This post is uh, extremely normal I swear
So hello yes I am absolutely On My Bullshit regarding my new favourite game.
That’s right, it’s the cannibal incest game, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. And I’m here to shove five thousand words of pretentious analysis down your throat because, and I do not exaggerate, I think it is one of, if not the best written game I have ever played. And I have played a lot of games, including Baldur’s Gate 3, Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale, to name a few narrative luminaries to come to mind.
That wordcount is not an exaggeration. My brainworms are extremely powerful and now you can share them with me as I walk you through my insane skyscraper of inference-driven analysis.
Or you can click away. I really wouldn’t blame you, it’s quite a lot.
Content Warnings: …Yes?
(To drop the bit for a moment, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley covers extremely disturbing material and challenges you to examine aspects of living in this world that many have taken for granted all their life, it is not a comfortable game, this will cover similar topics and will often echo the game’s unremitting scepticism on basic principles of society and humanity and you should look after yourself first. My Content Warning is framed as a joke, but it’s also quite real in that the game is designed to make you uncomfortable and there’s no shame in that not being for you.)
This was originally posted on and formatted for Sufficient Velocity, and you can probably more easily read and discuss it with me here.
With that said, let’s dig in. I have had to split this into multiple posts because tumblr will only allow so many images.
She’s excited, are you?
It’s All About Ashley
It really is, isn’t it? I mean, for approximately eighty percent of the total game as currently released and the entirety of Episode 1, you’re in control of Ashley, just as she’s in control of her and Andrew’s relationship for 80% of the game, up until the various ending sequences where it begins to slip. The only other characters who really matter at all in and of themselves are Andrew and her mother — and the former is under her thumb, and she eats the latter. It’s all about Ashley. Even her obsession with Andrew is, ultimately, about Ashley.
But who is Ashley? What is Ashley? Why is Ashley, even? Let’s take a look.
Ashley as presented to us in Episode 1 is very straightforward, so let’s list off the traits we’re given — she is malicious, she is fearless, she lacks empathy, she doesn’t have anything resembling a conscience, she demands Andrew belong to her and her alone, she has him at her beck and call.
In Episode 2, we’re ostensibly shown how she has him at her beck and call— she leverages the threat of reporting Nina’s death over him and had him swear to be with her forever. We’re shown that even as a child she was “just, like that” — but as a child, she hadn’t learnt to live with it yet, to laugh at the farce of it all.
Yeah, exactly like that!
And she does this throughout Episode 1 — The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is a remarkably silly game much of the time, finding moments of absurdity and levity against a backdrop blacker than pitch — and most of the time, your internal narration is coming from Ashley and the jokes will not-infrequently come at her own expense.
She will later get negged by her human sacrifice for her poor ritual circle drawing
Her reaction to being told that her soul is as dark and viscous as tar is “You guess you already knew that” — it’s confirmation to her, not new information. Ashley knows who she is. But who taught her this? There’s layers to this, nothing in this game is as simple and straightforward as it appears at first sight, which is why I’ve been obsessing over it for days.
While it’s common in fiction, the truth of the matter is, most ‘bad people’ really do think they’re good people. But Ashley has never once thought of herself as a good person — or perhaps better put as a person worthy of love — as we learn across Episodes 1 & 2, with our flashbacks to Andy and Leyley and the VERY VERY QUIET!!!
I really wish I had space in this essay to talk about this, but I’d like to touch on these being traits usually more easily forgiven in young boys than young girls at some point.
If she removes all other options, only then can she expect him to like her.
This is something that is echoed in the modern day — her seeming self-assurance is easily shaken and she reaches out to the world — usually Andrew — to affirm and validate her, soothing her insecurities, using any tool she deems necessary. Even when her life is on the line when Andrew has her by the throat at the climax of Episode 1, the only ‘compelling reason’ she can give Andrew to not kill her is her ability to soothe his nightmares. When he tells her there are sleeping pills for that…
Most people would have a bit more to argue for their existence.
While she, unlike Andrew, acknowledges having had friends before the quarantine… you know she’s got a point that they didn’t even bother to answer her calls, that was clearly not something the state was interfering with given Andrew’s calls with his mother and his girlfriend, and given her general demeanour it’s not hard to imagine that… they weren’t ever very close. When we see her and Nina talk in the infamous ‘box scene’, it’s clear that Nina doesn’t like her very much, despite Andrew’s assessment of Nina as being one of Ashley’s friends.
