PAX 2015: Cibele is the most authentic, romantic game I've ever played

I can’t stop thinking about Cibele. Far from the noise of the PAX show floor, the demo I played was on a Macbook in a quiet hotel lobby, but it’s stuck with me more than any of the big-budget AAA games or extravagant booths I saw during the show.

In the words of its creator Nina Freeman, Cibele is “a game about love, sex, and the internet.” It’s the true, autobiographical story of meeting someone in an online game and eventually progressing that relationship to the point of meeting up in-person and having sex. It’s mature, it’s unique, and it’s as honest and authentic as any game I’ve ever played.

Just calling it “autobiographical” is underselling it. The game, which is divided into three acts, begins with actual video of a younger Freeman sitting at her computer. Once you take control, you’re clicking around her virtual desktop, getting a taste of her life by looking through selfies, drafts of blog posts, homework, emails. It felt almost creepy to rifle through someone’s most intimate personal details, but it was also an incredible way to establish who this teenage girl is, what she’s like, who she has in her life.

Then you open Valtameri.

Valtameri is Cibele’s game within a game, loosely based on Freeman’s experiences in Final Fantasy XI Online. The meat of Cibele’s first act comes in “playing” Valtameri, mindlessly clicking on enemies and eventually a boss in a way that anyone who’s ever grinded in an RPG knows all too well. But that gameplay just serves as a vehicle for Cibele’s real story, the conversations Freeman has with the game’s only other character, the boy she met online: Ichi.

These conversations take place entirely via voiceover, and they evolve as you play through Valtameri. If you wander too far from Ichi's avatar, he'll tell you where to go on the map to find him. If he takes down an enemy, Freeman will tell him he got a nice hit. Throughout the conversation, you'll receive emails or app notifications that you tab out of Valtameri to look at. Ichi comments on some of those, too.

The dialog here feels so completely natural, a flirty conversation between two friends that are starting to want more. It’s sometimes cute, it’s familiar, and it’s refreshingly realistic.

Millions of people connect online. Plenty eventually meet to date or have sex or get married or any number of scenarios in between. There used to be a stigma attached to confessing that you met your significant other online (or worse, in a video game!), but now it’s common. It’s normal. It happens literally every day. Despite that, while you can open Steam right now and play 100 games that let you sleep with an alien or a pigeon or an elf, you rarely see a game handle contemporary romance well. Cibele has the most realistic portrayal of two young people flirting that I’ve ever seen in a game.

Early in the first act of Cibele, Ichi comments on a cute photo he saw of Freeman. Later, he gets bolder. He starts to tell her she has a nice body. He asks for another picture. The final scene in my demo was another actual video of a younger Freeman setting up her camera to take a new, more suggestive picture. Things are about to go further.

Each act will begin and end with videos of Freeman, and there will be a time jump between each act. Freeman didn’t want to say much about what happens in the later acts, but did say the game will end with the decision to meet and hook up. While that sounds like a spoiler, the point is actually the process of getting there. These people decide to take things to the next step, but how they get there is the interesting process Cibele is exploring.

Freeman is an incredibly open and brave storyteller, willing to reveal personal details about her life (which she previously proved with the harrowing Freshman Year, which is a must-play) in a way few developers are. Cibele is as much about Freeman herself as it’s about sex or romance, and it’s fascinating to play a game that’s so personal and tied to its creator.

I find myself so interested to see what happens next in the relationship Cibele portrays, but simultaneously feel so voyeuristic, like I’ve tapped into two people’s actual intimate chats. It’s a feeling of authenticity that no other game has even come close to giving me. I can’t wait to play again.

Freeman has made several vignette games, but Cibele is by far her longest and most ambitious. Cibele will be available on Steam or playable on Freeman’s site, and a release date should be coming soon. Aside from Cibele, Freeman is also working with Fullbright on Tacoma, which we recently checked out at Gamescom.