izigame.me

For those who are unaware, this game is actually a very tiny prequel to a much bigger game, Milk OUTside of a bag (which may sound like i'm being silly, but no seriously). This game serves as just a mild bit of a lore and is completely skippable, but since this is the first part of the journey, I wanted to leave a bit more of a serious review since Milk OUTside left me in so much shambles I couldn't help but make a joke review to cope.
Milk In/Outside of a bag are both two games that leave a lot up to the players interpretation, so I'll be avoiding talking about the specific details they do give. But I cannot recommend either of these games enough, as they've both touched on the very real experience of coping with mental illness. Which mental illness exactly is left up to your guess, but this isn't a lazy means of writing at all--it's intended to make the character someone that you can relate to, regardless of your diagnosis. What they deal with is a conflict of identity after trying to learn how to live after a traumatic incident. It leaves them anxious to the point of counting their every step, stressing over whether or not they're going to get in trouble for stepping on grass, whether their ceiling will collapse in and randomly kill them despite not given a reason, to even trying to justify not taking their medications, even going as far as to convince themselves that they don't need it despite clearly suffering the consequences of going without, later admitting that they know they need the medication, they just wish they were strong enough to go without it.
The main story comes from this rumination of rolling over the experiences of the unnamed main character's thoughts about what's happened to them over and over and over. It's clear that something happened to them, and although they don't ever fully explain themselves, they're clearly in the midst of inner turmoil thinking of how to think about it--which although is very common for people who struggle with mental illness, it's actually very rarely portrayed in games quite as well as this.
your role in the game is to pose as some voice in their head that's supposed to keep them company, and you can choose to either push them to be harder on themselves (which WILL result in negative consequences), or you can help them learn to have some patience with themselves. Milk Outside definitely has a lot more story to work with, and what follows becomes a very introspective journey that feels simultaneously stuck trying to make sense of the past while also desperately wishing for some resolution that would allow them to move forward to the future. Regardless of what choices you make, the main character is stranded in the present, alone, isolated, and trying to put their thoughts together in a way that they can work with but never quite finding out how to do that. These games deal with a lot--the impact of losing people close to you, the impact of having hope for the future only for it to carelessly stripped from you, having parents that could never even bother to try and understand you, losing your sense of direction with no clear sight of whether you'll find it ever again, only to go to sleep and dream about how much better things can be, or (if you're not careful) nightmares that reflect the inner turmoil of what living with trauma can do to you once you've sunken deep enough into your mental illness that you wonder whether medications can even help anymore.
After reading all that, I'm sure this explains why I mentioned making a joke review on Milk OUTside's page. This game is filled to the brim with existential dread, but it also brings a lot of comfort to those who might be struggling with mental illness. As somebody diagnosed with PTSD, this game, although as depressing as it is, felt very comforting as it found a way to put the struggles of personality disorders into a neatly packed 3 - 4 hour experience across the two games. It feels better to know that the experiences of struggling with mental illness this severely is something that people can find common ground on, and that common ground is very clearly laid out in this game in a way that I've never seen in another game besides maybe Omori. The morality of the main character is never brought into question--they can be petty and bratty, but at the end of the day they're just some teenager who had things happen to them when they were too young to face those things, and are now living with the lingering question how to move forward after what they've experienced when they can barely even put into words what happened to them. I seriously suggest being careful and only playing this game if you're in the proper head space. But DO take the chance to play these games both. Milk INside isn't as big of a game and definitely doesn't touch on as much, only serving as a precursor of what's to come. In Milk INside, you will have a glimpse of what anxiety is doing to the main character. Milk OUTside is the headspinning whirlwind that I just wrote about above, but I still seriously recommend Milk INside because it's a small taste of what you're going to experience with Milk OUTside (and in some ways that I won't spoil, it makes the experience of Milk OUTside a bit more rewarding). I played the game quite a few months ago and I still think about it every day. I still listen to the soundtrack on a daily basis. I sincerely hope the creators of the game see this and know that they've made a masterpiece that very few people have been able to follow.