For the last five years, the independent game designer Nina Freeman, working with small teams of collaborators, has been exploring the boundaries and connections between video games, art and autobiography. Her witty, ethereal projects often involve her own experiences with family and lovers, and tease relatable truths from the most subtle interactions: a girl learning about sex while playing with dolls; a young woman’s online relationship explored through the folders on her PC desktop. As a “player”, your role is often negligible, flitting between embodiment, friendship and voyeurism.
We Met in May is a set of four vignette games about the early moments in a romantic relationship, ostensibly between Nina herself and the game’s programmer, Jake Jefferies. In Nothing to Hide, Nina has invited Jake back to her flat for the first time and, bashful about its untidiness and her collection of anime plushies and posters, considers hiding things from him – it’s up to the player to decide what she conceals. In Beach Date, Nina and Jake lounge at the seaside and, controlling her arm with the cursor, you can pile sand or suncream on to him, or try to pour wine into his mouth. The inexactness of the control mechanic makes her arm flail awkwardly, like a sort of dating version of Surgeon Simulator.
The final two feel like they’re set slightly later in the relationship. Strike a Pose sees the couple going to the mall, where Nina tries on a range of outfits. In a funny reference to the magical attacks in role-playing games, each item of clothing empowers her with different abilities with which she quite literally stuns her waiting boyfriend when she emerges from the cubicle. Finally, Dinner’s Ready has Jake fixing Nina dinner, while she idly fantasises about tweaking his nipples, an action the player takes over via a first-person-shooter-style aiming cursor.
Along the way, there are snippets of cute interactive dialogue and we often see Nina’s thought bubbles as she combats her insecurities and uncertainties. There is a lovely, pastel-shaded comic book wash to the visuals, an aesthetic that reminded me of 1970s girls’ comics such as Jinty and Bunty. The soundtrack by Ryan Yoshikami has a relaxing, muzak vibe to it that underlines the playfulness and ephemeral nature of early romance, when everything feels silly and lightweight but also loaded with significance.
We Met in May is done in an hour, but like Freeman’s other explorations of self-conscious longing and ardour, it lingers in the mind. The brief vignettes tap into memories we all share – of first dates and fumbled physical contact, of building shared jokes and memories, of just really fancying someone but not quite having the lexical or physical vocabulary to express it.
That is the beauty of We Met in May. While playing Beach Date, I was trying to pour wine on Jake’s shorts but ended up accidentally dropping the bottle, and the action became an affectionate stroke of his chest. It was a moment of unintended but electric intimacy that made the small asking price of this experimental project more than worth it.