We see further support for her general lack of companionship in her dream sequence in the Burial route — Leyley and Leyley Alone. No matter what you do, you can’t place the pink plushy at the family table, the flowers won’t bloom if you give the Julia and Nina plushies her own as a companion instead of Andrew’s — and if you’re bold enough to go for the ‘incest route’, in the ‘Love’ room you see that no one ever looks happy to be with her in the childlike depictions of her history, nor is she happy in turn, save for when she’s with Andrew. In a bit of heavy-handed metaphor, the player then overwrites all of these tense, upset, hard moments with Andrew, having him fill in for everyone else in life — and happy with her.
Once Upon A Lousy Life…
THE END
And that’s why she needs him to affirm her, because no one else ever has and no one else ever will. It’s even included in their comic beats — when the siblings are getting along well, they’ll often play a game where Andrew dramatically overpraises Ashley while she demands more; it’s a comedic bit but I mean — it really does matter to her!
For the record, she opened a door. She gets a little heart in a speech bubble after this exchange.
We have a great example of this dynamic, that of insecurity and affirmation, in Episode 1, after Andrew has killed for her, butchered for her, his girlfriend broke up with her, he’s seemingly thrown his entire life away for her… she’s still insecure over her relationship with him, she’s uncertain of her control and she needs him to reaffirm it for her.
This is her victory, surely?
Andrew affirms her once, with his usual dead-eyed look.
But she's still not so sure.
He actively reaches out to affirm her again with cheer.
Look how happy she is!
While it’s most obvious and clear cut here, it’s hardly the only case. Let’s look back to the aftermath of Andy and Leyley and the VERY VERY QUIET!!! (I’m not using the other name). Leyley is, after similarly extreme acts — he murdered a girl and hid her body for her — convinced Andy doesn’t like her and she needs this leverage to keep him around, to meet her basic needs for survival. Because that’s what this is — she receives no care of affection elsewhere, so she forces it out of the only source she sees available through the means she sees as necessary.
I really hope we see some of their earlier childhood in Episode 3
What exactly made her like this? Was it just neglect, or something more specific…
She needs this to be the case because otherwise she doesn’t believe he’d stay.
This pattern repeats throughout — Ashley’s insecurities are hit on and she reaches out to Andy to affirm that she is not alone, and she will use any and every tool to exploit her ostensible control over him and force him to be what she needs him to be — and as long as she has that, as long as she is everything to him and it’s not possible for him to leave, she’s happy. As long as she thinks he loves her in her very particular, very peculiar view of love, she’s content, come what may. As long as Andy and Leyley are together, they can take on the world.
Let’s talk about that view of love, because there’s always more layers to unpack here I’m only scratching the surface with this essay — Ashley consistently refers to anyone else Andrew may have befriended or spent time with as a whore, a slut, a bitch — highly gendered insults that bring to mind the idea that he’s cheating in some way. But it’s not even about sex — when Andrew mentions that their parents had friends, she accuses them of cheating on each other in the same way!
There’s a lot to unpack about Ashley’s view of femininity and the role the patriarchy plays in their relationship.
Any kind of emotional engagement, any kind of commitment, any kind of life outside of your significant other is, to Ashley, cheating. Because that’s what she needs from Andrew, a seeming complete and total commitment, secure in her place as the only thing in his life, because she cannot understand anyone picking her if they have a choice.
This insecurity she has in her relationship is what drives her to empower the trinket — he can’t leave her as long as she can protect him with prophetic dreams, after all. She needs every kind of leverage she can get because until she succeeds in being everything to him, in devouring him so completely she has him in her thrall mind, body and soul she can’t be sure of herself — hell, her dream sequence in Burial has you placing Andrew’s signature green plushy, ‘the best thing in the world’ in a cage far away from anything else.
Ultimately, it really is all about Ashley — even her seeming obsession with Andrew ultimately comes back to her own insecurities. If she is everything to ‘the best thing in the world’, some of that ‘best’ must surely reflect on her!
But that’s enough about the more normal, straightforward and understandable sibling.
That was not a joke.
Andrew’s Rank 100 Deception
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist.
Let me explain.
You might have noticed that in the previous section I often use language such as ‘ostensibly’ or ‘seemingly’ to describe Andy and Leyley’s relationship, and there’s a good reason for that. From the beginning of the game through to its end, Andrew is lying to you, the player, without ever falsely representing or misinforming you about events that occurred.
The common, or obvious ‘initial take’ on Andrew as presented in Episode 1 is fairly straightforward. The game primes you to think this way, it frames things and strings reveals just right so as to make it very easy to overlook the incongruities it introduces in Episode 2. He’s a victim. Plain and simple, Ashley is his abuser and he is her victim and would be fine, a normal albeit kinda depressed guy without her.
