Garbochii Games
an indie game studio making narrative-rich games
I'm a solo creator writing story-heavy games with strong aesthetics and lots of emotion.
Find me online:
GATSBY: boats against the current
You Love Him - a story about being in love with the wrong person.
& more to come...
I'm Sam, a coffee-addicted translation project manager living on the East Coast of the United States. My dream is to work in video game localization. In addition to studying Japanese (and working on my second degree), at some point I realized I could also share my own games and stories with the world! Thus Garbochii Games was born.
When I can pull myself away from the computer, I enjoy hiking, grilling, and camping with my partner. I'm obsessed with pastel aesthetics, lo-fi music, retro games, and dogs.
time zone: GMT- 4
“You Love Him” is an interactive fiction from the perspective of someone in an abusive relationship.
About a year ago, I had the idea to write an interactive fiction based on my own experiences from a series of terrible relationships. With the working title "The Bad Boyfriend Game", the original concept was more of a horror game. The boyfriend was a demon who lured and trapped women, but I felt that the concept took away from the story rather than adding to it. I wanted to show that abusers are ordinary people who often seem sweet at first - sometimes a spade is just a spade and a bad person is just a bad person.
This story/game/whatever you want to call it was painful to write at times, and I stopped writing and considered scrapping the whole thing more times than I can remember. I was worried that my depictions of abuse were too heavy-handed, but reminded myself that I based almost all the scenarios on my own experiences. I pushed through because I needed to get it off my chest, and I do think it helped me.
In the end, I hope that sharing this will help others who have gone through something similar realize that they are not alone in their experiences. I also hope it can help others understand why it can be so hard to leave an abusive relationship.