Dear reader. In all of your life, you’ve no doubt seen all sorts of people. Pleasant and not so pleasant. Both those beautiful and those who are hideously ugly. The shameless and the overly reserved. The ragged and the rich. Those that are endowed with wit enough to damn near charm you to your knees and those who cannot muster a sentence without you wanting to blow your brains out.
Knowing all that, with all of your experience, could you help me answer this one singular question?
“What does it mean to be kind?”
See, to you and I, a question like that might seem so obvious that questioning it is akin to asking why water runs. However, I’d like to suggest that in this instance, this question is a little more murky than the “matter of fact” running water it feigns itself to be.
Furthermore, this review will focus less on the “game” elements, and more so on tackling what I believe is the point of this game.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Teaching Feeling is a story about Sylvie, a short slave girl that’s been tossed around through hell and back. Beaten, burned and likely abused in ways you can’t imagine. A girl whose life is genuinely not worth living. A girl, who, unlike you or I, does not know what makes someone good or kind.
Now, it’s not as though she can’t perceive things that are happening around her to be one way or another, rather, an act of inherent kindness is seen as something of a currency - a form of exchange.
A fresh new pillow offered is equivalent to a beating that will come in the future. A plate of pancakes is a disguised attempt to berate you later. A pat on the head is a prelude to horror. The horror of uncertainty. That’s what the word “kindness” rings as in Sylvie’s bruised head. An impending sense of doom.
When you’ve been demeaned and used like an accessory your entire life, it is easy to assume that your perception of reality differs from the average person. Acts of brutality are an everyday occurrence, - in other words, a normality. If your skin were to be seared with boiling water every day.. then the absence of such an act on a random day wouldn’t make you relieved..
..It’d make you more terrified than you ever were before.
Severe anxiety and profound fear is a powerful venom that can make someone wish that they were being physically abused instead. There are those who’d rather suffer through the agony of gruesome physical pain, than to spend so much as a moment in the purgatory that is the uncertainty of your fate.
And that uncertainty is where the player comes in. YOU, the player, are the judge, jury and executioner of Sylvie’s fate.
This game offers you two routes to take.
- Route number one is to continue the cycle of abuse that Sylvie has endured by using her as her previous owner had.
- Route number two is stoking Sylvie’s fears by showing her an endless barrage of affectionate acts.
See, by and of itself, the second choice is the obvious selection to any reasonable person. Most people don’t get off on abusing people, and those that do will likely not find much interest in this game due to how short lived the first option is. Conversely, however, it is evident that at the beginning that Sylvie actually “prefers” the first choice, due to her being kept in a familiar cycle, where she has already learned how to cope and live in, however awful it may be. I say this because of the genuine fear of every action you make in the second route, being so logically alien to Sylvie’s perception that you cannot unsee her agonizing fear of what may come.
Now, following the second choice, throughout the game, you offer physical affection, food, clothes - all of which Sylvie simply looks at with fear. Seeing this, a question props up in my mind as all of this unwinds.
Do I, both the player character and the person pressing the keys, do this out of kindness?
Is this an act of mere generosity, or do I wish to gain something out of this girl? Do I want this person to feel safe and happy, despite their miserable life before it, or do I wish to subdue someone into a life of gratitude, as I wallow in my own righteousness? It’s a difficult question to answer, seeing as being kind isn’t viewed as a double-edge sword by most folk. Certainly, to offer kindness is a greater sum than to offer a dagger in the back. But is it greater than a measured middle ground?
As time goes on, Sylvie’s fear begins to mutate into a feeling of confusion. “What’s going on? Why aren’t I being hurt?”. A horrifically hideous, yet comical moment comes up in the game where Sylvie genuinely says that it’s okay for you to beat her, as her previous master had done just that, as it was her one and only use. She mentions that it seemed to entertain him, and gave her some meaning to her existence as to be a tool for someone’s morbid joy. To Sylvie, physical pain is secondary to the fear of being abandoned and thrown out into the unknown. That one, singular line of dialogue says more about her state of mind than most games on this platform say with their entire bloated narrative.