It really is not a difficult conclusion to draw
You can go all the way through the game, have him try to accept his mother’s olive branch and enter the Decay route as a method for him to finally actualise his desire to get out from Ashley’s thumb and it makes sense, it’s a reasonable way for the story to go, given his character.
You see him this way because the game primes you in Episode 1 to view their relationship like Andrew does — he’s lying. He’s lying to himself, he’s lying to Ashley and he’s so good at it — Deception Rank 100 — he even lies to you. Without misrepresenting a single event or otherwise misleading you directly, the game gets you to buy into his preferred self-perception. Nina? Ashley. Julia? Ashley. The murders they commit in the course of the game? Ashley, Ashley, Ashley, it’s not his fault he’s not to blame he’s just a doormat at the beck and call of his demonic sister.
But he wants to be there. From the very outset, the very first puzzle, that’s made clear. Does anyone else remember this exchange, from right at the beginning of the game?
Ashley wants to investigate the music!
Andrew disapproves…
…Or does he?!
Like. Listen. Okay. You do not frown when saying ‘Nope’ and then smile when saying that you’ll instead tag along if they do it if your heart is at all in the no. That’s not an objection, that’s using Ashley as his excuse. Especially if you immediately throw her the balcony key that she could not possibly have gotten from you by force (more on Andrew’s ability to use force later).
This is the very first time you control both characters together with Andrew following Ashley instead of off on his own, the first adventure, the first puzzle!
But put a pin in that for now, let’s talk about his initial framing in Episode 2 first. Episode 1 has set us up to, generally speaking, believe the superficial framing of the siblings as portrayed in its promotional art:
The question that we then ask, right at the heart of it is… why is he a doormat? We explore this in his dream sequence in Episode 2, which does make it clear that the boy’s not okay but— it’s real easy, given the priming from Episode 1 to make you think that he’s the one with the originally functional moral compass, to think that that him being fucked up is damage done to him by Nina’s death and being bound to Ashley for his entire life. She corrupted him.
But, well, is that the case?
You're primed to ignore this as manipulation (which it is) but the best manipulation has some truth to it.
Precisely two things spur Andrew to action in the entire game, consistently — they are the fear of consequences and Ashley. And the first incident of that fear, the very first time we’re shown his seeming moral compass as a kid — the first time it’s really hammered home that it’s a fear of consequences rather than any true moral qualms is after Nina’s death. And why does he fear consequences here?
……
The ‘natural’ read that many take away from this sequence, particularly those who have only played Decay, is that Ashley browbeat him into doing this against his will, using emotional blackmail to overwhelm his objections, and then used the event itself to bind him to her forever as her personal doormat.
In a strict sense, this is true. But this doesn’t match up with the details, something the game uses shock to encourage you to overlook. That outburst is before any kind of threat has been made, and absolutely nothing either of them say anything about it being morally bad until Ashley weaponises ‘you’re a bad person’ against Andrew — morality didn’t seem to enter his mind or the equation at all until Ashley brought it up. More than that, his greatest fear and driving motivation even prior to that is, as shown above, being taken away from Ashley.
She, of course, recognises this and uses it against him. But she never needed to, it didn’t change anything about Andrew’s attachment to her, it was there to address her own insecurities.
Just like to touch on how a lot of his affirmations are preceded by him confirming her insecurities.
I adore this phrasing
There’s a second prong to this as well, to the question of ‘who really calls the shots here’ because — Andrew can, at any stage, apply an ‘ultimate veto’ of physical violence. The game is very clear to the player that that is on the table — even when they were children, when Andy swears their blood oath, he briefly considers killing her — and take note of how he ultimately got a ‘winning’ condition out of her by not specifying there wouldn’t be others and she is forced to accept that, there. Even outside of their most serious confrontations, Ashley is portrayed as having to convince, manipulate or otherwise coerce Andrew into going along with her schemes — she really can’t make him do anything, she doesn’t have the supremacy in violence and, to a lesser extent, capability that would allow her to.
Andrew, you are like ten years old.
The truth of the matter is, Ashley can only make Andrew do anything because he lets her. I don’t mean in the sense that I’m saying abuse victims let their abusers emotionally abuse them, I mean in the sense that he is clearly considering his options on the table and choosing to discard those that could stop her, or bring an end to any of this. He needs her.
But it’s true that he hates her, too. He has to hate her, because if he doesn’t hate her, if he isn’t forced to have done this, that means… he’s responsible. And nothing, at the start of the story, is as important to Andrew as avoiding the consequences of his own actions, not even Ashley. By the midpoint, he loves her, he hates her, he can’t live without her, he wants to kill her — by the end… well, that depends if you’re on Decay or Burial, but more on that in a bit.
