The indie scene can easily be seen as a hub of creativity in which there is room for wonderful and intriguing concepts to flourish. One such example of Blueberry by Mellow Games, which takes players on a story-driven journey through a woman’s mind while she’s dealing with trauma. It explores many interesting sides of how we grow and develop through the events that shape us, so we got in touch with creator Mel Taylor to find out more.
What was the inspiration behind Blueberry?
The inspiration for Blueberry came partly out of my own interest in psychology and memory processing and partly from personal experience. That said, the story is not autobiographical. There are some parts that are inspired by things that I have experienced, but it was important for me to not make myself the protagonist. She is a separate person with her own wants and needs and although I have been through traumatic experiences myself, they are not the same as the ones Blueberry goes through.
What have been the most rewarding (or difficult) aspects of working on a game like Blueberry?
To me, the most rewarding thing about making games in general is to see player’s reactions and how they receive the game. Gamescom was a great opportunity to see a lot of new players play Blueberry and there was one incident that stood out to me especially. It was already late and we were about to wrap up for the day when a girl played the demo through and reached the end of it. I asked her how she liked it and she started crying. I had very mixed feelings in that moment and tried to comfort her. But she also told me she enjoyed it and that it had moved her. My final thesis when I was studying was called “Beyond Fun – Complex Player Emotions in Games” and it looks like we have succeeded in making at least a quite memorable player experience that is not “fun” in that sense.
Other than that, a big difficulty has definitely been to find funding for the game. It seems that players and press like it, but investors are not sure whether it will make enough money.
The game deals with heavy themes such as depression and trauma. What was your approach to handling these topics sensitively while still crafting an engaging gameplay experience?
I work with a team of 3 psychologists called Behind The Screens. They have a German podcast of the same name about psychology in games. They gave me regular feedback on the game experience during the past year or so and great advice on how to improve things in order to prepare players for the difficult topics before playing, but also treating them in a sensitive, multi-dimensional way in the game. Essentially, Blueberry is not supposed to make players even more depressed, but give people hope and comfort who have experienced similar hardships and to create more empathy and understanding for players who never encountered these things.
How has the demo for Blueberry been received by players so far?
We got a lot of positive feedback, especially from players who could see themselves in the main character Blueberry. One thing that surprised me a bit was that younger people, especially teenagers, seemed to enjoy the demo quite a lot. I expected most players to be a bit older since the game centers a mother-daughter relationship and is about motherhood. But I think that especially teenagers liked that a lot of the first part of the game centers the perspective of a child/teenager in a toxic family dynamic. This is something that is rarely seen in games, but an enormous amount of people experience.
Managing Blueberry’s depression adds a layer of complexity to the game. How does this system work?
At first glance, managing Blueberry’s depression level is pretty “gamey”. So we have the “Blues Bar”, where the aim is to keep it as low as possible at all times. It is a bit like an inverted health bar: 0% is good, 100% is bad. The higher the blues gets, the less color we have in the game and Blueberry’s world becomes more blue. Players can regulate it through mundane things such as food items, but also through dialog and gameplay choices. The mini-game scenes in Blueberry are memories the player needs to collect and if the Blues Bar goes to 100% in one of these scenes, it will often end and change the story path, a bit like a story fail state. The story will continue either way, just differently. Another interesting use of the Blues Bar in a story-sense is to convey subtext to players. For example, at a later stage in the game, other characters will also have Blues Bars. Even though Blueberry as a character might not know the state of her mom’s Blues Bar, the player will know and thus be able to see that she is hurt by something Blueberry said without her realizing it herself.
Mental health in video games is becoming a more prominent theme. How do you feel Blueberry contributes to this conversation, and what are your hopes for the game’s impact on players?
Mental health has been historically misrepresented in games. For instance, many horror games use the “asylum” as a scary setting with monsters and dangerous people who want to kill the player. Instead of using these mental-health-related tropes, Blueberry wants to help players empathize more with people who are experiencing mental health troubles. It also aims to explain how trauma influences memory processing and how it has real effects on how people are able to manage everyday life as well as how memories change over time. I found it fascinating to learn how much memory has to do with the human ability to imagine things and how little it has to do with recalling events accurately. It is as if a memory is newly created every time we think of it and this obviously changes a lot throughout our lives, as we change. In the same way, Blueberry will revisit and re-experience older memories in a different way at later points of the game as she ages. A traumatic memory can (in very simplified terms) be seen as a “broken” memory, where the body fails to understand that the threat is over and reacts in an extreme way, such as a panic attack. I found this realization very interesting and hope that the game will de-stigmatize trauma through centering this in the story.
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