In a puzzle-platforming section of the game, Kay meets her brother’s bullies inside a school. Through Kay’s confrontation with her brother in raven form, she realizes the pain he’s experienced in his young life, bullied to the point where he wonders if he should even be alive. She sees herself as responsible for what she’s experienced, and so she’s detached herself from the real world, what we see in Sea of Solitude. The monsters and visions in Sea of Solitude are based in Kay’s reality, but filtered through the self-hate and loneliness she’s experiencing. There’s a piece of Kay in each of these monsters, reflecting back her own insecurities. The monsters are expressions of the tremendous trauma that Kay has experienced in her life: the dramatic collapse of her parents’ marriage, the bullying that could have killed her brother, and a toxic relationship and subsequent breakup. She also meets a white wolf with a dark interior, an imagining of a recent ex-boyfriend. Her father is represented by an ornery chameleon her mother, a feathered octopuslike creature. An oversized raven with sad eyes is a version of her younger brother. She travels by boat, on foot, and sometimes by swimming, often where she’s at risk of being devoured - literally and figuratively - by those feelings, which are represented by a shadowy sea monster with a humanoid face.īut Kay encounters a bunch of other monsters during Sea of Solitude, each of which represents an important person in her life.
Kay zigzags across the familiar city, unlocking memories and grappling with her ingrained loneliness. A Berlin-looking city rests underwater, its pastel hues obscured by a mixture of light and dark blue-green tones. Sea of Solitude, developed by German studio Jo-Mei Games and published by Electronic Arts, is about a sort of loneliness that’s similar to what Borges discussed: looking over the edge of your rowboat and seeing only oceans and submerged buildings. I spend the rest of the game with her searching for a much larger raft. Borges keeps herself afloat with what she calls life preservers, a system of treatment and support that is essential when her legs get tired.Īt the beginning of Sea of Solitude, Kay only has her wooden rowboat. Other times, the water is clear and calm - “but you’re always, always in the ocean,” she wrote. Sometimes it’s like swimming through a storm, all waves and rain. She wrote that it’s like existing in the ocean, “not as sea creatures do, native and equipped with feathery gills to dissolve oxygen for my bloodstream, but alone, with an expanse of water at all sides.” Borges wrote that these chronic thoughts are like treading water. In early April, the writer Anna Borges published an essay in The Outline about chronic, passive suicidal ideation. When she has her boat, Kay doesn’t have to worry about treading water her body can rest, with little risk of drowning. She becomes attached to it as if it were a friend. But she’s safe on her boat, one of the few safe spots in the game’s underwater world. Our heroine can hear whispers of them as they slink through the murky water - the most dangerous of which has dagger-like teeth and will swallow her whole.
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In Sea of Solitude’s flooded city, few places are free from the monsters that lurk in the depths. A lantern glows at the front of her wooden rowboat, illuminating the dark sea below.
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