A great scene to study for this dynamic is the climax of Episode 1, when Andrew grabs Ashley by the throat and considers strangling her to death. She’s pushed him too far with hurtful words and assault, and he’s seemingly had enough.
It’s still framed as a question of risk, of consequences happening to him.
Like, this is not the usual behaviour of someone who’s been pushed past their breaking point.
He tells Ashley that he wants to kill her, because she’s just going to throw another fit and that’s a risk to him. She is… not framed as being able to fight back (she does have a gun here, and more on that in a later essay, maybe). He’s so calculated in how he approaches his use of violence here, which isn’t at all what you’d expect of someone about to commit a crime of passion… but it’s very easy to overlook because of the abuser/victim narrative that the player fits his behaviour into the narrative that the game primes them to accept, brushing incongruities under the carpet.
At the start of Episode 2, we get to control Andrew for the first time, and the first obvious holes in his cover start to show. Some of this is optional — you only learn that he’s been faking having nightmares in order to share a bed with Ashley if you choose to go back into the motel room and check the bed, for example — but not all of it.
----
This sequence is the first time we get to see Andrew’s internal monologue and boy is it fascinating.
She’s his Ashley, but he refuses to be her Andy — we see this most clearly in the blood oath scene, where he manages to ‘have it both ways’ — he’ll be her best friend forever, but there’ll be others and — I think it is generous in the most to suggest that he isn’t aware of her obsession with him, given his uncanny accuracy in hitting her insecurities when he’s annoyed with her.
He just doesn’t care — he barely cares about anything. We see him break up with his girlfriend and his chief concern is, as usual… dodging blame. It’s Ashley’s fault, why is he the one being held responsible — he’s not actually upset he’s just annoyed he’s being blamed at something that’s Ashley’s fault. You know, just like everything else. I could have written this essay entirely about that confrontation, so forgive me for referring back to the Episode 1 climax — what makes him ‘snap’ is Ashley telling him that it’s his fault not hers.
Andrew having a very normal reaction to being told his sister has been conducting a harassment campaign on his girlfriend and she’s breaking up with him. Incidentally, did you ever notice that there’s no way he could have heard those voicemails you see in Episode 2?
And that’s the one thing he needs her for, the one thing he tells himself — it’s all her fault. His biggest fault is that he’s an extraordinary doormat.
But he doesn’t have to stay that way. There are two major branching routes to The Coffin of Andy and Leyley — Burial and Decay. Which you enter hinges on whether Andrew chooses to Accept or Decline his mother’s olive branch — you may also enter Decay by choosing not to trust Andrew alone with their parents. While not the topic of this essay, it is notable that Decay may be entered into by a choice by either sibling, but you require both to make a choice committing, in some way, to the other to enter Burial.
In Burial, Andrew accepts that actually, he wants to be here. He uses his cleaver to threaten his mother about talking that way about Ashley, he jokes around with the corpses of their parents with Ashley, he is much more upbeat and — for lack of a better word, free. He repeatedly affirms his commitment to her, and ceases to attempt to pass any kind of moral judgment on her.
In Decay, he tells his mother he wants to accept, but he can’t — he’s stuck. He really wants to be normal, he wants to fit himself into the same slot in society that she’s crowbarred herself into but — he can’t. Ashley’s made it impossible, and he’s come too far. It’s all her fault.
In Decay, Andrew hates Ashley. He is bitter, angry and suicidal in the aftermath of their parents’ murder and refuses to play around with her or even share a bed with her any more. He wants her dead and Ashley receives a vision of him killing her — something she can only avert with her gun, which is the topic of a hypothetical different essay.
Remember that chatter about double suicide back in Episode 1…?
Here’s the thing, here’s the thing. I said it was all about Ashley earlier and it is — we talked about how even Ashley’s obsession with Andrew ultimately was driven by her own self-perception and insecurities, which caused it to develop into the all-consuming codependency it is at the start of the game. In short, even Ashley’s obsession with Andrew is about Ashley.
And it’s the same for Andrew’s obsession with Ashley — at least, to begin with. He needs her to blame, he needs her to spur him to action, he needs her to validate his worldview and he needs her to belong to him. But, but, but-
In Episode 2, Andrew chooses whether to believe his own lies or not. In Decay, he commits himself to acting how he ‘should’ in his role, his love for Ashley becomes hate and he genuinely, truly, wants them both dead — Ashley is freaked out by the change in him, and when she asks him what he wants, he tells her he wants to lock her in the boot of his car and drive into the ocean.