Much like this review
Time passes, and the fear and confusion begin to form into a new emotion.
Hope.
A hope that.. maybe this isn’t.. all a ploy? A hope that this person actually means well? And yet, with that same hope, flows the newfound fear of betrayal.
To build upon this bridge of hope means to surrender the feeling of fear, to cast it aside for trust. Sylvie realizes that the person before her has done nothing but good things to her, and yet she’s incredibly conflicted, since her distrust of people is so overwhelming that it’s killing her with guilt. Should she reciprocate and accept that kindness, and offer back her own kindness in turn? Doing so, Sylvie would have to give up her lifelong fears for your and her own sake. A step into the unknown, which if misguided, would almost certainly be her end. Naturally, she’s aware of this, and her fear and guilt culminate in a single scene.
Sylvie simply asks you, earnestly and naively, if you’re truly a kind person. If it’s okay that she trusts you, from now on. A display of bravery which renders her completely naked before your judgment. To lie to her now, would likely mean her death, both physically and mentally.
And so, you say yes.
Because you’re not an imbecile
And just as earnestly as her question prior, she decides to believe you from now on.
From this point onward, Sylvie is in a far more vulnerable state than she was before. She’s cast away both uncertainty and fear, and begins to open up to you. She tells you about how she got her burn marks, how awfully she was treated, - yet never failing to mention that it doesn’t hurt anymore, trying not to worry you. You two begin to share a genuine and profound relationship between two people that is no longer riddled with questions, and is instead ruled by trust.
From the macabre art style, and the way the story presents itself at the beginning, one might assume that this game is some sort of strange fetishistic rape-fantasy. Naturally, but this could not be further from the truth.
This game has some of the most profound and beautiful renditions of what reciprocal kindness can create. A true tale of the need for people to trust one another in order to survive in this awful world. Even though she had no talents or skills. Despite the state of her ravaged and malnourished body, Sylvie was still offered affection. She wasn’t used as a sexual object, or a toy to play with. It was likely the first time that Sylvie had felt like a human being.
While I don’t know your answer to the question I inquired upon you at the start, the answer I have is pretty concise. To me, kindness is offering yourself to someone who treasures you as much as you treasure them, in spite of your fears, in spite of your uncertainties and insecurities. It is an ultimate act of goodwill, that disregards the anxiety inducing fear of the unknown.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Real talk.
The underlying tones of this game are hidden under its almost ghoulish(but also gorgeous), painterly art style. They’re pushed under the generic gameplay elements that feel monotonous. I’ll be frank with you, I don’t give a fuck about the gameplay being mediocre. I don’t care that this game is a faux kinetic novel with some short bad-endings. This doesn’t matter. What’s on display here is some of the most profound artistry that this website has, and it’s genuinely not even close. It’s difficult to receive something so heart warming from what is basically disguised as a game about owning a slave. I’m of the opinion that the game actually has two titles. One is the first route, which is “living with a slave”, and the second is “teaching feeling”, which I referred to it as, at the very beginning. A game where you teach someone who had lost all feeling, to feel again.
Most of the games on this website offer you jerk off material with some mediocre excuse to get to the porn. You’ve seen it, you’ve read it, you’ve played through it. You know exactly what I mean. This game isn’t that. The entire point of this game IS the build up. The appeal is in the human need for affection. Most of these games don’t get it. You get some rinky-dink porn scene, and when you’re done with it, you feel no better than you did before squeezing your hog. These momentary feelings of sexual gratification are immediately fleeting.
Meanwhile, the GoodVibes™ stay with you past your baseline needs.
This game is amazing. The writing in this game is amazing, the artwork is incredible. The sex scenes, together with the build up, and the extremely erotic and almost animalistic affection in them is incredibly arousing and appealing.
The people saying the artwork looks bad couldn’t empty water out of a shoe if the instructions were at the heel. This game has some flaws, but I don’t care. Not a single other game on this website offers what Teaching Feeling does.
Thanks for reading.
P.S.
A lot of this author’s work dances around themes of disfigurement and monstrosities, and just like teaching feeling, all of them(to my limited knowledge) are as heart warming and worth playing as this game.
