A few months ago, I received a review copy of Suda51’s cameo-fest Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, played through it, and then didn’t write about it. As someone who had only player one other Suda51 game, Killer is Dead, I felt I had nothing meaningful to contribute to the discourse. Even if I had, no one would want my opinion as some dude who doesn’t get the context of the game. I’m not part of the inner circle. So why should I blemish the face of a game that I mostly enjoyed, but in big parts just didn’t understand?
A similar thing happened with Where The Water Tastes Like Wine a few months before that. Not because I missed context, but because the stories told in that game are so personal. I am so far removed from them as a white, cis-male European that even if they touch me emotionally, which most often they do, I feel bad commenting on them. It’s not my place to do so. How do I write about this, fulfilling my responsibility as a reviewer, without coopting something that is — and shouldn’t be — mine?
In a way, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine’s concept of collecting and disseminating stories even embodies a wider variation of impostor syndrome I have as a games writer: While I tell stories, they are never mine. I play games which fill me with certain feelings and thoughts and then I pour those into text. I analyse plot points and speech patterns as a game studies scholar, and while those thought processes, the shapings of what I write down are made by me, the things I talk about never are. Do I have a right to tell them, put them on a website as *my* work? After all, it takes me mere days to play and write about an experience that other people either liked for years or even had to live through, putting several years of their life and more often than not the entirety of their lived experience into it. Am I allowed to comment on that? Hell, am I allowed to get paid for it?
I often bounce away from writing an article because of those questions. Some games are not meant to be talked about by me, and not always could I have seen this before requesting a review copy. In those cases, I make an effort to recommend the games on social media or podcasts without consciously reviewing them. I sure am not the voice that should tell you why Where The Water Tastes Like Wine or Umurangi Generation are great, but I can still be one of the people who tells you to experience those games yourself and who amplifies indigenous and BPoC voices that have more to say about the given topics.
