Gender dysphoria. It is a real thing but it is not a thing which many people either take seriously or treat with any kind of sensitivity or respect. Some people don't even bother to try and understand it and educate themselves about it to reach that point, they'd rather spew what they think is right even if it's based on nothing so much as whatever innards they could find spelunking in their rear posteriors with their heads.

I don't want to ramble on too long about this since this is only a part of what the game is about, even if it is a significant part, but I just want to say: yes, there exists people who have very real disassociation with the sex they are born with and with the one they identify with. And it gets even more complicated - some people, whether they are born male or female, don't really fully identify with either. I don't know the full workings of this so I'll just leave it there. And no it is not a mental illness insofar as they are out of touch with reality or are behaving abnormally and need medications to turn them around. That's as legitimate a stance as these "gay conversion therapies" hanging around that should be illegal (but in too many places aren't) for the psychological damage they do to people and how they are based on nothing more than complete unfettered bullshit (I wouldn't call it "pseudo-science" even - even pseudo-science is based on some aspects of actual science even if a distorted version of it).

Psychology and examinations of the brain have rested this case already, as in, a "male brain" can exist in a female's body and in reverse. It's really not that far-fetched to try and comprehend either, when a human is developing in the womb male and female hormones and chromosomes are running so close together a lack of unification between the sex of the body and "sex of the mind" is possible. The fact that we have people born hermaphrodites and yet said people often only identify with one gender associated with one of those sets of genitalia (wait, what, not all of them identify as BOTH man and woman? Clearly mentally ill) should be more than enough to lend credence to this. So people comparing it to people thinking they are a different type of species, are of a different (physical) age, are of a different state of living (as in, not living) or are of a different hierarchy of being (the Messiah, the reincarnation of U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes) or any other thing that could be considered actual mental illnesses, you can quit it now, and for others you can put your "moralizing" back where it belongs - in previously mentioned rear posterior of yours you were digging through. It is true they, biologically speaking, will always remain technically a male if they identify as female and vice versa, but in the longer run of things, as in, once this person becomes self-aware from that point until the rest of their life that ceases to even fucking matter.

So, people who still have prejudices or fears about what a trans person is - no, they aren't trying to "trap" you. At least, that is something to be as concerned with as voter fraud or "welfare queens." As in, because decency of human nature doesn't apply to everyone, not even trans people, something I don't think any reasonable person could argue with, it is possible there may have been one or two in human history that have done something in that matter, much like voter fraud (almost every case so far committed by the people who are posturing against it) or welfare queens (which, guess what, the majority of people on welfare - actually do need welfare, yeah crazy that, pulling on bootstraps doesn't work so well when you're not born in a position of wealth and privilege in an economy run by said people who are actively trying to destroy you at all costs - but yeah the two or three or zero people who managed to scam a Cadillac with welfare money is reason enough to cut it altogether). But for almost everyone of them, it is a serious thing they have to deal with. It's not some fun activity they conceived to play practical jokes on cis people. And another thing, the simplest courtesy you can offer of all, yet one bigots want to be so defiant of to show they are "principled" (i.e. bigots) and that they're "not gonna listen to some PC crap" (i.e. bigots) and "THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY ARE THEY ARE REALLY MEAWOEAAO (i.e. OK it's apparent you're the one with mental issues to deal with), that being... if someone who is openly trans asks that you refer to them by a certain gender pronoun, like, get this, one that is the opposite of how they appear or what sex they were born with(!), do so.

That's all. A simple request that's simple to execute. If you slip every now and then a simple apology I'm sure will suffice. It happens, especially if you're not as acquainted with being around trans individuals as others. No need, no need whatsoever, to be a dick about something that hurts nobody, and in fact hurts more if you DON'T do it, and takes no effort on your part. Also, trying to converse or ask questions about their genitals is not what I would call a respectable way to break the ice, so as well-intentioned and genuinely curious as you may be, unless they say from the start you can talk about it, just... no, don't. Wouldn't it be weird to you after all if someone who you've just met just started asking nonchalantly about your junk? (horny, sex-deprived dudes thinking of a scenario where a hot chick asks them, you don't count)

"I don't want to ramble on too long about this since this is only a part of what the game is about" - so that part of my above paragraph was a lie. But then again I followed up with "even if it is a significant part" so I'll excuse myself with that. Maybe I'm getting too political here, but I think the more it's said, the more it's likely someone might start actually thinking about it and adjusting their ways, and the more people we have who will do that, the better it'll be, even just slightly, for what may very well be the most marginalized group of people in this country if not the world. So how does the game treat this subject matter? Actually... for all the rambling I did do there it is not completely certain to me. Not that the game is insensitive to what it deals with, which is far from the case, but I'm unsure if what it deals with is even what I just talked about at all. The way the story is told, the vague bits of story I may have not payed attention to or noticed (more detail on that later) leave me thinking it could be either way.