On the other hand, in Burial he acknowledges that actually — he’s exactly where he wants to be. He doesn’t need her to validate him, he just wants her, he wants to make her happy and he wants to be with her — in the Love branch of Burial, this can obviously manifest in the infamous ‘incest route’.
But the one thing that stays the same across both is that even if he hates her, he can’t live without her, he needs her in a way that arguably, if she ever like, addressed her insecurities… she wouldn’t need him.
He wants to possess her, to have her belong to him completely, he needs her like he needs air which is similar yet contrasting with Ashley’s desire to occupy every possible facet of his life as exclusively hers to validate herself. He wants to own her completely, she wants to be everything to him. They’re not quite the same. And like, that’s a strong statement, but, keep in mind-
Andrew wants to fuck his sister.
Even if you don’t go Burial, even if you don’t take the ‘I know what I’m about’ option… this doesn’t change. We’ll assume that this is not Fire Emblem: Three Houses and that player choices do not retroactively alter character beats or retcon anything — at most, events may be recontextualised.
And uh, listen. I’m just going to let these screens speak for themselves for a bit.
Immediately following the above, he’s shoving it all to the back of his mind where it may fester with all the other thoughts he wished he’d never had. That’s more or less a quote.
Why is your hand there, Andrew?
Why are you asking your girlfriend to wear your sister’s hairstyle?
Which is, apparently, a common event.
Hm.
Hm.
This is part of a dream.
I’ll be honest there is a lot and like, I encourage and invite you to go back over the game yourself if you find yourself disagreeing. I think the big clincher is that, given our premise that characterisation isn’t retroactively altered is… I’ll be honest Andrew, this is not what someone who is shocked and disgusted by the thought of sleeping with their sister looks like.
Mmhmm, so mortified.
Moreover for once — he needs Ashley to actually veto him. Usually, she needs to coerce him into things, she needs to get him to give her the okay, through whatever means she has available. In this? It’s the opposite — he’s begging her to say never because he knows that if she doesn’t he won’t be able to stop this future from coming true himself.
If you don’t believe me, I invite you to play the game for yourself — you can see so much more on a second playthrough than you did the first, and I think the game is actually quite heavy-handed with this, once you’re actually looking for this.
Given that, and given his pretty extreme reactions to Ashley’s very transactional attitude to sex — another thing I could talk about but I would prefer this stay below 40 pages — it feels that he needs Ashley to be his but he doesn’t want to be exclusively hers. At least, not in Decay, and perhaps not in Burial, either.
This is from Decay, and from a certain perspective, she’s not wrong.
If this rambling has sparked any neurons, I hope it’s this one:
Who’s really in control here? Who has agency, and when? I hope to hear your thoughts before the next time I get around to this. Until then…
Fin.
Closing Thoughts
I need to wrap this up because we are already over thirty pages long, but…
Wow, what a game, these two really are just, the Worst People Alive making each other worse as they circle the drain and Andrew is just, possibly one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever seen, he’s so awful and there’s so many layers that I just, struggled to articulate or fit into this five thousand word long essay it could have been four times this long if I’d had the energy. Don’t get me wrong, Ashley is my favourite but as a good friend put it, I want to dissect Andrew in a lab.
I have so many thoughts on this game, it has activated my neurons like no game has before. I could talk about agency, culpability, gender roles, the impact that the game’s near-absolute moral scepticism has upon the player when you attempt to morally interrogate it and even more stuff, honestly. We’ll see how much feedback and how many responses I get because, ultimately, I write these to be seen. If I wanted to just develop my brainworms in peace, I’d stick to Discord. One thing that I really did need to touch on but this was just getting way too long so I’l leave it here — isn’t it interesting that the most cheerful ending, the most upbeat one is the most monstrous by our own standards? The siblings revel and find an enormous amount of humour in the murder and cannibalism of their parents, while we’re shown that the path that they’re on will lead to them ending up in bed together.
Meanwhile, Decay, where Andrew hates his sister and himself and wants them both dead as, honestly, most people would consider the ‘moral’ thing to do in his situation is… miserable. It’s bleak, it’s deeply uncomfortable and emotionally ravaging.
But- here’s that last thing. When the game tells you the siblings are bad it’s always in the context of society, or the world being better off without them. What do the siblings owe that society? They were raised without care or affection — the parents are another thing I wish I’d been able to cover here — and given the bare minimum to survive. If they’d acted as society wished and expected them to do in Episode 1, they’d have been left to die and used as literal meat in the organ trade.
The comparison to farm animals raised for slaughter seems obvious. (You heard it here first, the message of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is to eat vegetarian!)
And honestly, they’ve charmed me. If being fucked up little monsters is what makes them happy then, well.
Love that for them, really.
