Coming to Terms with the Happy-Sad Everyday through Camille and Laura
My road through life so far recently met me with one of the most jarring speed bumps that I’ve yet encountered. I’m only twenty-one so I’m sure that when I describe the feeling as alien to me, others with more time on this Earth than I currently possess will know it as an intimately familiar sensation. Life was good and I was travelling fast and smoothly down my road, and the speed bump felt all the worse for it. Vertigo, isolation, anxiety, and claustrophobia all crashed in at once and the disequilibrium of it all far overstayed its welcome — as if it had one at all. Whilst I am being somewhat obtuse and overtly conservative when describing this experience, an indie game from this year used the interactive medium to precisely capture and explain how I felt when I couldn’t.
Seeking consolation and routine, I turned to the friends that I was close to. This choice was deliberate despite the fact that I choked on every word as my emotions held my vocabulary hostage, and that I could barely see through a mess of tears. It was when a dumb, derivative, and deeply immature sex joke broke the awkwardness between us that I felt myself blinded more and choking harder through an ugly and absurd mix of crying and laughter. It was then that the cold tears on my cheeks felt briefly warm, the world felt slightly lighter, and I thought about Camille and Laura.
According to the game’s Steam page — which I feel aptly sums it up — Camille and Laura is a “point and click about the greatest adventure of all - parenting.” The game’s solo developer, Olivier Bouchard of BonjourBorzoi, stated that the approach with Camille and Laura and his other sad games was a subdued one, tackling grounded and real world issues without “resorting to fantasy or metaphor”. The game’s best idea, which I hope can be used to recommend the entire experience, exemplifies this perfectly.
The game is episodic, using a single, five-day workweek to structure your progress. Playing as Laura, the titular mother of Camille, on each of these days, you have to go to work. What is your job? Clicking on some emails to respond to them instantly, and clicking on others to delete them. The job is simple in its process but chaotic in its appearance and execution, making the gameplay mechanics and their context synonymous with Camille’s naïve worldview as a child in the same way that the crayon art style does.
You work alongside Laura, performing the exact same actions as her using the game’s mouse and keyboard controls. The gameplay feels like a far more mundane and decisively abrasive version of Nintendo’s controller gimmicks, one where we’re invested in and stressed out by clicking on forward and reply buttons instead of swinging a sword or some other weapon around. Without resorting to fantasy or metaphor, Olivier Bouchard has turned what we typically do on our computers into game mechanics, using the exact same input medium and motions.
This is the first time that I’ve experienced this level of harmony between gameplay inputs, story, and thematic design since playing Lewis Finch’s level in What Remains of Edith Finch — which I considered to be the most unique game I’d ever played at that point in my life. However, where the boring office job minigame excels the most is in how it makes you feel whilst playing. The downtime between emails can feel empty and boring and I found myself drifting into my imagination, or reminiscing and thinking about what Camille might be doing. The intervals between emails are consistently inconsistent, requiring just enough attention that you can’t think about anything but so little attention that you feel bored and caught in the motions. The task is stressful and loud — and has bold visual cues — making me feel like I did at minimum wage jobs I’ve worked in the past.
Other tasks/minigames, such as buying groceries without going into an overdraft and making meals with said groceries, emulate the exact emotional turmoil and isolating sense of confusion associated with the tasks' real-world counterparts. This process of making mechanics out of everyday moments, or rather highlighting the mechanics already in them, was something that Bouchard outlined as intentional and inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman. The film is known for evoking a lot of friction with its audience through its slow pacing and static cinematography. Camille and Laura walks a thin line to maintain the pedigree of a subversive masterpiece by being avant garde in similar ways but still coming out of the other side as a joyful and happy experience.
Camille and Laura’s art style evokes nostalgia, childhood naivety, and humour through visual gags, bright colours, and overt references to children's media. A good example is that, according to Bouchard, the walk to school everyday is taken directly from Peppa Pig. Furthermore, you will either see the other side of the problems you face if you make the right choices, or you will be teased of better possibilities otherwise. Accentuating this is that the game’s easily obtainable Steam achievements all gently push you towards making the choices that would make you a better and healthier person in the real world — with the obvious but funny exception of drinking coffee at every opportunity.
Bouchard also outlined how he wrote himself into the game through the character of Camille. She is written to be like the artist behind her, as a “calm and silent kid that was introspective very young”. This only further cements how nearly every moment of Camille and Laura is drenched in its relationship with the everyday world and the emotions that come from our lived experience, and how there is likely an even broader range of people that aren’t like me that would also extract a great deal of value from the game.
When I felt that I was at my lowest a friend strangled a laugh out of me, and I was reminded of the humour and levity that can underlie and supersede my worst moments. Camille and Laura is about this, among other things. Olivier Bouchard has successfully crafted one of my favourite gaming experiences from this year, and succeeded in creating the only game that I’ve played that, whilst sweet and touching, was best played when I was miserable. If nothing else, Camille and Laura helped me come to terms with a lot and I hope that I expressed my appreciation for that in this piece.
