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how ISAT makes you feel like going home

so one of my friends said to me "the first time i played (isat) was when i was home sick, i felt like it had curative properties. analyse that mr playstyle 😎" and i took it as a fucking challenge. i've never written an (tumblr-posted) analysis essay before and i'm going into this with a bunch of haphazardly folded ideas and NO OUTLINE fuck it we ball

so to begin with: DORMONT.

isat, as a whole, is extremely a traditional rpg setup. which unfortunately i know little to nothing about, so forgive me in advance if i put my foot in my mouth regarding traditional rpg mechanics. but like many games, you start at a home base, at home. and the whole vibes of the place honestly serve to only emphasize the safe / at home / storybook atmosphere isat cultivates. you wake up in a field, sleepy and tired. your dear friend mirabelle leans over you and tells you to wake up, because you're going to beat the king tomorrow! and you laugh and you're sleepy but eventually you start playing. eventually, you push yourself up and wander around and meet the townsfolk and your party.

now, the player doesn't know the party. they've just opened the game! they don't know these characters. siffrin does though, and it shows in the interactions he has with each one of them. mirabelle teases siffrin about the quality of his nap. isabeau puns with siffrin. odile smiles at him. bonnie... looks away, because of backstory you don't have yet, because you're leaping into this story at its very end. but siffrin knows.

(...)

siffrin knows. which informs his narration, of course, and overall it gives the sense of - you're watching a story already known, with characters who already love each other. like walking into a family home midway through a dinner party, to know and be known in turn.

(you know where you are. you're home!)

siffrin provides some exposition of course, enough to catch the player up and let them know the basics of the world you've set foot into. these people are here because they have natural ties, connections to the land they've been born or raised in or are travelling through. you all are here to defeat the king, who is the epitome of a traditional storybook villain, the big bad evil you defeat at the end of the fairytale. he's just the generically evil guy, with no focus given to the atrocities he must have committed and been willing to commit in order to get where he is. there's no need to be scared of him, not really. (yet.) he's evil, but in the way a storybook villain is evil. all the sharp edges defanged, sanded away, all the humanity and dimensionality and violence inherent in his character compressed into a set of scribbles on the page, words on a screen. it's not personal. it's not.... scary. not to you, and not to siffrin, who's already been floating above it all.

(the rest is under a cut! spoilers for The Entire Rest Of The Game)

similarly, the exposition is in the form of little childlike drawings, emphasizing the same nostalgia it draws on - fairytales, fables, those stories where the heroes collect the magic sword and slay the dragon and save the princess. you know these stories, consciously or not. you love these stories, (probably), and it all serves to emphasize the familiarity with which you step into dormont. heroic stories are extremely common in the stories we love today, from the old classic prince charming to (somewhat) more modern legend of zelda, and no doubt many people picking up isat have a similar passing familiarity with the overarching story of rpgs. (i in fact was the exception, but that's a whole other essay)

the townspeople definitely do not help this vibe as well. they are practically one and all kind, steady people, precisely the sort of common folk you'd want to save in a story where nothing hurts and everyone is safe and loved. they're happy to gift you a flower or a pan au chocolat and cheer you on in your quest, certain of your victory and at least certain of their continued happiness even if you fail. simple, easy, familiar, comforting in the way redwall is comforting or an old set of childhood fairytales is comforting. there's no real judgement, no anger at you for potentially failing and (almost) none of the gross ugly real emotions that would be present in a more 'realistic' story. simple, easy, familiar, comforting.

(You like knowing what happens next!)

so. i think we all know that isat at its core is a game about homesickness. god's sakes mal du pays is literally right there. the central conflict of this game, beneath the overlaying fluff of an rpg archetype and an evil to defeat, is about siffrin not being able to go home while the rest of his party get to do so. and even at this very early stage (approximately act 1 and i would argue a bit into act 2) you can start to see the cracks. siffrin is shown alone, tagging along with the party because he had "nothing else to do" (read: nowhere else to go.) he laughs and pals and jokes with the party, but like before, like always, he merely mirrors them. he makes puns with isabeau because isabeau likes puns, and siffrin liked making him laugh so much so that he adopted puns into a part of his personality. he comforts mirabelle about her future, jokes with odile about her research, and always, always, avoids talking about himself. when they ask where he's going to go after their journey is over, his answer is always a mirror of their own - pilgrimage, research, travel, comedy. when he makes a wish at the favor tree, there's no option to wish for himself.

because the thing is, right. siffrin never thinks of himself. the only options instead are to wish for his family - his home, his only living and real connections in his life, the people surrounding him that really make dormont feel like a real home and not just another friendly place in vaugaurde he's passing through. cause the townsfolk are nice, sure, they're friendly, sure, but - they don't know him. they're not important enough for him to literally rewrite his personality for them. it's his party instead, that he laughs and jokes with and is known with, even if superficially. he wants to be allowed to go home, to stay home. he's been homeless both literally and figuratively for so long that he's beyond desperate to be allowed to keep what little he's found for himself.

