Wednesdays is a game for survivors of sexual abuse and those who want to listen to them.

Disclaimers:

1. This game deals with sexual abuse, incest, and other related traumatic subject matter. While there are no explicit depictions, it remains a tough game to play through and discuss thoroughly. It's okay to take breaks while reading this article or/and especially while playing the game.

2. I also received this game for free, though I wasn't required to write anything about it. I just like the game, and its message resonates with me a lot.

Introduction:

I have always thought about the purpose of creating trauma-informed games. In my Rosebush piece, I argued that while these games may not convince people unaffected by trauma to empathize with survivors, they render these traumas legible to them:

We cannot deny the existence of these traumas because the games are designed to make us think about them. The conclusions that players reach may not be what the developers anticipated, but they are an understanding that has grown organically from playing the games. Whatever the outcome, they are responses to traumas explored within the games.

The piece implicitly assumes that survivors create these games to help others understand their invisible pain. And for the most part, I think I was on the right track with games like He Fucked The Girl Out of Me where the whole point is to have players to identify with the survivors.

However, after writing it, I realized there is one major tension with this generalization that I have not been able to resolve:

What about the games made by survivors for the people who know them?

Wednesdays is a game directed and written by Pierre Corbinais who introduces himself in a trailer as a "survivor of incest". Developed by The Pixel Hunt (Bury me, my Love) and published by Arte France, the title "seeks to raise awareness about child sexual abuse through a surprisingly hope-filled story."

This may sound at odds with how the general public understands sexual abuse. But as the trailer continues, it took him a journey to recognize that he was a survivor. That recognition made him feel "free, proud, and at ease". He then brings up that

Wednesdays isn't a video game about incest per se. It doesn't address the starting point. It's about the journey.

The journey the game begins on is disorienting: after agreeing to dialog boxes detailing content warnings and the ability to skip scenes, you see a character turn on the computer and start playing a fictional game called Orco Park.

A friendly orca greets us:

Both my partner and I were distraught. We weren't expecting a pastel-colored rendition of RollerCoaster Tycoon on the TV screen at all.

Orco then tells us that building an attraction will bring back memories for Timothée, our player character. Plop a merry-go-round or any other carnival attractions on the map and you'll not only gain income but experience a flashback of events from his life.

To me, it was obvious that this fictional game was complicit in so far that it was used as a tool to facilitate the sexual abuse. The player character was digging through his memories via the game's mechanics. I wasn't sure about the framing because it felt disarming.

Or rather, it felt too ... welcoming.

As my partner and me played the game, we were skeptical about the way the game approached the subject matter. After each episode, we're always returning to Orco Park, unlocking new attractions and therefore new memories.

These intermissions with the theme park are sparse, but you can pick up trash and get more shells to unlock more chapters. Or just make the park visitors happier. As far as I can tell, there is no actual simulation element, but it is something you can do before you dive into the next chapter.

Besides serving as a nice distraction, the trigger warnings are all diegetically included in the amusement park descriptions. Colorful exclamation marks warn players about the content within while question marks are more suggestive. Everything is packaged in these warm colors and kid-friendly fonts.

Much of this was off-putting to us. It evoked my skepticism about the idea that cozy and wholesome games need to hold their players' hands. I'm accustomed to games that educate me about trauma through pain, so this game felt like eating cotton candy. After reading an intense chapter, it was discomforting to hear cheery music play.

But I could not help but be pulled in by this tension—a twee aesthetic diving into the abyss of memories. Orco is earnestly sincere. There is no twist that makes the fictional game horrifying. We didn't know what we were getting into.

Then, I saw an inkling of the genius behind this game: Orco started to regain his memories of Tim playing the game. He was practically a sentient virtual buddy, someone who remembered Tim fondly and hadn't seen him in a long time. But as mascot characters tended to be, he's rather oblivious about what had happened and naively believes he was helping to uncover pleasant childhood memories.

And he was responding in abject horror, just like us.

But before I say more about Orco, I must also stress that he isn't too off the mark in describing the state of Tim's memories. His memories are not in chronological order: we jump between his earliest memories with Tim's grandmother and her death. Stories of children and teenagers discovering their sexuality intertwine with tales of abuse, joy, and trauma.

And there are some fun memories in the mix too: cousins discussing masturbation, a fling with an older woman, fourth grade students derailing a class with sex jokes, and an elaborate playdate where Tim and a friend pretended to be soldiers that ended with a blowjob. Very quickly, a common throughline emerges in this game: children exploring their genitalia does not necessarily mean they are being abused, but they are growing up and beginning to understand the complexities of sexuality and gender.

It is these developments that help define our coming of age. The repression of these heartwarming conversations and the censorship of traumatic experiences make it difficult to talk about child sexuality at all.

And this difficulty is why I think it's important that the game rarely gives the player control of Tim in these memories. The staff discusses their design decisions like this:

We chose not to let players be the victim. Why that? Because games are about letting players interact and make choices and, by definition, sexual abuse survivors didn’t have any choice. They didn’t consent in any way to what happened to them so we figured that “playing” the victim was not the right choice.

Or course, there was no way we would make a game in which you would embody an abuser. So we thought about another option: play the other ones.

We are Tim's grandmother, childhood friends, teacher, cousins, love interests, and parents. These characters have interiority, and their dialogue choices reflect their own thoughts about Tim instead of the player's overall knowledge.

