

Some game where you play as a bug, another where you play as a scientist trying to track down your escaped evil clone.

Pleased by the results, I decided that I’d try submitting other titles from my childhood lost in the annals of my memory. Within hours I received the odd closure I was looking for ( The House of the Dead: Overkill for those interested). Figuring that another human would certainly remember that uniquely specific description, I quickly typed up what I could recall, pressed post, and waited. One link stood out from the rest, however a subreddit called /r/tipofmyjoystick, a polite community of gamers who assisted others find the names of the titles they were looking for. Desperate enough to try anyway, I typed a few variations I thought would get some hits, but to no avail. I knew searching through Google was going to be impossible “game where nerd’s mother gets really big and you have to destroy her and your girlfriend’s brain is in a jar also there’s a helicopter involved”was just not going to yield any results. I could see it in my mind’s eye so vividly… why couldn’t I remember the name? It wasn’t a game I had played, to tell the truth, but a game that had an ending so bizarrely traumatic that the play-by-play explanation given to me by a friend over a decade ago had been seared into my memory. It wasn’t anything in response to the Twitter prompt - the game I was suddenly recalling was where the mother was an antagonist - but the fact that I couldn’t remember the name of the game started to drive me mad. After replying with a few of the games I could remember ( The Park, Rakuen, Grandia III, and, jokingly, Silent Hill III), I couldn’t help but think I was forgetting… something. That was the prompt I read one night on Twitter, the community coming up mostly blank in response. “Name a game where the protagonist is a mother.”
