The rising style of games like Cibele that evoke the model of outdated web chat rooms to discover interpersonal relationships and teenage feels is an effective one. Dear Sophie picks up the custom, describing itself as “the mid-2000s version of leafing through a stack of dusty love letters between you and your high school sweetheart.” What makes it attention-grabbing, although, is that it largely highlights how a lot youngsters can suck.
If you need to keep away from spoilers, you possibly can go forward and obtain the game on itch.io; it takes round 30 minutes to play by and is accessible for pay what you need with no minimal.
Otherwise, the game sees you logging in to the titular Sophie’s outdated Minty Messenger account, and recovering conversations between her and one other character who is barely known as Pills. The chat logs are replayed as if in actual time, as Sophie watches their late-night talks over once more.
The approach that the typing notifications typically seem on the identical time after which drop off as one particular person waits for the opposite is a pleasant element, nevertheless it’s largely all concerning the writing. Early on, there are hints that Sophie and Pills’ (fully on-line) relationship isn’t ideally suited. Though each are in highschool, Pills is noticeably youthful. Sophie is pedantic about their grammar, correcting them at each flip. Later, she turns into pushy, about desirous to see an image of Pills, about wanting to speak on the telephone, about wanting to satisfy up.
When Pills is regularly reluctant, citing legitimate privateness issues, Sophie decides that they want a break from each other. Then, in response to the chat logs, she simply leaves Minty Messenger fully. When she returns all these years later, there are a number of messages from Pills, who doesn’t appear to have gotten over her simply. It’s a large number – however not essentially as a result of Sophie was malicious, simply because she was a child.
How she herself feels about all this after revisiting the conversations is left open to your interpretation, however to me it invoked a nice sort of anti-nostalgia – a reminder that every little thing we glance again on with rose-coloured glasses in all probability isn’t that fairly in spite of everything, and that’s okay.
