Dr. Lilith Fleischer - Lily, please - is a gifted therapist, a licensed psychiatrist, an exceptional hypnotherapist, and a mildly dangerous solipsist. She has concluded, after careful consideration, that she is the only person who is actually in there. Everyone else runs on chemistry. Fortunately for everyone else, chemistry is her whole job.
Her new patient is a 24-year-old game store clerk with six weeks of flat nothing, a single-car accident she is very done talking about. The chart says depression. The chart is a liar, but then again, so is she, and so are you.
SOLIPCYST is a puzzle visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Return of the Obra Dinn, and grade school polymino puzzles: one patient, eight weeks, one hour at a time. Peel apart everything she tells you in good confidence to dig for clues. Pack her mind like a suitcase. Medicate, manipulate, stabilize, groom - anything necessary to heal the patient. Among other things.
A brain is a board: Therapy is polymino packing with a license.
A diagnostic interrogation: claims, evidence, challenges, and a woman who fights the label with everything except the truth.
The classic blunder: A visual novel that responds to your actions.
Eight endings, with variation. Designed to be replayed.
Average playthrough will discover around 12,000 words of Visual Novel, and hundreds more trying to pry apart all her testimony!
Content warnings: therapeutic abuse from the therapist's POV, grooming/manipulation of an adult patient, gaslighting, bipolar disorder, mania, depression, medical coercion, grief and parental death, a serious car accident (recounted and depicted), sexual themes. All characters are adults. The game does not endorse what it lets you do. Obviously.
Made for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam II.
Future case files to come, probably.
Credits below the read more.
CREDITS
Team
BSTDev - code, UI, design, script, music (that's me!)
Roxy Pop - portrait art; music & SFX consultation (@lonestareq.bsky.social)
Special thanks: Moon, Pallas, Quinn, and Eight - script feedback, plot workshopping, UI feedback, and moral support.
Third-party materials
Therapy office photograph via Unsplash
SFX/instrument samples adapted from the Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations soundfont and the Mother 3 soundfont, both under CC BY 3.0
Guitar chord sounds from the YouTube channel JP SFX (released free to use)
Chat, is it considered “abusive roommate behavior” to release a raccoon into the living space after you have asked your roommate for months to please clean up their messes (they do not pay any of the mortgage)
For context, when I used to live alone I would do something called “Princess Time” where I would do an initial sweep (to remove any significant hazards) and then I would release a raccoon into the living area and clean. This helped because I would 1) feel like a princess and 2) the raccoon would bring attention to things my ADHD brain had decided to ignore and I’d quickly clean that stuff up.
So like, if I’m expected to clean the house now, I will be doing it in the way that is most effective for me. And anything that has not been cleaned up after months of having sit-down talks and sending reminders and being promised things will change, might be deemed “trash” by the trash panda and thrown away.
We haven’t done since we moved into the house, because I didn’t want to cause my roommate or their cats destress or have their things destroyed by a raccoon
I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.
I wanna make things very clear that underneath all the whimsy, I am a trained professional.
what I love about fantasy is the utility of the shared metaphor, how you can talk about things without actually talking about those things—
we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about fairies!
we’re not talking about cycles of abuse, we’re talking about vampires!
we’re not talking about mental illness (or disability, or communicable disease of any kind) we’re talking about werewolves!
we’re not talking about slavery, we’re talking about zombies!
we’re not talking about agency, we’re talking about magic!
and like, yes, like anything and everything, you have to be careful with it because a scalpel is an important surgical tool but you can also stab someone with it, pain killers save more lives than they take but addiction can also kill you, but the suspension of disbelief brings down barriers in such a way you can communicate themes and ideas to someone who might not otherwise be willing to listen, and that’s… kind of amazing actually!
I’m Japanese, but I like drawing characters from different countries. This time, my American OC, Jack, talking about the U.S.
Before working on this comic, I learned a lot about America from people here on Tumblr, and I’m really grateful for that.
This is only Part 1, and there’s more to come. I think Japanese readers will enjoy it, but for American readers, it might feel a bit obvious or not very surprising, so maybe a little boring.
please keep scrolling
As for why I decided to make a comic where Jack talks about America—he’s actually the most popular character among my Japanese readers. When I ran a poll, the most common request was to have him talk about his home country (the U.S.), so that’s what inspired me to create this.
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