Time Capsules and Parasocial Relationships: A Reflection on ‘I Told You So!’
When I wrote about Heart of the Woods in 2019, I praised the game for its “bold writing, narrative depth, fantastic illustrations, and sheer ambition.” I can comfortably say that those words still ring true years after writing them, and I’d suggest that Heart of the Woods remains one of the most underrated visual novels I’ve had the pleasure of playing. Since my article, Heart of the Woods has received several updates, including the addition of full voice acting as well as a Nintendo Switch port. I have followed Studio Élan ever since falling in love with their work, and so I was delighted at the recent release of I Told You So!, their new game that follows up with the central characters from Heart of the Woods. While not intended to be as impactful as Heart of the Woods, I Told You So! feels like a natural and loving extension of these characters that I’m eager to spend more time with. My brief time with them hit me with a tidal wave of memories that I wasn’t prepared for.
I Told You So! takes a fundamentally different approach to its storytelling than Heart of the Woods. Though still presented in a familiar visual novel format, the character art is now strikingly stylized in chibi fashion. The music feels markedly more upbeat and less instrumental. The storytelling also takes the form of bite-sized chunks instead of a winding contiguous story that Heart of the Woods offers. As a result, the tone feels more jovial and frivolous than its predecessor. Despite these changes, I enjoyed my brief rekindling of parasocial friendship with Tara, Maddie, Abigail, and Morgan — people who I had gotten to know for several intimate hours, people who feel like friends who moved away for a while and have returned for a brief holiday visit.
Comforting Feelings of Nostalgia
If anything, you could look at I Told You So! as exactly that: a brief holiday visit. The story is structurally broken into four mini-episodes of what is now formerly known as “Taranormal,” Tara’s popular internet show that was an important touchstone at several narrative beats in Heart of the Woods. This structure allows each mini-episode of the newly rebranded “I Told You So!” to be distinct and separate in the same way that you might click around a vlogger’s channel. The first mini-episode in I Told You So! literally begins on Halloween, and the remaining three episodes could just as easily be clocked as taking place around the holidays.
The four mini-episodes in I Told You So! involve little skits and show segments that never linger for more than a few dozen lines of quick banter. I particularly enjoyed a segment where Tara and Maddie evaluated some fan art. There’s some light teasing about Maddie dressing up as a goth, something wildly surprising given her reserved personality and bookish aesthetic. Naturally, Tara started swooning over an illustration of herself as a demon. I felt like I was hanging out in a chill setting with some friends — the kind of friends that you can pick up right where you last left off, whether that’s months or years down the road.
These little vignettes from Taranormal made me feel at home, a quiet nostalgia that I didn’t realize was latent in my emotional memory. I Told You So! conjured pangs of the uncanny, that ever-present border between the familiar and the unfamiliar, which left me looking backwards at my life, at the people I’ve moved on from and who’ve moved on from me. I looked back at myself.
Then and Now: Seeing the Past in the Present
When I see Morgan appear on the screen with a mostly shaved head, I take a second to fill in the potential backstory of this change. I wonder if her relationship with Tara is freeing up her gender expression, whether this change is recent, whether she made this dramatic makeover on a whim or whether they spoke it over together ahead of time. I notice her double helix piercings and green flannel rolled up to the elbows. She looks happy, and that in turn makes me happy.
When I hear Maddie reflect on her decision to move on from her vitally important role in producing Taranormal, I think back on the unfinished threads from Heart of the Woods and how Maddie was already leaning away from this collaborative endeavor. I project moments of my former creative collaboration with musicians and artists and writers: of times where I, too, have wanted to move on from a creative partnership, of times where others have wanted to pave their own generative path. I think about how I buried many of my passions while grinding away at university, how a singularly devoted focus to the myopic goal of the college degree almost inevitably comes at the cost of other passionate pursuits. But Maddie seems resolute, and I support her.
