Transition, Transhumanism, and Transportation - an 11.45: A Vivid Life Game Review

This review contains light spoilers for 11.45: A Vivid Life.

This one won't be long, or very heavily edited. It's getting late and time keeps slipping away.

11.45: A Vivid Life, by developer Deconstructeam, is a game about cutting yourself open. I think it's a common experience for kids and young adults to feel a kind of pull to do this at some point. To be clear, I'm not discussing this from a lens of self-harm; this kind of excavation is sugical, analytical. There's a moment when a person realizes that something about them is just not right, and there seems to be only one way to figure out why.

11.45 is a power fantasy about being able to understand yourself. It's a very non-traditional power fantasy, but will be very familiar to the hordes of young, transgender and gender non-conforming kids I grew up around.

We LARPed, and in many of those LARPs we spent time thinking about who we were. I have countless friends for life who've managed to cut themselves open in a LARP and uncovered some deeper truth that they've carried with them.

When you're a queer kid growing up in a cis-and-heteronormative world, it's common to feel like something about you isn't quite human.

Playing 11.45 reminded me a lot of I Saw the TV Glow, in the way that while I read it as a pretty clear queer allegory, I don't believe that's the only way to read it and come out with a greater understanding. There are many things that can make us feel like we're not human.

Transhumanism is about evolving past human limitations, but art around the movement is fractured. The truth is transhumanism, like many kinds of speculative fiction, reveal exaggerations in our own perspective on the current human condition. What the traditional society chooses to look to transhumanism to escape — disease, age, death — reveals a negative void in what they don't think to evolve beyond — gender, biases in body shape, or any manner of other things.

The subset of transhumanism that 11.45 falls into is one of forced transhumanism, though. It presents an interesting take where the normative concepts of transhumanism are prevalent in non-conforming society; a world where we've reached the classic goal of altering our bodies successfully, but haven't yet evolved past the abuse and prejudice against people who don't align with society's platonic ideals.

11.45: A Vivid Life is also about running away. This is another power fantasy: that running away involves breaking taboo, sometimes even breaking laws, in order to get to where you need to be.

No matter what narrative choices you make in 11.45, there is one constant: a voice on your car radio, asking you to "come home". The voice doesn't respond to any of your perspectives or new understandings about yourself. All it cares about is where you are, and where you are is not home.

The voice, like many loved ones of kids who've run off, still cares about you. Depending on your perspective on the game, this care can be love, or power, or anything else, but it clearly is some kind of care. It's just not a care for what we think.

In the end, I think 11.45: A Vivid Life is wildly effective, at least from a metaphorical standpoint. It's a game that speaks to the experiences of non-conforming people, but also to kids and growing up as a whole.

It uses interesting mechanics and light choice variation to give us a nontraditional game experience about a nontraditional part of life. It reminds us that our inhumanness is part of what makes us human.

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11.45: A Vivid Life earns an 81/100. All ratings over 50 indicate that I enjoyed the game.

I've been considering making video essay style analyses, and this post (with some more editing and work put into it) is on my list. Keep your eyes open.