The main character you play is named Lamb, a strange name, possibly symbolic (though I wouldn't know what it is symbolic of), but most importantly gender-neutral. Lamb is born a boy but finds identification with girl's clothing and manner of appearance, and a best friend named Angelica even offers Lamb her own old clothing she was going to throw out anyway, for which Lamb is grateful for. There is some info on jobs Lamb deals with in life and then falls in love with a man named Conor. There are a lot of other details in between, many of them... bizarre (which I might also get to later), and all leading to a bittersweet conclusion.

So, who is Lamb? A transgender individual or merely gay transvestite (not necessarily the same thing)? The game is on the surface explicit about the latter, as far at least how everyone perceives Lamb, recounted by other people's dialogue (Angelica saying that Lamb is "more of a girl than other girls in the school"). But there also suggests a kind of inner turmoil, perhaps never truly coming to grips with, that shows signs of the former in Lamb's own thoughts. If this is the case, it would make sense, as Lamb never opens up about it and we're never given indication of acceptance of that identification. So which is it? The game's creator doesn't make anything clear, leaving only the vague description of a game that explores "death, gender and unhappy places" leaving it to the player to interpret. If this isn't the case then I must have overlooked something important. Either way, it is frustrating in a way, not knowing how one is to properly identify the character on such a serious matter, even if it's a character in a bit of surreal fiction made of pixels falling somewhere between an 8 and 16 bit style (the graphic style seems heavily influenced by Cave Story, or Pixl games in general, particularly the way the character looks). For the sake of simplicity, and seeing as this is a game, one made of strange images and texts, that the player controls and gets to interpret, I, the player, will, as of now, officially assign Lamb as a... "he." Until I can know for absolute certain otherwise, this is a game that to me is about a cross-dressing, gay young man where mentions of gender conflict might be hinted at but are never full explored, and considering the other aspects of life we look at of Lamb's that are given overt mention and how much weight that they add to his character, it may only be relevant in a speculative sense. So, was my opening rant for naught? I'll say, despite my conclusions, no. After all, this is a game where you can draw your own conclusions, and it can be one way or the other. And what about that title, "I'm Afraid of Girls"? Does this clue in to anything? I don't know, there was nothing particular in the game that I remember where Lamb faces some memory where that line would make sense. Perhaps bullying by girls at the school he goes to (save for Angelica of course). This might have been mentioned, but honestly, details of the story are foggy to me.

How does this all tie into the game itself? All of these story revelations come from exploration, but not just that, dungeon exploration. Yes, unlike many other games like this, this one eschews both the purely adventure/exploration and traditional built-in RPG Maker elements in favor of something more akin to a hack-'n'-slash dungeon crawler. Only there's not much hacking or slashing to be found. More like, er, pointing? Pushing? Well, you see, the game starts off in a black room with a blaring television (televisions are a frequent motif in this game... what they're supposed to mean, your guess is as good as mine), and then a knife appears, your starting weapon. Then you will transported to a nexus of sorts, filled with what look like ancient slabs, pillars and stairs, leading all over the place. Interacting with some slabs will take you to a dungeon, others won't. It's simply a matter of walking around a bit and trying everything out. At first though you only really have access to one dungeon area, and you'll find, as you will the rest of the game, blue enemy "spirits" coming in all different shapes and sizes trying to swarm and kill you. You don't have much HP in this game and there's no leveling up, but thankfully health replenishing hearts are frequent and the enemies weak. So, you attack by... standing next to them. Yeah, that's how it works. Mind, they can attack back just as well, though they seem to "Miss" a good number of times. You can only attack to your left and right of them though, so keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of the combat systems of the original Ys and Hydlide (some might take mention of the latter game as a slight, which it isn't - I for one don't think the game is that bad, or at least I don't think its combat mechanics are bad), where you had to "ram" into your enemies with sword or shield out until they're killed as opposed to pressing a button to swing your swords at them, which did take away from your health, so you had to be careful what you did (from what I played of Hydlide having it on offense pretty much wiped me out immediately, at least in the beginning it does - ramming them with the shield was a better strategy). It's more simplified here though, for better or worse, and "ramming" into your enemies is less of a good idea. What's best to do is to walk over or wait until the enemy is right next to you, then press in the direction the enemy is standing, in which you should get in a hit before they do. It's trickier in more enclosed, trap-filled areas and ones with enemies swarming everywhere, but the good news is you only need to kill one enemy in the room to proceed. Hint: it's the one that's not like the others. Kill it, and stairs will open up and let you move further down. All the enemies in the game are slow, and the other enemies don't yield any benefits that I could see from killing them, allowing you to safely ignore them to move on, so difficulty-wise it's not particularly taxing, but it's always good to save your progress, since as I said you don't have much health and you could end up in a situation where you're swarmed and then made not alive. Or will it?

