itch.io

Thanks for your thoughtful comment!

As you may imagine based on the tone of the demo, the main game will go into some fairly dark places as well, and (most of) the endings will lean towards bittersweet 😔 Well, at least a lot of what happens in it will probably be nicer than being stuck on an island forever.

As for the pronouns: generally speaking, I think it's best to refer to fictional characters with whatever pronouns they themselves or the narration use. However, in this case, there is some nuance due to the multilingual nature of the work.

As you might know, Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, and nothing in the Finnish script (which I consider to be the authoritative version) genders the protagonist directly. Gender is all subtext in the game, most visible in how the protagonist orients themselves towards masculine ideals and archetypes, but still up to interpretation.

The decision to use they/them in the translation was not an easy one. It certainly doesn't reflect the protagonist's sense of self-identity – the fictional languages the characters speak, like Finnish, lack gendered personal pronouns. But in the end, I thought it was the most sensible way to reflect the inherent ambiguity of the original script and worked best with how the rest of the story goes.

If they spoke English, I imagine the protagonist could also choose to use he/they or even accept any pronouns. Maybe they'd go with he/him at this point, since nothing in the text speaks of their personal understanding of gender. The story won't say anything definite either way, since the characters will not talk about pronouns.

When discussing the story in English, I'm personally going to go with they/them for the same reasons I chose to do so in the script. I'm not that strict about it, however – the choice is regardless an artifact of translation, and the ungendered personal pronouns of the original script are what most closely reflects my artistic intentions.