Say it in Red | Episode 57: Milk Inside and Milk Outside of a Bag of Milk

Say It In Red

How do I get to the convenience store from here? How does anyone get to a convenience store from anywhere? Where are you right now, and can I follow you for a while? I don't think I'm catching up even though I told you I was right behind you - I just didn't want you to worry or feel inconvenienced by my indecision. Hey, is it alright if we just sit here for a while? I think... yeah, even this much has worn me down this morning. Let me tell you about a game I played recently. A couple games, in fact.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss the Milk series of games, covering both Milk Inside a Bag of Milk (2020) and Milk outside a bag of Milk (2021) and the surreal horror of mundane daily struggles with mental health, common chores, and our attempts to form connections. The first game focuses on you, the player, entering your name just before an unnamed girl entreats you to help her go to the store and buy a bag of milk. You have dialogue options, sometimes ranging from soft comfort to abject cruelty and often landing in sarcastic needling territory. As you accompany this girl, she reveals some small details about her daily struggles with life, chores, and the way she sees the world. "I'll try being a visual novel protagonist!" she says, and thus her thoughts appear as narration for us to read, even if she can't necessarily give them coherent voice. Once you've successfully helped her buy a bag of milk, she returns home to see her mother, represented as a blank, hollow-eyed mask, who tells her to go directly to bed. The second game picks up right here, immediately upon the girl's return to home as we now see her mother as a massive, formless being with sprawling arms and tendrils who injects a thin, needle-like finger into our protagonist's arm. From there, we help our protagonist, now trying out her life as an Adventure Game protagonist, search for her stray thoughts which have turned into fireflies. She longs for sleep and dreaming, and at the end of the night your choices will determine the vision she sees when she closes her eyes.
This is, above all else, a game about plumbing the depths of your own mind, the ways we navigate society and life as we struggle with mental illness, the way we make sense of our pain and treatment, and the dreams we see when we can finally sleep.
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Content Warnings for this episode:
Our episode contains mentions and discussions of suicide, self-harm, online harassment, and forced injection.