(You want to stay with them!)

except - what happens when you beat the game? what happens when you finish the rpg, when you reach the end of the book, when you grow up and leave this set of children's fairytales behind?

you put it down, right? you go home, right? you go back to your home, you go back to travelling, you go back to your family.

what do you do when you don't get to go home? when dormont and the clocktower and the house are the closest you will ever get to home, are the last moment you will ever have being home before it's ripped away from you forever? (ripped away from you just like before - )

you'd want to stay, right? forever and ever and ever?

siffrin is a character who has a very bad time letting go. just like the king, he wants to have, desperately, enough to kill himself a hundred times over for it. and, through the timeloop, he can pull you, the player, and himself and his hapless party along through the timeloop, repeating the same two comforting days over and over and over and over.

and perhaps after a few loops of settling in you, too, can understand why he would want to do this. it's nice, isn't it? knowing what will happen? knowing that these people will always love you? knowing that you can always get the flower, always get the drawing, always get the pan au chocolat, always beat the tutorial kid and get the jackpot? that the townsfolk will always smile at you, that your party - your family, your home - will never know what you've done?

it's not enough, isn't it?

(Dormont, unchanging! Dormont, stagnating!)

no matter how hard siffrin tries to cling to the past turned present to stave off his inevitable future, he is still human. under the fairytale setting and pretty lights, even under his own desire to stay with them, he needs that human connection. he needs something to change, to give way. needs to be seen, to be known, to be loved for himself and not because he's learned the perfect pretty words and actions to trick them into loving him. you, the player, the person driving siffrin, can understand this frustration perfectly as well - you need something to change. you need something to give way, because you can't keep doing this. because you can't hear the same lines over and over and over anymore. you can't do the same thing over and over anymore. you're not happy. siffrin's not happy. something needs to change.

i finished isat over the course of about four days, playing about 12-14 hours per day. during that time, i experienced possibly the most deeply intensely felt emotion i have ever experienced. to this day when i look back on my first playthrough of isat, the sheer depth and fury of that emotion takes my breath away.

and it was frustration. just like siffrin, i was trapped. i couldn't look away, because i loved these characters, because i loved their story, because i wanted them to keep going and going and living and i wanted to keep living alongside them. but i couldn't keep going like this. i couldn't do the same thing over and over and over. i needed something to change, but both siffrin and i were desperately, agonizingly trapped in the same few days. the same places, the same faces, the same lines said rote until i was zoning out through every dialogue interaction, only pausing when i needed to make sure that i hadn't missed something new.

because i loved these characters. i loved how homely they felt. i loved them, i loved them, i -

needed them to be real. to change, to grow, to have their future returned to them. i needed to see them go home, not trapped in this same endless time-frozen loop. i had been trapped at home too long, and the cabin fever was eating me alive. my desire to be allowed to keep playing (to stay in the timeloop) was duking it out with my desire to see them change beyond what they were allowed to change in the span of just two days. i wanted to see bonnie grow up, to see isabeau change into someone else, to see odile come to terms with her half-vaugardian nature, to see mirabelle learn to accept her sexuality (or lack thereof). i wanted them to remember us as family.

ah, isat, absolute king of getting in my head and making me think like siffrin.

back to dormont. in the end, dormont only changes permanently in act 6, after the time loop breaks. the only time the townsfolk ever change, ever coherently move to different places and act differently (act 5 is similar, but i would argue that's because siffrin changes, dormont still doesn't really meaningfully change) is after the loops.

and it's fitting, isn't it? by this point in the game, you could recite dormont backwards and forwards. but by this point in the game, you are well aware that you need to give them back a future. their future. the one they wished for in the first place. they've been trapped in their fairy tale wonderland for long enough. they deserve to go home, truly home, to go forward and live their lives and keep moving on. to allow them to change, to grow.

to allow yourself to change, to grow. to allow yourself to go home, to admit that you want to keep your home you have now, to keep the family you've built from blood and death and tears and stars.

(You want to stay with them!)

to leave dormont. to leave this fairytale behind, and keep living.

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