the one to cause it.

a lot of people really don't like this, feeling like it's a broken aesop of some sort. if alex is a self-centered jerk, shouldn't he be finding out that he's not so important? i don't know, should he? would it be as engaging a twist if the essentia just told him that he's Just Some Guy? would it make me feel as much as the slow, horrific realization that he truly *is* that important, but for all the wrong reasons?? and is this not presented as a bad thing to be true anyways??? sometimes, bad people aren't just some guy, they're people close to you who'll hurt you over and over, and the problem is not simply that they're important to you but that they destructively abuse that connection, as alex already has in parallel lives. the problem is presented on a bombastic universal scale, but the underlying parallel is to something tangible and real, and the visceral gut-punch here is worth the more complicated moral in my view.

oh, and another example - at the very end of the game, with only minutes left to go, you're introduced to two secret antagonists who've been controlling everything the whole time and lying about most of it. also there's a super confusing bit involving the dev's previous game. and then it ends super abruptly without elaborating on fucking anything that just happened. it pulls the rug out from under you. it's confusing, shocking, bizarre, unsettling, unexplained, and i love it for all of this! YIIK's plot is a disorienting, messy, unpredictable ride, and that's a feature. i love that YIIK is weird and hard to follow for what are ultimately pretty simple reasons - it's cool! it matches the surreality of the visuals and atmosphere beautifully in my eyes, and frankly i don't think it needs to make sense on a literal level when it works as well as it does on an emotional one. of course that initial plot is dropped as you fall deeper into increasingly frantic conspiracies! ultimately, the game wants you to think, this quest seemingly to save a missing person was never a noble one but a flawed trainwreck by one asshole who eventually alienates everyone around him and has to try desperately to self-improve in the most self-centered way possible. in fact, let's just get down to it and talk about alex already.

Alex

Alex gets his own section because he is very special. Alex is super super special. Alex is the specialest boy. Alex is my favorite character from YIIK! YIIK is about plenty of things, but perhaps most of all it is about alex, to an almost obsessive degree - alex narrates the game, the focus never leaves alex, the final act of the game is played out almost entirely by various figments of alex real and imagined, or perhaps even projected. (that's a whole can of worms.) indeed, near the end of the game alex reveals that you too - the player - are an alternate version of himself, and calls upon you and your real-life friends for help. this isn't the biggest twist in the world after the earthbound-y intro, and there's a few different interpretations of this sequence (the "intended" one seeming to be that it's a final act of selfishness forcing you into the game's reality to solve alex's problems for him), but quite honestly i love it on the face of it. see, i love alex as a character. like yeah, i love watching him be a dick to everyone and have stupid monologues, i think he's entertaining to watch once you get it through your brain that you're supposed to think he's a bit of an idiot, but even more than that. i love watching his awful, harmful, long winding road to attempted redemption, one which might not end until the end of the game if even that.

i'm realizing now that i've just kinda been assuming people are already familiar with alex since he takes up so much rent in my brain. in short, alex is a self-centered piece of work. he monologues constantly because he loves the sound of his own voice and thinks he's super smart (would never do this), alienates all his friends constantly by not considering their emotional needs or by blowing up at them (have never done this!), and causes the end of the world by meteor-in-the-shape-of-his-own-head (ok you got me, i probably did this at one point). most egregious is a moment near the end of the game's second chapter, where after him and his friends almost die he blows up at one for being sad over his sister's suicide. he's just altogether not that great of a guy. i relate to him some! i've never gotten mad at someone for suicide-related reasons because frankly that's a bridge too far to directly project onto, but i've messed up plenty of interpersonal relationships, and improving myself has been a long and difficult path.

this is what captivates me about alex as a character, and what makes me tolerant of the game focusing on him even to the detriment of other characters - the act of watching him fail. over and over again throughout YIIK, alex fails. alex fails his original mission of course, misguided as it was, but in realizing that it was never what he should've been focusing on in the first place he turns to failing repeatedly at self-improvement. first he fails when, after his first awful blow-up at rory (see the earlier suicide-related anger) he goes around giving everyone shallow and barely sincere apologies. then, when finally confronted head-on with his destructive personality by the essentia, he's ultimately unable to fix himself - he recognizes his problems, but attempts to get his friends to fix them for him and alienates them once again. it's only at the very end of the game, once the world is destroyed and his friends are dead and the game becomes truly and fully alex-centric, that he's able to conflictingly improve himself and get even worse. he enters a surreal dungeon that itself is himself and fights against negative figments of himself to literally destroy them, and at the very end does...something??? to the "proto-alex" that's screwed up the universe to make it revolve around himself.

it is at once both a deeply narcissistic way to view self-improvement and a final act of true growth, one defined by simply removing himself from the center of the universe, coinciding with the game itself abruptly ending as its obect of obsession ceases to be obsessed over. even in these last moments, he gets your self-insert to land the final blow. is this an acknowledgement that you can't improve entirely on your own? a metaphor for a better version of alex (which you're positioned as) saving his worse self? both??? none????? all??????? it's very ambiguous.

the way i like to interpret it - and this likely isn't the intended way, and will just as likely be inapplicable come I.V - is somewhat literal. the twist is oddly validating to me - here's a guy who's had a lot of my same problems, who doesn't know how to deal with them, who's way worse about them than i am, and here's me - having watched him flounder about for hours - lifting him up when he can't himself, and therefore myself, by extension, or something. it's oddly cathartic to play out in this form, and i honestly do think playing YIIK and viewing it as i did made me come to terms with my own flaws a bit more. alex is just such a piece of shit sometimes that being forced to identify with him makes you reflect on yourself too, right? to me, this, underneath everything else, is the beating heart of YIIK - alex being a supernaturally mundanely awful person and his haphazard clawing attempts towards improvement, and the ways the game forces you to reckon with what you're seeing.

this is a message that'll probably only resonate with some people, but hey, i'm one of them! YIIK is designed to be niche, and i'm the niche it's filling, bitch. even if it doesn't hit you so specifically i'm sure you can get something about of YIIK - you've probably known someone like alex, you might've even been like alex at some point, you might've just been into the exploitative conspiracy stuff the game often centers around and criticizes. YIIK is a lot of things! find your own interpretations! it's cool! appreciate it and let it come to you on its own terms instead of trying to fit it into a boxed-in standard little "self centered guy becomes super nice" narrative or god forbid an even more standard little "guy goes on a heroic quest" narrative!!

Conclusion

YIIK is not a perfect game - the combat isn't that good, the dialogue can be comedic but that's not always the best fit, the cutscenes are blandly presented, the game focuses on alex to the detriment of other characters, and an essential bit of context for the plot is highly unclear. despite all of this, i loved my time with YIIK - the atmosphere is excellent, the plot is thought-provoking and engaging once properly contextualized, the goofy dialogue makes the characters lovable, and i was very rarely bored. try it out for yourself and give it a genuine chance - you might not love it, but it's better than blindly going off of the opinions of people who played a version where every fight took 20 minutes.

Yeah

I'm yiiking out