When I see Tara proudly sporting a trans pride hoodie, I well up with affection. When I played Heart of the Woods years ago, I didn’t read the signs that Tara was a trans character; the game had to spell it out for me before it all clicked. I played Heart of the Woods at a time where my own denial about my gender identity no doubt manifested in a failure to notice another character’s. Again, I’m projecting, but I can’t help but fill in the gaps with my imagination: I picture Tara from Heart of the Woods and I think about the pressure to “pass” as a trans person, whereas I see Tara from I Told You So! and think about the rejection of this oppressive expectation. There is, in other words, liberation in being loud about one’s trans identity, not simply hoping to blend into the shadows. It’s just so Tara to be loud and proud about something as important as her gender identity. And it makes me want to hug her neck and remind her how special she is.
Tara’s trans identity is conspicuously absent in my 2019 review of Heart of the Woods, as is mine. In the same way that I was burying this side of myself, hoping it’d eventually go away, I think I omitted this detail so as to avoid topically confronting it in public. Instead, my review culminates with an examination of how sexuality is represented in Heart of the Woods. I find that deliberate avoidance equal parts pitiful and hilarious, though I’m proud of where I’ve come since then. You can see the egg starting to crack when I write how “I wasn’t expecting to empathize so deeply with these characters,” and how “this game reminded me why LGBTQ+ representation is still so important” in gaming.
I was afraid to acknowledge it at the time — repression is a cruel hydra — but when I played Heart of the Woods in 2019, I saw myself in Tara’s character. I was so good at pretending otherwise that it took me until I Told You So! to realize that she’s almost certainly the first trans character I ever knowingly interacted with in a video game. I played Heart of the Woods at a time when there was no way in hell that I could ever imagine myself coming out safely. It felt like the ship had sailed, like I would never muster the courage to make such a change. Whether I knew it or not, Tara’s vibrant presence in Heart of the Woods was one of the first truly respectable portrayals of a trans woman in almost any media I had consumed. And she would probably roast me for not using her name in a pun for this article’s title: Tarasocial. She’s an incredibly important character to me, especially now.
I look at these beloved characters and I chuckle at myself. There’s so much contained in a memory, especially when you have closed the book and seemingly moved on. As Marcel Proust taught me years ago when reading In Search of Lost Time, memory tends to reveal itself unannounced and involuntarily. Memory is a grasping at what was, a vain attempt to recapture and rewrite, maybe even relive, a particular moment. I Told You So! unlocked this Proustian involuntary memory in my head, causing me to yearn backwards towards a past where I first played Heart of the Woods, wishing I could recontextualize Tara’s character and Heart of the Woods more generally for myself back then. Alas, as I lose myself in these thoughts during my final moments with I Told You So!, Abigail zooms into the screen to jump-scare the audience: “Boo!” I am brought back to the pocket-sized game on my computer monitor.
Should You Play I Told You So! and Heart of the Woods?
I often think back to Tell Me Why and If Found…, the two games that made me decide to stop pretending to be cis and fully embrace myself, and it’s striking to me that Heart of the Woods gets forgotten along the way in that story I tell about myself. It’s an equally important game in my life, it just hit me before I was ready. But I would love it if more people gave it a chance. Between its voice acting and Switch port, Heart of the Woods is more accessible than ever. It might not have cracked my proverbial egg, but it certainly reminded me that there was an outer shell encasing who I really was.
After playing I Told You So!, I can’t wait to reinstall Heart of the Woods and give it a fresh playthrough now that I’m so much more in touch with myself. I Told You So! feels like a love letter to fans, something that seems like an ongoing passion project from the developers who clearly haven’t moved on from these characters either. For anyone curious to try out I Told You So!, I’d implore you to play Heart of the Woods first, because I don’t think the game would be impactful without that necessary backstory. It’s just remarkably rare that games receive light-hearted and whimsical follow-up projects like this, and in that respect, I am so incredibly glad that I Told You So! exists.
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