Nothing lasts forever. And just like that, I finished your game today after playing it for almost one and a half months, almost on a daily basis.
I don’t know where to start. Maybe with this: Thank you so much.
The life of your protagonist have become part of my life over time. It was comforting to spend time with them, laugh, cry, smile and grow with them.
To learn from them.
I deeply hope many young people play your game and get the chance to avoid the mistakes that I’ve made during my life. Mistakes, that I wouldn’t have made had I played your game at a young age. I’m over 50 years old. I know there are things in life that each of us regrets and yes, we grow and learn by making mistakes, but human beings can also learn from others, heck, otherwise we wouldn’t need any kind of education.
What I want to say is, that during the story, I often wished I could go back in time with this knowledge and act and react differently in certain situations in my life.
Who is to say if it’d make my life better – or worse – but that’s not even the point. There are at least a handful of decisions that you made and you later regret. It doesn’t mean that they were objectively wrong or right and there’s no way to ever know it. But it doesn’t matter. You regret them, that matters. You regret them, because making them was unnecessary. With a little bit more knowledge from people with more experience or wiser or older people, you might have done things differently. If not for your own benefit, than at least for the one of the people around you, especially the most important ones – friends.
It took me 29 years to stop living in fear, to stop living a lie. And so much longer to catch up. Your game would’ve given me strength and with that strength I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.
That’s why I hope your game will help others not to do the same.
Thank you for allowing me to dive into the world that you’ve created and to teach me something new along the way. You’re never to old to learn new stuff.
On a lighter note, each night when I played the game, I listened to the score of ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’ by Alexandre Desplat. For me, the music is from now on and forever entangled with the story of Zack and Braden and not with the movie anymore.
And one of the tracks is even named ‘Nothing lasts’.