If Found: Making Peace With the Past

It wasn’t long after I’d arrived for my first visit post-lockdown that my mother began dredging up the past. My difficult time all throughout school and my chaotic late-teens, when whatever miniscule dedication I had to attendance and grades gave way to alcohol and a wayward desire for acceptance. However debatable the finer details are, I’d survived to adulthood mostly intact, but she still wonders what she could’ve done better. “I’ve had a lot of time to think these past few months,” she said. “I did the best that I could.”

I tried to reassure her that she did great, that I was merely a dysfunctional teen caught up in adolescence, insecurity, mental illness, and trauma, self-medicating through cheap vodka and cider and over-extending for basically anyone around me. But I’m not sure she bought it, because I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to assuage the emotional dissonance she’s feeling, much like there’s very little she could say to me to dissuade mine. The cumulative weight of pain and guilt wrought by time is not so easily unburdened; it takes a great deal more than saying “it’s not your fault” for someone to internalize and feel it.

And as I played through the closing scenes of If Found…, I felt it. A sense of understanding and comfort, a feeling that perhaps what haunts me now won’t haunt me forever. I felt seen, accepted, and hopeful. I felt found.

Developed by Dreamfeel, If Found… is a visual novel about a trans woman, Kasio, who’s forced to take a trip home to her small town in west Ireland during the Christmas of 1993. Prior to the game, Kasio has been studying at university in Dublin, on the opposite coast. She arrives home to an immediate family who resents her move to the big city, don’t understand her queer identity, and aren’t keen on making any effort to do so. The scene-to-scene occurs through her diary, played out in hand-drawn sketches you erase to get from one to the next. Sometimes, the action is subtle and muted, other times it’s a loud, repeating noise and animation, to externalize Kasio’s exact thoughts and mood.

Between Kasio’s arrival on Achill Island through New Year’s Day, we follow her from awkward, condescending conversations with her mam,  squatting with her friend’s band, to having a pleasant, distinctly Irish Christmas, and to suddenly being alone and scared in the dizzying conclusion before moving into a wonderfully romantic epilogue. Amid all of this, an astronaut, Cassiopea, searches for an anomaly that may threaten the survival of all mankind, leading her to the wilds of County Mayo, proving the fate of the universe isn’t always decided in London, New York or Los Angeles.

Kasio’s journey is one of personal affirmation, developing confidence in her identity, and finding solidarity in where she grew up. My own resonance isn’t in the explicit queerness – which other critics have brilliantly discussed – but in the tone, shape and execution of the game. Taking place in an Irish village already speaks to my own upbringing, compounded by being somewhat contemporary and the fulsome use of local vernacular, but it isn’t just that, either. If Found… threads the very thin line between exposing painful memories and allowing the nostalgia therein to flourish, without letting one excuse or diminish the other.

Much of my late-teens are overshadowed by the effects of one particular person. I’ve discussed this before, and the long-and-short of it is I was stalked and bullied by someone who wanted me to either kill myself or otherwise vanish. What started as a friend’s difficult former partner transitioned into that person waiting outside my mam and I’s apartment to hurt or intimidate me and getting texts and phone calls at all hours, usually making threats and demanding personal information. He’d openly ask me to commit suicide in front of other people, and physically attacked me twice, once leading to an overnight hospital stay.

The only saving grace was that I wasn’t alone, the entire friend group drew his attention at one point or another. We had each other, and gave multiple statements to law enforcement, to whom he was a known figure due to miscreancy. Eventually, he left my town, and staying out of his way was as simple as avoiding certain areas of Dublin’s city center. Some of my favorite memories happened while he was around–I saw Slayer, My Chemical Romance, and Ozzy Osbourne for the first time, started getting to know the girl I’d lose my virginity to, and spent innumerable late nights crammed into tiny bedrooms nerding out with friends. It wasn’t all bad, but his presence lingers as an undercurrent, and focusing on the good over the bad merely shelves the trauma rather than actually coming to terms with it.

I often chastise myself for not doing more for myself or those around me, trying to apply hindsight to a lost, scared 17-year-old. Then I fall back on images and stories from that time, like this group photo from the queue outside Ozzy, where we waited all day before I passed out during Black Label Society’s supporting set and had to give up our position near the front. I start to believe it wasn’t all completely terrible, feel an inkling of self-reassurance as the knot in my stomach unwinds, and drop it. But what I’m really doing is using one to convince myself the other isn’t real, letting the phantom dwell in the shadows while I gaze at the sunny pastures.

If Found… recognizes giving credence to both is needed for real peace of mind. Kasio seeing the depths to which her mum rejects who she is warrants the same time and attention as when Kasio, Colum, Jack, and Shans watch the Late Late Toy Show together, and the supple tension of the family dinner-table is reflected in the details as much as when Kasio and Shans are staring at the stars through the holes in a dilapidated roof. Everything matters, all of it, because we don’t get to choose our formative periods, we just get to navigate them.

Frontiers are where we find them, as the ending of Richard Linklater’s comedy Everybody Wants Some!!! puts it. Dreamfeel utilizes a similarly rose-tinted sentimentality to Linklater, erring on the side of romance over shame in presentation. Everybody Wants Some!!! is much easier in its subject matter, being about a frat boy’s first week at college (they do both contain our heroes enjoying a local punk show), yet If Found… manages the same level of quiet peacefulness, even when dealing with fraught personal complexities. A wistful acknowledgment carries the plot, showing things as they were without dwelling on what could, or should, have been.

In my review, I called it a burning ritual–the sense of the story disappearing behind you as you erase it feeling like an exercise in letting the past go. Natalie Flores discussed this more intimately, talking about the power of erasure in moving forward. I think the strength of If Found… lies in being both something you can come to if you need to erase what was, and somewhere to project your memories for safe-keeping. It’s true the game is an exercise in erasure, but by the very nature of being a piece of art you can replay and experience over and over, it’s an immortalization of whatever Kasio’s story reflects for you, too.

The narrative is only ever Kasio’s, communicating the subjective but very real truth that it doesn’t matter how other people saw or would’ve done things, what matters is what happened to you. As I was playing, clicking through her high-strung conversations with her bigoted brother, I saw my own perceived failings in a different light. All those times I was taken in by emotional coercion and gaslighting, believing this time wouldn’t end in tears. I put a brave face on, because I listened to Pantera and Slipknot and wouldn’t be trampled, but I was duped over and over, because I feared the physical confrontation. I’ve started giving myself the same empathy I was giving Kasio, accepting that I defended myself as best I knew how.

If Found… has a happy ending. Kasio, trying to disappear from everyone, falls into a state of pneumonia in the dreary landing of an abandoned house but is  saved by all the people she thought she’d alienated. They may never see what she went through as clear as in this diary, but they still care about her. A coda lets you shape her life as an older woman, still in touch with most of the characters, thriving in modern Ireland. What happened then wasn’t the end of her– it’s merely a chapter that bears re-reading once in a while.

Luckily, I get to enjoy the same. As much as anxiety and loneliness might linger, I have people I can turn to, some that were there, some that weren’t, and I’m thankful for all of them. Regardless of the weight I still carry, I survived, and If Found… gave me license to revel in that without losing sight of the journey here. My mam doesn’t play video games, but I’m going to try to get her to play this. I’m not sure if she’ll like it, but I think I’ll find it easier to tell her about who I was as a teenager if we start talking about this first, and about the mother that helped me through it all.