Mom... where are you?
COLINA: Legacy is an indie Survival Horror game created and distributed by the Brazilian Chance6 Studios.
The game follows Alex, a young man who wakes up in his grandmother's house as he goes there with his divorced parents after his grandmother asks for help from his mother. Waking up with no idea of where everyone is, an empty house and strange occurrences, Alex tries to figure out what happened to his family.
The game was released on Steam at September 13th, 2018.
Tropes present in this work:
- Abusive Parents: Alex's mother sexually abused him and his father tried to drown him to get rid of him.
- Arc Symbol: Puppets.
- Bloody Horror: Some places have enormous pools of blood in the game. The Glyph of Blood is able to ward the blood off.
- Cat-and-Mouse Boss: The Son of the Moon can't be stopped. The player must run around the arena and find where can they use the glyphs, aiming at the moon, once fully powered, it will one hit kill the boss.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Story Breadcrumbs the player finds in the house all point towards this, mentioning something called the Son of the Moon, an Old God and a gate that is containing the latter and is guarded by the former, besides other odd, esoteric references to it's own plot.
- Demonic Dummy: A common enemy is one of those. Later on, The Blue Fairy, a puppet that talks with herself as if she was talking with her daughter shows up and is intensely creepy.
- Divine Incest: Several notes make references to a heptad of cosmic entities, among which a trio involved in divine incest: The Lady of the Golden Womb gives birth to the Son of the Moon, who rapes his mother and fathers another deity named The Moonchild. Despite the Lovecraftian elements of the game, the mythopoeic narrative seems to be a foil to the protagonist Alex's journey to remember his mother's sexual abuse of him.
- Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Averted. Nina's sexual abuse of Alex is played for nothing short of horror.
- Driven to Suicide:
- Valentina has killed herself after too long under the influence of the amulet, having hung herself in the shed.
- Nina hangs herself too. Alex finds and talks with her body when she finds her by the roadside. Her reasons to do so are less clear, but it might have something to do with what she did to Alex.
- Eldritch Abomination: The plot hints at ancient, eldritch beings that are somehow related to Alex's trials, especially one called the Son of the Moon, which is described as being born with a thousand limbs. When he shows up as a Final Boss, he really is a huge mass of flesh with a huge amount of limbs and about 5 heads connected to the middle of it.
- Final Boss: The Son of the Moon, which is met in an eldritch and cosmic location through a portal in the temple.
- Foreshadowing:
- The Art Room has a painting of a rhino's head as the painting that Valentina was working on. The underground temple shows that a human with a rhino's head called the Tellurian was an important figure to the cult, and was the first human.
- In the Blue Fairy's story, she says that in the story, a mother was separated from her child by a crone, who said she wasn't loving her child properly, loving him too much. As it's clear that the Blue Fairy was referring to Nina, Nina is later confirmed to have been sexually abusing Alex.
- Gaslighting: Nina had done it to Alex several times, making him forget a certain event in his past that Valentina wants him to face. She very specifically says that the fact she is sexually abusing Alex is just a bad dream of his and tries to stick to that facade, saying that Valentina is the one lying to him.
- Hellhound: During the Forest segment, a large creature called Flaming Hound can be seen and it instakills Alex if it gets too close. It's a huge, alien-like dog surrounded by flames and with tentacles in its head.
- It's All About Me: It's mentioned that Alex almost drowning was directly caused by his father. His father could not handle the fact that his wife was now more dedicated and loving to their son than to him, so he was going to let Alex drown. He seems to regret it though.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Glyph of the Moon, when used, spams little bits of characters related to coding and programming around it, which includes C#, 7, {, etc. Later parts of the game imply a degree of meta on the game as they imply that all Alex has been through was part of a game.
- Lunacy: One of the Glyphs that are collected is the Glyph of the Moon, that can be used to decipher blue messages left behind. In the final boss fight, the player must power a giant moon above the arena for it to release a Wave-Motion Gun at the boss and kill him instantly.
- Mythical Motifs: There are many references to a Sphinx through the game, many of which are related to Alex in some way. The very end of the game even shows a book of Oedipus' story and the game itself has various references to the story. This includes the fact that Alex's mother was sexually abusing him and that she hung herself at the end of the game.
- Notice This: In the room where the game starts, the Amulet of the Old God is surrounded by an impossible to miss huge glowing mist. Objects that the light can be used on usually glow at the same color of their Glyphs.
- The Old Gods: The game makes several mentions of ancient gods, especially a group of seven that are intimately connected to the game's lore. The Eldest, the Lady of the Golden Womb and the Son of the Moon seem to be the most important ones, while the Rider of the Stars, the Lightsword and the Burning Crimson are mentioned as part of the worldbuilding. Another entity called the Tellurian is later mentioned too, though he's the first human, rather than an old god.
- Parental Incest:
- One of the relates reveal that in the backstory, the Lady of the Golden Womb was impregnated by the cosmic dust and gave birth to the Son of the Moon. Once he was born, it's implied he raped her, with the Moonchild being created from it.
- Nina raped her own son.
- The Reveal: Through the game, a lot of Valentina's messages to Alex ask him to remember something. In the last part of the game, he remembers what it was: Nina had abused him when he was a kid.
- The Unreveal: The person behind the Experiment relates is never revealed.
- Revenge: It's implied that the Moonchild was cultivated to be used as part of the Lady of the Golden Womb's revenge plot against the Son of the Moon for raping her.
- Story Breadcrumbs: The game mostly tells you stuff through pieces of paper spread around that contain, often cryptic and esoteric, pieces of information that the player must connect to one another. The first few things that are apparent include some sort of accident or traumatic event that happened to Alex and a Cosmic Horror Story about ancient, eldritch beings, with the ones called The Son of the Moon and The Eldest being the most important ones, and old humans that knew how to use magic.
- Wham Line: Nearly at the end of the game, Valentina asks Alex to call her on the phone. When he calls on the phone, he hears his own memories, one that clearly implies his mother had been raping him.Young Alex: Mommy, I don't want to play that game anymore. [...] The one where I make you feel good.
- You Wake Up in a Room: Alex's story starts off with him waking up in his grandmother's bedroom to see that he's alone in the house.
