SUNSHINE BACKWARDS

Thank you. It was not easy. And it won't be easy, not always, maybe not often. But what's happened is not what's happening still.

This was really really good (and painful!) and needed.

played this twice back to back. i wasnt sure how it was making me feel until the tails doll. i had one as a kid too, considered him my best friend for a time--i was a lot like sonia, honestly, obsessed with sonic, talking to people i shouldnt have been online, engaging in sexual content in a way i found shameful and secretive, and now as an adult sometimes feeling like these experiences may have stunted me.

Ive never seen a piece of media so perfectly express how it felt to be a hyper-paranoid, anxious, suicidal kid during that time, being terrorized by stories of creepypastas, finding solace in an online life that brings back memories of both shame and nostalgia as an adult. I dont have a zip folder--i nuked most of my online presence off the internet and my own pc in my mid teens in a fit of paranoia. this game almost made me wish i hadnt, just so id have that secret still on my desktop, unopened. 

i fear im being a bit too rambly. this game brought up a lot of feelings id like to sit with for a while (in a good, cathartic way). id like to dish some of your own optimism back to you; i hope you keep making things. im going to go play some of your other VNs now. the voice you gave this game is one i think we could all use a lot more of--genuinely exploring the dark shameful secretive corners of the internet-addled brain.

It felt like a faint memory i wanted to keep away .  It is very beautiful too. 

I will share something with you : When I was a kid i remember being very obsessed with tails doll and thinking that I had "summoned him" and would imagine he was following around talking to me, as a friend. So this affected me in a very strange way. it makes me think of all the memories of stories i heard from others about people who have hurt them online, and the times i had it happen too.  

The beginning part with the nostalgia she was feeling is very real. The adult swim bumpers mention hit me hard .

Im struggling to find words to describe how i feel about this game but i know i wont ever forget it.

a long time ago, i wrapped my hard drive in an anti-static bag and made sure it was in a box that couldn't be crushed, and wrote the date - i labeled a hidden .zip after my own rosy.

now, a decade plus later, a small part of me used to wonder why i just don't toss it into the ocean. but i think sonia and i know too well why.

i was scared to read this, truthfully. but it ended up being cathartic in ways i didn't know i needed. thank you. thank you so much.

So great. Made me think about old online art, online artists, getting older without getting where I wanna be, long aftershocks of growing up with internet, dangerous internet community, repeated cycles of hurt. The game pushes on the wounds from screens we spend our lives under. A digital onslaught on Sonia's everything. It was interesting seeing Rosy life suffering in years later.

I liked how the game didn't tell me how to feel about mental health. The character Sonia has problems and her society has problems, but the writing centers on mind as it is, as it continues. It was neutrally, authentically shown, without condemnation nor hagiography, without trying to fix to be something cleaner. It felt like Sonia and Rosy were each written like how Sonia/Rosy would see self, from own point of view. Such a cool way of writing across different style, tone, mood, medium, genre. Reading about a mind as it sees itself. There was enough space in the story also for the fiction to still intensify as fiction and push reality's dangers to supernatural technology horror extreme.

The game helped me understand myself, and understand some bad people I remember. The jump scares scared me. That's what that era was like. The story showed vices hidden away shamefully put out in the open. Artwork is excellent, hitting every moment in many styles for many feelings. The game made me tear up and also smile seeing so many menaces I recognize from past decades put into biting, authentic story. Thank you for sharing this.

Words cannot overstate how much this story means to me. It feels like it was handcrafted for me specifically, it both makes me happy to see a media that hits so hard while also making me uneasy with just how common certain experiences are. I could rant almost endlessly about my full feelings on the two main characters, but I am afraid it will dissolve into something far too personal. Sonia is one of the first characters that I can truly see myself in though, I will be thinking about her for perhaps forever.

