How disappointing.
Such a juxtaposition between expectation and reality is surprising and almost jarring, but in the game Loved, the narrator uses it quite frequently. In Loved, the narrator comes across as rude and controlling through the frequent moments in which directions pop up on the screen and order you to do as it wishes, regardless of your self-preservation. These instances can be as tame as touching the statue as it tells you to do, which ends up "saving" your process up to that point; but they can also be as wild as telling you to throw yourself into the barbs, killing your character within the game and having to restart. It is at one of these specific moments that I would like to explore.
Generally, if you do as the narrator asks every time, the environment changes. Red blocks become black and broken. Flowers and roots sprout or dangle from hovering platforms. As this happens, little white specks appear in the ground. These specks pulsate similarly to the avatar's eyes. The main difference is that those in the ground have three spots, or eyes.
If one continues further, however, there is a secret room they can enter. to get here, the avatar must walk through the black ground. As it walks by, there is no light to brightened where the avatar is, other than its pulsating eyes. The comparison is strikingly similar between the avatar and these dot trios, enough that it prompts the question of what are the dot trios?
Is it possible that they are other trapped avatars? Why is it that they appear only once you begin to obey the narrator? It is an unsettling thought, but the concept that there are trapped avatars expands from just the game of Loved. Loved plays with themes of emotional and verbal abuse throughout the game. The narrator's denial or your chosen gender, demands to be obeyed, and insults should you not obey are all framed in a light that should make the player guilty for not listening: the narrator loved you and you are hurting them by not following its orders. In relationships like these, the victims of the abuse can often feel trapped in this cycle of manipulative behavior. Can these eyes in the ground be a nod to trapped victims of relationship abuse?
Since these eyes are only visible once you know you are obeying the narrator, does it add another dimension of being trapped? I believe so. The player is trapped within the game, being insulted or misgendered despite your choices of action, and because even if you choose to disobey the narrator now, the colorful squares that will appear will only block the eyes from your vision but they will still be in your mind. The player becomes a kind of bystander, knowing that there is something--whether it be other avatars or something else with eyes--trapped in the ground but you can never reach or know more about it. The player can only continue through the game, arriving at an ending that either insinuates the beginning of the cycle of abuse again, accuses the player of hating the narrator, or is loved by narrator.
In relation to the week's topics of choice and freedom then, Loved gives you choices and freedom that amounts to very little when the stakes surpass reaching the game's end. The choice to disobey leads the player to never seeing the eyes in the ground, while the choice to obey shows the player the eyes in the ground but yields to them no freedom to do anything about it. And when you think about these situations occurring in real life, you have to ask: what are your choices? What are you free to do?
Bringing in relationship abuse as an item that the game might subtly point towards makes me look at Loved in a completely different way. When I first played through it, the element of choice was at the forefront of my mind, with deciding to obey or disobey the narrator. But at a certain point, the choice disappears, as you can't continually throw yourself into the spikes when the narrator tells you to, as it doesn't allow you to complete the game. This illusion of choice can be tied back to the hints of abuse you talk about - since victims often feel trapped in their situations, but some try to justify their position by telling themselves, "It will be better…
I never thought of the possibility of the three dots being eyes. I assumed that they were placed in sets of 3 as to not give the impression that they were eyes, but were instead a different form of mysterious light. I do like the observation that both these dots and the eyes of the avatar are able to be seen despite the darkness they can be found within, and I also wonder what choices they bring the player. They appear to be intentional and an indicator of something that can be done within the game that is immediately apparent to the player and their initial objective (of which there are a few possibilities). I think it is possible that…