This brings up yet other interesting parts of the game. Sometimes, when you die, you'll be sent to an area leading to a bar with friendlier blue spirit things, a few which offer certain services, such as one who, for 1000 points, will send you back to the surface if you want (points are easily accumulated and by that point you should have more than enough to pay for your ride back up). At some points you'll run into these empty red areas which either will be... well, empty, allow you to go up, or allow you to heal. The first of these red rooms you encounter will have NPCs that will "seal your soul" for a fee for your benefit later. I have no idea what this even does. One would assume so you don't game over when you die, but this doesn't seem to be the case. My first playthrough I didn't get to this machine, I died and then was transported to the bar anyway. And further playthroughs with my "soul stored" I'd either be sent to the bar or get a game over, this soul-storing machine not seeming to matter or its use being unknown to me. Actually, that would lead to another issue I have with the game I will get to eventually.

And what are you exploring for? In your travels you will collect certain precious stones (only a few kinds, really), find boxes which will transform your character into a different outfit, health pickups either big or small (it does this interesting thing where it'll randomly either be a heart pickup or a useless yellow box. Picking any one of these will transform the other hearts/boxes to something else, usually. So say you have a room with three yellow boxes. You "collect" one yellow box which does nothing, but transforms the other two into mini-hearts. You collect a mini-heart which turns the other mini-heart into a BIG heart. And so on), and, most importantly, red gems. These will take you to a room in which the gem hangs on a rope. You go up, interact with it to cut it down then a flashback, usually in text will appear. You will reminisce on past events, telling them straight-on or poetically speaking. You must find all, or a certain number, of gem stones to reach the finale. The gems do not speak of a happy life for Lamb, it is one of rejection, cruelty and sadness. And the manner in which it's told, collected bit by bit and spread far apart, and at times told abstractly, it can be difficult to follow, but the general gist of the story you should have no problems understanding. One gem I found led me to something different entirely, a After you receive your bit of story, you take a teleporter which sends you back to the nexus, where you then get to choose your next destination, more being unlocked depending on certain prerequisites, like, one gate that has a giant ruby next to it. When you examine it, it says "10." Obviously that means you need ten of these to open it up, and these stones, like the others, are gotten from killing the enemies in rooms which lead you to your way out.

Now it's time to put on my critic hat, a finely-laced trilfedork pie hat that is. But in all seriousness, the biggest problem with this game to me is that it feels very incomplete. Not in the sense that the game is a buggy mess (well actually I did run into a weird bug with the game when I first started it which randomly screwed up my controls and affected my other RPG Maker games too, but I don't want to get too much into that, as I commented on it in the comments section for the game here already, and as it turns out it might have had nothing to do with the game at all after playing some other RPG Maker games after I finished this one) or that the game is incompletable with no ending or anything, because if I can say one thing it has one hell of an ending, particularly the lead-up to it, but the overall impression is that there are scattered remnants of gameplay elements that the creator seemed to want to add in the game but backed off either for the sake of time or to keep the game focused, streamlined and not bogged down in complications, but forgot to take them out entirely. There are several examples of this, which I'll name, that indicates this: one, the costume system. It literally does nothing but change your costume. Which is fine, until you get the prison outfit, which is found easily, and early, in the game. It makes you four times as powerful, essentially one-shotting all the enemies in the game except one, which kills it in two swipes (there are also these weird blue sword creature things that grow more transparent with every hit but never seem to die, but they're not necessary to confront and appear in like one room so I won't count them). Some sort of upgrade system might have been in the works but instead just the one useful prison outfit remains, and the enemies as such are designed around it, well that or the rest of the enemies were never added in. All the enemies, despite their differing shapes, behave the same way and are killed the same way, with the exception of the enemy that takes two hits to kill and that weird sword (the only things that differ them from the rest). A second thing, there is one particular "side quest" of sorts that involves getting three sapphires to get a key. Sapphires are rarer, and generally found on enemies in some of the later dungeons, but returning and killing them will always net you one, so getting three isn't a problem. So you get your key and go to an area with a giant sapphire that says it needs a key. You interact with it, put the key in, aaaand... I don't know. There's a door in front of the sapphire but it never opened. Did it do something else? Is it one of those things in a game where one of your actions will cause something else to happen in a level but you have no idea where? I suppose that will remain a mystery for the gaming ages, like another blue thing, the giant ice key in Banjo-Kazooie that I wanted to get that drove me to madness wondering how to get it and what amazing thing it must unlock. A third thing, I ran into a merchant who was looking for skulls and would offer something good in exchange. I found no skulls whatsoever, except ones on the ground that damage you when you walk on them. And there's no way to pick them up. They're introduced to you in the very same room you meet this fellow, in fact. Fourth, the onyxes - ZEY DO NOTIHNK! At least as far as I know. The only thing I ever found them relevant for was for a certain guy in the "you just got your ass whooped" bar there is a guy who if you talk to will tell you how many onyxes you have, something you could easily do yourself. Really, that's it. And no matter how many you collect, if it's more than ten it will always read as "10 or more onyxes" that you have, which he will repeat likewise. Iunno, this is one baffling game.

