Do you think he's coming today?
my eyes deceive, stylized in all lowercase letters, is a horror game released May 25, 2023 by nouhidev on itch.io.
You play as a young girl living After the End in a shelter your father designed for you. The world outside is infected with a deadly disease, and your papa lives out there, popping in from time to time to deliver supplies. He's very insistent on you taking your "disease-preventative pills".
You can play it here
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my eyes deceive provides examples of:
- Artistic License – Biology: When watering the plants, the protagonist uses a fairly large amount of water (judging by the time taken to water them each time) daily. This would quickly drown the plant.
- Watering the plant at all still wouldn't do much good in terms of getting it to survive, since it doesn't get any sunlight down in your bunker.
- Child by Rape: In the bad ending, you are impregnated by the father while asleep.
- Crapsack World: Papa says the world is infected with a deadly disease, with Voice Changelings running around and society completely gone. He's lying.
- Dream Sequence: You have a dream sequence each night that serves as a break from the mundanity of your day to day tasks and an interjection of creepiness.
- Featureless Protagonist: Neither the father or the girl are shown on-screen.
- Foreshadowing: In the dream sequence for day 6, if you choose to take the pills, near the end of the loop, chains will cover the rooms. This symbolizes how your father is controlling you in that room. If you choose not to take the pills, you undo each of those chains, representing you breaking free of him.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: When it Time Skips to day 147, you're much more sluggish. This is because you're farther along in your pregnancy.
- The fact that the water pumbling system seems to work just fine in spite of the After the End scenario is one of the few signs that exposes the entire situation as made up by Papa.
- In Day 7, 'Papa' gives you an apple to apologize for being so distant, he gives her a very interesting tip about the apple; "They're best when they're fresh." Because this quote actually symbolizes one of the worst endings in the game, being raped by your own father, he chose the one thats considered.. fresh.
- Game Within a Game: There's a pretty fun game on the girl's tablet where you have to evade enemies, the number of which correlate to the stage number you're on.
- Jump Scare: Mostly averted, but there's a pretty good one in the Dream Sequence for day 2. You go to pick up what you think is an apple off the ground to look up and see a giant Eldritch Abomination standing over you. Though, it is debatable if that's really a monster or a shadow from the Ominous Visual Glitch.
- Mind Screw: Some of the dream sequences can be this at times. They're cryptic puzzles on their own, and the visual effects certainly don't help clear things up.
- Multiple Endings:
- The Golden Ending: you escape from papa and the shelter into the outside world and see the sun for the first time.
- The bad ending: you are impregnated by papa while sleeping.
- Mundane Horror: You repeat the loop of drinking water, taking your pills, eating, and showering every day until you either escape or are raped by papa.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The girl is overjoyed to have an apple from the surface. Justified, since papa says it's a scarce resource during the apocalypse.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Found all over the dream sequences.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Your papa has been drugging and then raping you the whole time, successfully impregnating you on the 6th day if you take your pills.
- Shown Their Work: The story takes place over 147 days. If you take your pills, your father impregnates you on the 6th day. This leaves about 20 weeks until the end of the story, where you are visibly pregnant. 20 weeks is around the exact time in the second trimester your baby bump would begin to be obvious.
- Signature Line: "Why is my belly so round and big?" associated with the game's Cruel Twist Ending.
- Time Skip: It goes from day 6 to day 147.
- Trust Password: The girl and her father have "apple".
- Voice Changeling: Papa says the infected can mimic other people's voices, hence the Trust Password.
- Wham Line:
- Day 147. The sudden jump of months into the future just to reveal that the girl is still stuck in the loop is heartbreaking.
- Of course, "Why is my belly so round and big?"
Keep growing, little one.