Anyways, fuck Omegle. 

very few stories have stuck with me in the way sunshine backwards has. as an autist who grew up on the internet reading sonic creepypastas and forming close friendships with mentally unstable adults sonia's character managed to tap into my psyche in a way i had never seen before. looking forward to whatever you make next

best game i played in this jam by far. Very nostalgic. incredibly painful, while being relatable in a way....    

you are a "fucking genius" as is said.

also i spent like 5 minutes attempting to input the code for the rar file before i realized i had caps lock on    oops. great read though

I absolutely loved this. It hits precisely where it hurts, but it's a kind of subdued, numbing pain. It feels very nostalgic, and conveys perfectly the comfort you can find in picking at an old wound and letting it swallow you. I had to go lay down on the floor after playing, 10/10 would play again. I didn't even get mad at the jumpscares because they were so effective and had something to tell! I had never heard of "kinetic VN" before but now I can definitely see what that means, I loved it. Thank you for this game.

amazing <3 exactly how it feels :)

absolutely nauseating. the image of little me in the early 2010s staring blankly at the blue light emanating from our kitchen desktop after trying to run away suddenly came back to me at the speed of light, after not being able to remember that for most of my life. a game has never done that for me before, nor made me feel such dread in its horror. really brought back some shit i didn't want to remember either, but that's what it'll do to you! play with caution, folks. lmao. insane shit, keep making games

Thank you for this. I needed it

Shit this scared me so bad. The first jumpscare had me swearing out loud to myself, closing my laptop, and standing up to do literally anything else around the apartment for an hour.  I had to put a podcast on in the background to continue through. I feel like the game file, in my downloads folder, is like a little bit cursed. 

Which is to say: incredible!!! extremely effective, really emotionally resonant portrayal of A Handful Of Fucking Experiences. Awesome art, also. I was worried about playing this right before bed but an hour later and I think it's settled into something peaceful in my brain. 

I did enjoy it, and it did hurt. Glad I got to play it.

thank you for making this game through all the effort it took. i'm grateful that i got to play it. it connected strongly with me.

this one hit me more than i expected going in. being someone who’s especially prone to reliving, ruminating, throwing myself into old chat logs, revisiting old dead kink sites, having a notes page devoted to giving some sense of order to trauma from my teenage years, who interprets her own shitty and fragmented memory like sealed zip files and distinct drives. this understands what it’s like to have your childhood fixations get tainted by suffering, the fact that you can never be “fixed” to be like you were before, how you hurt yourself by not knowing that, and how even the people you mythologize in your head as monsters are still human. but good heavens i wish i had a couple CW (some more specific ones, that is). 

i dont really know what to say about this that hasnt been said better than i could by people that understand the feelings behind this entry better than i could. but it truly is haunting.

im gonna be thinking about this for a while. thank you so much.

As I read this, I felt myself gripping the hand of the me of 2013, feeling just as scared reading a creepypasta chain comment as me playing this game. I felt her looking at me, looking at her, realizing that our Rosy might be something, somewhere similar now. I felt her just as nauseated at a winrar file, all those years ago. I felt her dread, our dread, cross again over the decade and change like it was yesterday.

I also got jumpscared twice. Just like markiplier, maybe

I’ve thought a lot over the last decade or so—especially post-2016—about how fear and trauma and insecurity can boil over from people who have no good outlet for it; the way loneliness and poor boundaries can turn catastrophic under pressure. Someone drowning will grab onto anything, even if it drags both of them down.

I didn’t actually make any proper internet friends until after college because my parents trained me too well to ghost at the first ask of age, sex, or location. Even so, having both grown up on the internet and struggled with forming friendships as a kid, the way Sonia and Rosy haunt each other is so deeply painful in its realism… and also in how the game has compassion for both of them as people. In some ways, it’s easier to make a monster of someone rather than face who they really are—even when that someone is yourself. And sometimes that monster eats you with teeth all the way down.

I was saying to one of my own game jam teams that there’s something I really like about works where it’s not like anyone sets out to behave badly, it’s just that everyone is a flawed person and their best method of coping is “making that everyone’s problem.” It feels… honest, to me, I guess, even if it sometimes feels like eating nails, and I think there’s something important about telling those kinds of stories. So: thank you. Incredible work. I will be thinking about this forever.

Also, additional traumatizing factor: 2013 being long ago enough to be a time you’d have a flash drive of Ancient Sins from. I’m the crypt keeper

don't you feel that sometimes, you just need to run away?

i get the feeling this is gonna be the most emotionally resonant and devastating entry of the jam so far for me. every reference and invocation helped push the exact mood and feeling of the piece. it's like it was made exactly for me.

i don't know what else to write outside of being extremely big on the cate wurtz type vibe the game has. 