Also, on the music, just a personal preference thing maybe but I can barely stand Satie's main Gymnopedie piece. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth for some reason. Maybe the first time I really began to hear it was a bad time in my life, and used in several movies I saw in a row, or maybe those movies were bad, or the way the music used in the movies was bad, but in any case, I feel the same way about it the way I do Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" (though granted Satie's piece doesn't sink that low) or a lot of Michael Nyman's film scores (not all of them are bad but his scores for Peter Greenaway's films are ghastly). I just find it (and the other two I mentioned) so treacly. This piece dominates most of the game, with a few other pieces here and there. But the Satie piece was chosen because, and I can think of no other reason, it is sad-sounding, and it conveys the sadness of the game's tone. Reinforcing theme through complementary music is fine, of course, but it should be somewhat subtle, and not over-bearing about it. Like I said, it could've been worse and Spiegel im Spiegel would have been the choice of music instead (as has been used to terrible effect by usually terrible films), or whatever else. It's not enough to ruin the game for me, as the music sits well enough in the background to not disrupt the actions and the weight of the story, but regardless, sorry, the music choice was a low point for me, though for most it might be a high. There was another game I played recently that also used this Satie piece, Schuld, and it didn't make me appreciate the music much better there, but in terms of how it was used, it wasn't as bad to me because first, it wasn't used as much, and second, that game carried a different tone than this one (there is a pretty sad story in there, but it mixes it in with a lot of other emotions too), and that music, so there at least could be said to be an interesting contrast there that's just a bit more subtle while still not outright conflicting with the game. Here I'm like... tone it down, I get it already!

And, I don't know if I'd consider this so much a complaint, a head-scratcher certainly, but complaint? Well, maybe, slightly. It does add a bit to the "unfinished" feel the game has. So, going back to the story. I said that there are elements left open to interpret, whether because the information is veiled or told cryptically, but there are story bits that made me think "Huh, did I just read that right or" If they are to be taken literally, or, well, however the hell they're to be taken, then these, combined with some intense and just slightly freaky bits in this game (where you get the prison outfit, and how you get out; the entire ending sequence; maybe others), then I'd say we have here something of a horror game. Not entirely one, but in part, I can't doubt. But still these are story bits I never properly understood or saw how they connected to the rest of the story or game in general. So, from what I get Also, when I finally got to the ending, I immediately recall there being some other places I am almost certain I never got to explore. Did these areas yield different pieces of the story or were they just there for extra sightseeing? If there were gems, did they answer the questions raised above? Is this one of those "you have to play more than once to know the whole story!" kind of games? I don't know, all I can say is that I was taken by surprise when I did get to the ending, which came out of nowhere, as I had thought the entire game was supposed to be ransacked for story gems. Guess not, unless those really were all the story gems in the game, then, well... *shrugs*

This is a very interesting game, no doubt. And that it just head-on tackles a subject matter so few will touch with the sensitivity needed deserves acknowledgment. Something only a freeware game that barely anyone knows exist is truly capable of, and delivers. The gameplay is not what I would call "deep" with only one real weapon upgrade, a few items, and even fewer of real worth, and enemies that are all basically the same. Not to mention all the strange gaps and unimplemented leftovers that are just laying around like a bunch of disparate ingredients for a recipe you don't know about but the chef was in a hurry to get home and forgot to put them away just leave you feeling confused. But for what it's worth I really did enjoy crawling dungeons of the subconscious smacking blue gelatin ghosts to death with the powers of an odd but not unintuitive combat system, with plenty of rooms to explore (but not so designed in a way you'll be lost and wandering around for hours - this is a game that likes to get to the point without being too linear or hand-holding), and it really does feel rewarding when you do find and reach each individual story gem.

Here is one of the few real surreal/sort-of horror RPG Maker games I've played that really tries to accentuate gameplay along with its story and despite clumsiness in both areas I have to say it is an overall success in what it sets out to do, and doing so by taking on a heavy topic like this is a bold move, and the many ways it could REALLY have backfired are great, but again, this is a tightrope walk that, while almost losing its balance a few times, nearly falling off, manages to get across and back anyway.