An inarguable truth, if you are fortunate enough to have all the necessary components: There's something sacred about being a kid and playing videogames with your sibling. Not because videogames are that important, necessarily, or essential to family relationships. But because there's an alchemy there, in huddling close to some old television, diving together into another world. A good game can transcend the fault lines of contentious sibling relationships and bring family together in joy, or terror, or awe.
Winter, 2001: Someone tell Luigi I love him contains a little of all three. Made by independent creator Joey Schutz, it's a brief, free experience for the PC cobbled together from hushed memories and bits and pieces of Mario games. With models and fonts borrowed from the in-game files of platformers like Super Mario Sunshine, Schutz's creation is a memory of playing the GameCube title Luigi's Mansion. In that game, Luigi searches for his brother in a manor drowning in ghosts. In this version, the uncanniness of the situation is dialed up, making Luigi's search a metaphor for the relationship between the two brothers playing the game. It's a move that makes the whole experience a little more frightening—and a little more beautiful.
The play experience is simple, and disorienting: a text story plays out as you gain control of a basic model of Luigi without accompanying animations. Luigi moves like a doll, and over a few screens you search for Mario. As you do, a model of Mario sits in the corner of the screen, playing your action on an old television. It's a loop of brotherly care, of memory and concern, closing in on itself. The experience's brevity does nothing to dull its effectiveness.
My brother and I used to play horror games. Or, to be fair, he would play them. I would watch. As the younger sibling, I had a reverence for those experiences, and for him as he went through them, braving dangers I couldn't alone. Winter, 2001 captures the fondness I feel for those memories in a singular, bizarre way, but that strangeness somehow gets at the truth of my memories better than anything more straightforward could. When you find Mario, Luigi, tell him that I love him, too.
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