As an adult, you might have forgotten how damn scary internet creepypastas used to be. Reading them on the family computer while awake well past your bedtime. Do you want to remember? 

Thanks for sharing. 

Love your painting style. Jumpscares got me good. Great work

owwwwwww v_v

bone chilling and bone crushing

loved it all the way through. every sentence and bit of information felt so important and resonated a chord within the little nostalgia girl inside me who was way too young using the internet

"the real and the unreal meet in the magic circle..." looking for catharsis where there is nothing but more teeth. haunting, sickening, completely real, and completely inspired. reminded me of too many things. my stomach hurts. fun for the whole family!

Beautiful work, speaks to me even as a very passive netizen who did not directly interact with fandom and internet culture much. Computers provided us with the means to broadcast our broken brains and brokenness in the least productive way possible and seeing this phenomenon splayed out like this hurts (in a very good way).

i have a hard time being objective when reviewing things, because, i mean, who doesn't, but i always feel there's a level of subjectivity that ends up being a little too personal and too revealing.  i don't know what i could say about Sunshine Backwards or how to put it into words that would really feel fair or do it justice, from an objective standpoint, and that wouldn't come across like i'm almost contemptuous of it, from the subjective.  i think i managed to avoid the latter, at least.

it's good, but it's the kind of thing you can have a bad time with, and that can be Good in its own way, but that can also be Bad.  beer, cigarettes, weed, junk food, too many energy drinks.  late night binges and staring at the pair of scissors on your desk and just, thinking.  it's the high you get from knowing you're hurting yourself and wanting a stronger hit.  it's looking into a mirror so hard you hope it explodes and the broken glass rips you to shreds.  sometimes you watch it happen to someone else;  sometimes you get to witness someone reaching into their own chest and pulling out their heart, and you wonder why it looks so much like your own, and what the fuck do you even do about it.  nothing, really.

my advice for best enjoying Sunshine Backwards is to drink a lot of water and go to bed immediately after.  as others have said and will say, it's an incredibly haunting piece of art.  it's the kind of thing you might need to cry/scream/manic laugh about, and definitely the kind of thing you need to sleep on to really think about and appreciate properly.  it's hard not to try and stay up, and ruminate on it, and rue its vulnerability, the way it cuts into itself and in its way, cuts into you, and the fact that if it cuts deep enough, you're going to have to acknowledge that there really are teeth all the way down.

thanks

The horrible intersection where fact and fiction meet, merging into one until you can't tell where it ends and where it begins.

The painted portions in this game were lovely, beautiful art that helps add to the disturbed feeling everything else in this game gives me. JPG artifacting is a type of horror in of itself in my eyes, but that likely makes no sense to anyone besides myself.

Let's play again some time.

this was such a haunting experience. sonia and rosy have such a beautifully appalling dynamic. this made me feel so uneasy is all the best ways. the further and further i read the less willing i was to advance the text, everything is paced so well i felt. thank you for making this, absolutely all of it. 

YOU'RE MISSING THE GREATEST PART, A WORK OF ART!

IT'S MISSING A LITTLE BIT OF YOU!

i think people are often drawn to demonic entities and transformations because it manifests the pain as real. it's the same logic most have for doing self-harm amongst other things, at least in my eyes. if people can just believe that you are being possessed, you'd be absolved of blame.

and yet our bodies are still ours. i'm not quite sure how to "fight off" these "demonic entities" but what i do know is that we are constantly vulnerable and capable of harm. in our efforts to never lose ourselves, we may change in ways we don't want to accept.

if we keep cutting off more of ourselves, there won't be any left. you have to live. identify the demon and eventually you can come to terms with it.

The single most raw, unhinged, and utterly engrossing release by Chambersoft yet. Sunshine Backwards truly feels like an experience that doesn't just show vulnerability from the author's end, but instills that exact same feeling of vulnerability onto the reader themselves if you've happened to also spend a lot of time growing up in a deeply unstable, unforgiving corner of the internet where everyone tries to be the better person at the expense of one another. Playing this game felt like tearing open old wounds that I almost completely forgot ever existed. It was as painful as it was impressive. I can't recommend it enough.

pain. pain all the way down. visceral. raw. a cycle. consumption. eating and being eaten. cat's game. pretending to be the bigger person. two cowboys laying dead at 12:01. i dont think im ok. give it a read.

that shit hurted