BRXKEN INSIDE is a visual novel that has unsympathetic characters, confusing writing, and a terrible portrayal of schizophrenia. Its good art can’t make up for how tone deaf and insensitive it is.

Introduction

When a developer wants to make a visual novel with dark themes, a certain level of care needs to be used. They often dive into sensitive topics that reflect on our society, thus fuelling how the player perceives said topics. BRXKEN INSIDE fails to take this into consideration. It decides to be extremely edgy without consideration for its subject matter, primarily schizophrenia. Add on an abysmal story and you’re in for an uncomfortable experience, if not outright gross.

Graphics

I can offer some legitimate praise here. The artwork for BRXKEN INSIDE is nicely done. All three primary characters look good, and the backgrounds are solid. There aren’t many differing expressions, but there are a couple of varying outfits. My only complaint with the character art is that Akiko has some strange faces where you can’t see her tongue with her mouth being open. All of her other expressions are fine, as are the other characters.

A decent amount of CGs are present. All of them are well drawn, though there is no gallery to unlock them in. What I didn’t care as much for were the varying effects to show how Shion was sliding into a worse state of mind. The black bars with red lettering felt cliché at best, as did the flashing letters. I think the somewhat wavy/blurry effect was decent, but not in this context. It made me think much more of being in a hot area than someone having a mental breakdown. Mind you, the novel does say they are experiencing heatwaves, yet there’s no mention of that being a factor when this effect is being used. Maybe it would work for some players; I just felt like the methods used were either overused or not fitting.

Sound

The soundtrack is made of sad piano music. I had to crank up the volume pretty high to be able to hear it, and even then I barely noticed it due to how generic it felt. It’s not offensive, but it doesn’t feel particularly fitting. There’s no voice acting, which is fine by me. I rate this category as neutral overall.

Gameplay

You click on the screen. The story proceeds. That’s a standard visual novel for you with BRXKEN INSIDE being no different. It uses Renpy as its game engine with the usual accommodations. This includes a multitude of save slots, being able to save and load at any point, and having the option to scroll back for past dialogue. I couldn’t find any way to view a log, even when I checked the control scheme in the game, so that was annoying. Other than that, it had everything it needed.

BRXKEN INSIDE has two potential endings. Which ending you get hinges on a single choice. You might say, “But wait! Is there really only one choice in the entire game?” No, dear reader, for there are a whopping two choices! It just so happens that the first choice changes nothing beyond a few lines of dialogue. The second makes a complete split with each route having different scenes and dialogue. While having many choices are a staple to visual novels, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to have one major choice and nothing else. I just don’t get why the first exists.

Story

I usually cover the story first, but due to how much I have to say about it and the following topic, I’ve moved it further into the review. I’ll give a brief summary and my thoughts, and spoilers will follow. As much as I prefer not spoiling stories in reviews, this one has too many issues to ignore, especially when I’m primarily giving this game a thumbs down because of it.

BRXKEN INSIDE follows Shion, a top student who is being followed by a fellow student named Akiko. Akiko wants to be Shion’s friend, but Shion dislikes Akiko and wants nothing to do with her. This is made all the worse by Shion thinking she is seeing her dead sister, Mirai. Will she be pushed over the edge by Mirai’s influence, or will she learn to accept Akiko? The answer is…

Oh heck who even cares? This story is a mess. All of the narration is done from the viewpoints of Shion and Akiko, and none of it makes a whole lot of sense. Their dialogue doesn’t sound like how humans would ever reasonably interact. I’m under the impression this was translated from Russian, but I’m not sure how much of the translation affected things. Maybe it sounded better in Russian. However, as I am only able to understand the English version, that’s what I’m judging, and that version is really poorly written.

On top of the awful dialogue and monologuing, you have typos, of which my ‘favorite’ is Shion’s name being misspelled as “Akiko” at least three times. It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs if the writer can’t even remember which character is which. Then again, maybe they forgot because they didn’t bother writing the speaker’s name for anyone but Shion most of the time, and only when she’s talking out loud. That makes it confusing to read. The voices aren’t distinct enough to tell Shion, Akiko, and Mirai apart, so good luck guessing through a large chunk of this bloody script.

Then we get to how utterly idiotic these girls are. I know they’re teenagers, but dear gosh, just look at some of the absolute stupidity they take part in. Spoilers are here for specific story beats, so if you care about that, skip ahead.

Spoilers for whatever this story is trying to accomplish.

Akiko apparently tries to kill Shion. As a result, Shion knocks her out, ties her up, and tosses her into a closet. Ignoring how questionable this decision is to start with, Shion decides to be an utter numbskull by only tying Akiko’s wrists in front of her. This means Akiko could just walk out if she felt like it, unless the closet locks from the outside, which is never stated. Shion also left Akiko’s cell phone with her. You know, so she could just call the police. What the actual heck? It doesn’t matter if Akiko would or would not have done these things to try getting away. The problem is Shion thinks she would, and with how supposedly intelligent she is (at least according to the game), how would she ever think this would work?

