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Perusing through Misfortune’s diary, you'll see she's scribbled her feelings about an imaginary fox named Benjamin, but also how nervous she felt, for which she's drawn a picture of herself throwing up. But the game does a great job of lulling you into anodyne sweetness only to punch you in the gut with ugliness. At times this almost feels like a delightful cartoon that you would watch on a crisp autumn day. Even the menu screen highlights options with pink sparkles. Everything seems to be lovely and pink and sparkly. That whisper of danger weaving throughout the whimsy can describe the entire aesthetic as a whole. In general, both actors are strong and engaging, which is important given that they are the only voices in the game. The disembodied 'voice' is dark and fatherly, with just a touch of menace. At times the young protagonist will approach the world around her with a wide-eyed naïveté at others, her abusive upbringing has primed her to spit out curse words, which was always jarring to me coming from an eight-year-old. The voice actress portraying Misfortune is sweet and very funny, her constant stream of oddball observations in an unusual Spanish-sounding accent filling the air. She seems at once familiar with all this strangeness and yet completely oblivious to it, like when she picks up “mints” from the ground which turn out, of course, to be drugs that send her on a trippy cutscene filled with flying birds, some of them flipping you the actual bird as they fly by. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like her. Misfortune is quite the character, funny and curious in the face of an awful life. A little past the bar is what appears to be a meth lab, which to Misfortune looks similar to the “science experiment” her father has in their basement. What might seem like an innocent scene with adorable hamsters takes a turn for the head-scratching when you realize they’re all hanging around outside a rodent nudie bar, replete with a half-naked neon hamster sign lighting up a dark ceiling choked with carrot roots. The cave leads Misfortune even further away from home into a surreal world of vice and iniquity.

LITTLE MISFORTUNE BACKGROUND SERIES

Elsewhere a snare drum and the pounding rhythm of a deep bass pulse through the air when she stumbles upon a bar and a drug den.ĭrug den? How did we get from a little girl’s bedroom to a drug den? Well, the voice sets a series of missions for Misfortune that at first seem simple enough, like “exit her room,” and “cross the road.” But soon she is venturing into empty houses, a cave, and taking the bus into the big bad city. The mood-setting soundwork extends to the original music used throughout the game, like a pop interlude when you turn on Misfortune’s boombox and she starts dancing. Doing so brightens up the terrible thing, such as a dead bird, and a small animation shows that Misfortune’s own heart brightens as well, but the effect only lasts a little while. And because Misfortune is so cute, there are times when you’ll be prompted by sparkles to sprinkle glitter on some particularly unpleasant item, accompanied by a uplifting tinkling and the sound of bubbles popping. You’ll explore this deceivingly bucolic setting with the WASD or arrow keys and another to interact. Every now and then, you can even hear a cow lowing in the distance. Drawn in a sweet cartoon style, it sits in a field where you can hear birds chirping and the wind whispering through the trees. You’ll get these small snippets of truth about her life as you investigate Misfortune’s small suburban house. While she plays in her room as many little girls do, with paper dolls and sparkly unicorns, the bed fort she has set up there is a safe space she retreats into if her parents are yelling too much or have had too much adult “juice” to drink, or when her father hits her mother. It’s an enticing proposition, since the reward for completing the game is “eternal happiness.” And eternal happiness is something that Misfortune would desperately like to have. For reasons you won’t find out until the end of this interactive story, the voice asks the young heroine if she would like to play a game. You’ll never see the voice’s owner, but he appears to have some control over Misfortune’s world. Misfortune is introduced by a mysterious voice. From the creators of Fran Bow comes the super cutesy yet grimdark Little Misfortune, Killmonday Games’ poisonously sweet adventure that takes players on a very grown-up journey as our intrepid protagonist explores the wide, scary world outside. And eight-year-old Misfortune Ramirez Hernandez doesn’t give a flying $% about monsters in her closet. She carries around glitter wherever she goes.

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