My Cognitive Dissonance on Gender in Depression Quest

First of all, I have to say that Depression Quest is good. Really good. Really really good. Amazingly, heartbreakingly, touchingly, astoundingly, incredibly fucking good. It’s not the “typical” game, and what some would describe as “not a game but interactive fiction”, but I still consider it a game, and it’s one of those indie games that shows us the true power of the medium: to really let us see inside someone else’s head, not just observe from afar as movies, books, etc do. This is why I love games.

I had a somewhat (?) unique experience with the game that I want to focus on. Something that is really tangential and irrelevant for the game as a whole, but interesting to me nonetheless. The gender of the protagonist is never explicitly mentioned, and I ended up suffering some cognitive dissonance over this. I’ve been thinking about this some and I have a number of thoughts on the subject.

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