Then there’s Akiko, who as mentioned above tries to kill Shion. Why? She doesn’t know. I’m not kidding. Every time Shion asks, Akiko is like, “Eh, I dunno mate.” The story never answers this. We’re left to wonder why Akiko brought a flipping boxcutter along to try and carve Shion up with no reason in sight. Was this just here to force the story along? Maybe. It does end the prologue, which honestly I felt was more of a game than the actual entire game. The rest of the story is somehow even more rushed and confusing. With this game being an hour and a half or so long, it has no time to actually tell the tale it advertises.

Not only are the characters stupid, they’re thoroughly unpleasant individuals. All Shion does is whine about Akiko bothering her with seemingly no justification for it. Oh, and think about how much she wants to kill her because schizophrenia! Of course! Akiko tolerates the horrible stuff Shion puts her through for seemingly no reason, making her a satellite character for Shion at best and a control freak in one route at worst. Then there’s Mirai, who is just the ‘evil psycho killer teehee’ stereotype. Gee, great cast, really made me want them to get their happy endings.

I wish I could end the review with that, but we’re not done yet. Linked to the story, there’s a huge problem with how Shion is portrayed. Let’s discuss it.

Can We Please Stop Demonizing Schizophrenia?

First of all, let’s define what schizophrenia is. According to psychiatry.org, “Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder… When schizophrenia is active, symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, trouble with thinking and lack of motivation. However, with treatment, most symptoms of schizophrenia will greatly improve and the likelihood of a recurrence can be diminished.” Most of these symptoms apply to Shion. It is also outright stated by Shion herself that she has schizophrenia, though she certainly isn’t a reliable source for medical information. It is stated that Shion has depression as well. Keep in mind that depression is extremely common in people with schizophrenia. The point here is that the story puts an emphasis on Shion’s troubles mentally, and those are focused on her schizophrenia.

The exploration of Shion’s schizophrenia is worse than poor; it’s downright harmful. To explain why, I will be going back into spoilers. That being said, I highly recommend still reading this part unless you are determined to play BRXKEN INSIDE with as little information as possible. This addresses a severe problem of schizophrenia in fiction that needs to be seen by more eyes, especially if we’re still getting character portrayals like this.

Spoilers for some problematic story beats.

Shion’s schizophrenia is depicted as her having extreme violent urges. She constantly thinks about wanting to kill Akiko, she strangles Akiko in one route, and she is outright abusive to Akiko throughout the story. This is often portrayed as having delusions of seeing Mirai, who is called “crazy” and apparently tried to suffocate Shion among other murderous actions. It is stated that Mirai killed herself, though in one route Shion says she killed Mirai instead. We get the usual harmful words for all of these events: crazy, insane, psychotic, etcetera.

At absolute best, this dives right back into clichés. We’ve seen the story of ‘schizophrenic person is murderous and craaaaazy’ ten thousand times by now. This telling of the same old story brings nothing to the table. If we’re talking strictly from a literary standpoint, it’s a boring way to try justifying a character being violent. You want a ‘sympathetic’ character despite them trying to knife people? Mental issues! Hurray! Thank goodness for that easy ticket to characterization! Except, no, it’s not characterization. It’s an aspect of a person that deserves a level of exploration that BRXKEN INSIDE doesn’t even come close to attempting.

Now let’s look at it from a non-literary standpoint. When you think of a schizophrenic person, what is your first thought? Unfortunately, a lot of people would answer that they think of violence. Schizophrenic people are no more dangerous to others than the average person. Yet with all of the half-baked media throwing around depictions of killer schizophrenics, that false stereotype has been ingrained in the public at large. It’s much like how sharks are demonized thanks to Jaws and other shark attack media, while in truth sharks rarely attack humans. The shark population has massively suffered thanks to this mischaracterization. Now picture that with a mental condition that 1 in 345 people have, which is 23 million people total (according to World Health Organization). You know what those people don’t need added onto their plates? The rest of the world thinking they’re dangerous to be around.

Mind you, I don’t have schizophrenia, so I’m speaking from an outsider’s point of view. Yet I have seen many people that do have schizophrenia talk about how this demonization is a serious problem for them. I won’t put words into their mouths, but I can pass on these sentiments. This visual novel is way too poorly written to ever handle this kind of plot the way it needs to be. At the very least it should’ve been run by some sensitivity readers. As it is, this is a disgusting portrayal of schizophrenia, and it’s only going to continue pushing the false notion that people with schizophrenia are violent psychopaths. They aren’t. Stop doing this.

Conclusion

The title BRXKEN INSIDE summarizes how I felt after playing it, though not for the reason the dev hoped. It’s a poorly written mess with unlikeable characters and an offensive portrayal of schizophrenia. The only enjoyment I got out of it was the art and laughing at how ridiculous some of the lines were. I wouldn’t recommend this for free, much less for $4.99 USD. Even if you’re interested in the dark subject matter, there are many other visual novels that do it much better.

(Also what kind of a name is BRXKEN INSIDE? Is it made to annoy people who hate words being misspelled? Because if so, it did its job with me.)

A key was provided by the developer to Otome Lovers for review purposes.

Abridged review posted on Steam ➞

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