It's possible to read this game as a kind of mystery not about what had happened but about what he's thinking and how we should respond to him. One interesting chapter has us play as his girlfriend who wants to have a child with him.

Tim pushes back on the idea, and his girlfriend admits that her reasoning is flawed (social pressure and "the future"). However, there is a line that she (and the player) can cross by asking him if his aversion to having children stems from what happened to him.

The characters you play, especially his loved ones, don't really know how to respond or understand him. Not only does everyone have their own shit going on, but it's difficult to find the right words. And that's assuming if people were aware of what had happened. Indeed, I didn't realize when the abuse was happening because we were seeing Tim through other people's eyes, and he just looked like a "normal" kid.

Normalcy is not just a regime that enforces toxic standards on everyone; it is also a structure that conceals harm and absolves abusers. It silences survivors and suggests that everything is under control as long as we view people as "normal" and "innocent".

I was horrified to learn that I, too, had failed to recognize the signs of sexual abuse. The clues were already there, but I was assuming that innocence existed. My vigilance was a sham.

And I identified not with the survivor but with the relatives and friends who learned about the abuse. My game designer brain knew that these choices would lead to the same endstate, but I was trying very hard to respond to Tim in the words of these characters. One instance was exploding with question dialog choices: the player and the character wanted to know the details, but how much did they need to know in order to do something for Tim?

This delicate situation was unique to me in the context of video games, yet I found it familiar. Close friends have confided in me about trauma and abuse, and the game reminded me of how hard my brain worked to say something productive instead of a distasteful platitude. Having been on both ends of the situation, I recognize its gravity. No matter how many times I've been in this situation, though, I don't think I will ever find it easy.

It pains me to realize that I'm no different from Orco, the friendly mascot of Orco Park. My anger is as immature as the little guy's, but it's the most I can do when I find out my friends are hurt.

I think that's why I felt irrationally irritated by the beginning of the game. His smile and genteel behavior are similar to what I do when a friend who needs someone to talk to DMs me out of the blue. My vitriol toward Orco was in fact a secret form of self-flagellation.

But Wednesdays doesn't criticize Orco nor the game he belongs to. Actually, it portrays them as Tim's childhood friends who care about his well-being.

Yes, the game was the excuse for everything that had happened. But Orco could respond in anger in behalf of Tim. He believed in him.

In one memory, a survivor was painting Tim's likeness, and the player's choices could change the appearance of the portrait. They discussed the lawsuit they filed against their brother who had molested them. Their family did not believe them and supported their brother instead. Nevertheless, they persevered in order to reveal how many people he had abused.

They were doing it for the silenced survivors. They believed that others had been harmed, which they felt justified this expensive lawsuit.

Friends and loved ones can only do so much when they learn about abuse allegations, and the scope of the problem is probably larger than one might want to admit. However, the game stresses that believing the voices of these survivors is the most important thing.

The Werner Herzog in me wants to denigrate myself by lamenting how stupid and worthless the orca is, but ultimately, the game states that he's doing the best job ever. He listens, he's there for Tim, and he wants what's best for him.

Isn't that the most important thing: to listen?

As soon as my partner and I finished the game, they said it was "instructive." They didn't mean it was didactic or educational, as in, it didn't teach you something. They meant that it revealed something about themselves.

How much do we truly listen to, care about, and help those who are recovering?

Wednesdays is, among many things, an optimistic game about recovery and discussion. The things we can't talk about always stay with us. Even children can sense that something is wrong with the way we fail to show intimacy and affection. This is all the more reason we should talk about abuse and sexuality.

Unfortunately, there are no suitable venues for nuanced discussions. The world is currently facing an assault on public spaces by rightwingers, and the private spaces we have are owned by corporations and billionaires who are happy to facilitate fascism.

No wonder it's hard to listen: all the noise of LLM-generated articles and rightwing propaganda makes it difficult to find any useful resources. I didn't know about the game until I received a review code, even though I occassionally look for this kind of stuff.

But that makes listening to survivors all the more vital: it is an ongoing process that reminds us that we will never be able to fully understand the details and should also cause us to reflect on the violent structures that allow this to happen. Believing is not just something you say, it's something you do and think.

And I see this clearly in Orco, a talking orca from a fictional children's game. He is a role model for children because he is friendly and listens to them. He never breaks character because he's always listening to and thinking about Tim.

When I compare myself to Orco, I realize that I still have a long way to go. Recovery is not something the survivor does alone but with the help of others. Orco helped Tim, and I want to do the same and follow in his footsteps.

The characters in Wednesdays are all trying their best to support Tim. Their help isn't perfect, but the player always steers the conversation and decides what to do next. The player acts as a listener, responding as best they can.

This intimacy, for lack of a better word, is what's needed. As listeners, we must continually ask ourselves what we should do next. There will be subtle things that we’ll never notice — I never thought how a survivor of child abuse might recoil at changing the diaper of a baby — but they are details worth thinking about as listeners and survivors create spaces together and learn from each other. This is not a game about feeling shit and horrified by child abuse. It's about establishing lines of communication and looking forward to a better future.

I want to hope alongside the survivors for a world where the concept of sexual abuse no longer exists. I need to be a better listener, not just someone who can identify trauma. There's much to learn and do before I can be as reliable as a childhood game mascot holding the player's hand as they navigate the gallery of memories.

Wednesdays is a genuinely beautiful game. Thomas Brasdefer's translation of the French is so good that it reads as if it were originally written in English. It is available on Steam and itch.io. I hope people play it.