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No (Okay, Some) Ragrets
As a natural melancholic, the idea of being drawn to the sea — to drown one’s regrets, whether figuratively or bodily — makes me glad there isn’t a significant body of water within six hundred miles. It isn’t that suicide holds appeal for its own sake. Rather, it’s a fire door in the back, rigged with an alarm but duly located in case of an emergency. Sometimes, when an elderly person goes missing in the mountains, I wonder if they disappeared because of forgetfulness, as the silver alerts would have us believe, or because they could no longer stop remembering.
Deep Regrets, like Judson Cowan’s forthcoming Personal Demons, wears its metaphor on its sleeve only to collar it in gameplay. Perhaps we went to the sea to forget, to scrape our hull free of the barnacles that have accreted there, only to find ourselves fouled with a fresh catch. To mount an escape is to be caught.
Okay, now I’m being melancholic. At least it’s a good fit for Cowan’s intended topic.
Therapeia Infernalis
The first time I opened up to a medical professional about some childhood trauma, it was like surgically excising a living thing from behind my breastbone. That experience — the galloping pulse, the ventricle-deep ache, the sensation that something alive and malicious was digging in its claws to stay rooted — made it easy to see how one might disavow ownership of those emotions and assign them to supernatural entities. Demons rather than one’s own untilled memories.
That, it seems, is the connection being made by Judson Cowan as well. Personal Demons is Cowan’s chaser to the successful Deep Regrets. Where that game used fishing for eldritch horrors as a stand-in for, well, deep regrets, Personal Demons is about calling demons to your own private summoning circle in order to dispel them. Or to confront them? To host a tea party for them? Look, it may be an apt metaphor, but it isn’t always a perfect one.
SPACE-BIFF! 