Can A Visual Novel Succeed As A Two-Player Game? An Exploration of ‘Locked In’
To call Locked In a marriage simulator runs the risk of steering people like me away, as the very mention of a “sim” game has me snoring before the rest of the word’s syllables can be uttered. Locked In might be better described as a contemporary lens into the troubles of marriage, love, and childrearing, as well as how to navigate those murky waters in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic. More interestingly, it’s the first and only two-player visual novel I have experienced – and I play a ton of visual novels. That one gimmick alone is worth the price of admission, but Locked In is more than its gimmick, and I’d like to explore why.
Fittingly, many indie developers have released games this year that explore themes relevant to our lives in lockdown. Part of this trend is obviously catharsis, finding meaning in our abject situation regarding the pandemic and its negligent mishandling. I am conflicted on whether playing games about this dreadful situation helps me process the everyday tragedies that are overwhelming and unbearable, or whether doing so simply bears down on me like incessant afternoon thunderstorms. In the case of Locked In, it was thankfully the former.
One of the reasons that Locked In didn’t cause me to dwell on the inescapable negativity in the world is because it wasis designed to be played with another person. I was lucky enough to be provided with codes for the 10mg bundle – which I would highly recommend at the humble price of $10 – and didn’t give a preview to any of the games included. I have fun just diving headlong into indie experiences, but I didn’t expect local co-op to be on the menu of games I was playing. As no one was in my house at the time, I opted to play remotely via Twitch chat with one of my dear friends. Having the comfort of someone else playing the game with me was enough to completely dismantle the oppressive reality outside my window and instead focus on having fun with a co-op game.
If you are playing Locked In locally, one player makes choices with the keyboard and the other player makes choices with a mouse. The format of the game will mostly be familiar to anyone well-versed in the visual novel genre, albeit with the two-player twist. In my playthrough, I opted to play Locked In with an honor system that neither player would look at each other’s screens when the game directs them to look away. The way my friend and I played it was a little tedious, with him needing to type out his choices instead of simply making them, but the tedium didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the experience.
I have a strong suspicion that the developers were cringing to an unbearable degree when watching my stream because it did not occur to me to use Steam’s “Remote Play Together” feature for this otherwise local co-op experience. Curiously enough, the day after I streamed Locked In, the developers posted an update to remind future players that Steam’s Remote Play Together feature could be used to play Locked In. Interesting timing, to say the least.
Playing Locked In, I can’t help but think of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. And indeed, the game’s description cheekily borrows this idea for love in the age of coronavirus. Both stories deal with secrecy, infidelity, and of course, a deep-seated need to cure an infectious disease. One of the brilliant conceits of Locked In is the fact that both players start off with different information; one player knows the husband’s motivations and backstory, while the other player knows the wife’s.
If you are role-playing these characters, as I did, then the visual novel becomes a kind of argumentative competition. I played as the wife, Sarah, who was deeply concerned with her daughter’s health and the husband’s blasé approach to taking health precautions like avoiding public spaces and wearing masks. Jerome, the husband, is a freelance artist who has been struggling under the economic downturn from the pandemic. I later learned that Sarah cheated on him six months prior to the events in the game, which was a pretty major twist from my perspective when playing as Sarah.
Keeping individual character backstories and motivations secret was a clever premise for a two-player visual novel. What made Locked In more interesting to play, however, was the blurb that each character receives regarding how they want to raise their daughter, Grace. Jerome’s player learns that he wants Sarah to go easy on Grace, whereas Sarah wants to keep Grace as busy as possible to protect her sanity under lockdown. From these conflicting parental desires alone, the co-op game suddenly shifts towards something resembling a competition.
I don’t ever want children, nor do I ever plan on marrying, so I cannot say with certainty that marriage should not be a competition. But it feels awfully unfair to Grace for her parents to be using her as a bargaining chip within their marriage. Of course, sharing the responsibility of raising a child will always come with conversations that lead to compromise. But the general discomfort created in me from the reduction of Grace’s character was an effective storytelling technique within the limited scope of how you can interact with most visual novels.
I also have no idea how maddening it must be to be in Jerome’s and Sarah’s position as parents sorting through marital issues during a pandemic that keeps their daughter home 100% of the time. The game thrusts these problems together via the disagreement that Jerome and Sarah have about how to best sort Grace out. Sarah’s solution involves incentivising Grace to complete learning tasks in her own time by rewarding her with a Nintendo Switch. Jerome’s idea involves inviting his father, who Sarah feels disease around, to quarantine with the family. Neither solution is perfect, but the writing makes it clear that Grace can not go on as she has been doing without it severely impacting her mental well-being.
Without exhausting the entirety of the game’s choices and my path through towards the end, suffice it to say that there are multiple endings to Locked In, some good and some bad. Your marriage can either break apart or be stitched back together. In my playthrough, the conflict between partners escalated pretty rapidly towards hurling f-bombs and resentful insults back and forth. Grace got caught in the crossfire of her parents’ verbal barrage.
Jerome and Sarah are not a healthy couple as portrayed in the game, but, oddly enough, I still chose to patch up the marriage with a compromise by the end. When the game describes Grace as “scared” when she overhears her parents fighting, it becomes a lot easier to compromise and capitulate to Jerome’s suggestion. For the sake of palliating the open, infected wound, I leaned into what Sarah didn’t want – and personally sounded like a problematic situation – to end the argument amicably.
As with the premise of all of the 10mg games, Locked In has a brief runtime that could be completed on a lunch break. It gives a glimpse into the idea of marriage and child rearing during lockdown that I have not experienced as a single, childless person. Family is arguably the first resource most people would want to have during an international crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic, but Locked In flips the notion of familial bonding and togetherness on its head. Seen in this way, home becomes a prison, the knot of marriage tightens its hold – often, it would seem, for the worst – and a child becomes a burden in need of distraction.
For me, Locked In highlighted the need for grace – not intending the pun with Sarah’s and Jerome’s daughter’s name, although perhaps her name is intentionally chosen for this reason – in this era of deep uncertainty and suffering. In an era of seemingly endless isolation, Locked In asks you to grab a partner and escape that isolation, if only for a while. When people think of the importance of history, usually books, news reports, and video footage come to mind. As tiny a project as it is, Locked In makes me think we will one day also think of video games as equally valuable historical accounts. Locked In is one of those games that truly serves as a (fictionalized) record of our contemporary lives and what it means to exist within this broken world.
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