"the most widely used of all solvents" indeed.

SWIM4SWIM was and is water to me. that's the easiest way for me to communicate the totality of my experience with it. i'll try to articulate it more, further down.

the shallow end: this was water in the way that it was hard for me to hold. much deserved praise has been heaped on the presentation and prose in this vn—the transitions and emphatic mood "cards" dividing certain scenes gripped me hard, and i want to try digging around in the files to see how it was managed. there were many times, however, where i found it hard to know the 'you' that was being spoken to, or who was speaking it, which led to confusion on my part for what was taking place. 

that said, even though it created friction in reading for me, it also felt strangely appropriate? the chlorine burn of trying to make out shapes and actions under the surface of a swimming pool, or the obliterating murkiness of lake water. some events are approached—less with caution and more tentative determination—and then a rush of text and images follows, which never feels like fear of the event being depicted but nevertheless felt at times like someone cannonball jumping into a placid moment. which felt, still, appropriate. maybe it's uncertain because everything blurs, smeared outlines in distorted refraction. maybe i should read this with goggles on. 

the music was incredible as well, and i loved the way it shifted fluidly as each beat of a scene was hit, tonally and sonically. 

the deep end: spoilers follow.

this was water for me in another way: i felt held by it and overwhelmed by it in equal measure. 

i went swimming yesterday. i'd been planning to go swimming specifically, in fact, to remember what it felt like to swim before i read SWIM4SWIM. it's been two and a half years since i last swam, and two years since i bought my first two piece swimsuit in anticipation of swimming again. 

i've always loved swimming. i was too big for professional swimming, but i eyed my swim team with envy for years. my main exposure to the professional world of it was the occasional olympic clip, and the exponentially more frequent news article about sexual abuse, about transgender performance, about institutional corruption. maybe it was for the best that my love of the water was kept safe from seeing if my ambition could float in it. 

it still feels surreal to think about what it felt like, getting back in the water, how natural it felt but how foreign it had become; how new-again the feeling of loving it was, but how bittersweet the forgetting of it was revealed to be. 

the love of swimming and the forgetting of it, the suffocation and resuscitation, the choking and the chest compressions—it's all so vivid and deeply felt.  

"i think, despite everything, i just want all of us to play in the pool together." the way that water can serve as a solvent to dissolve social contexts, because all of us who wade into it have evolved to the point where the belonging we find in it is only what we bring into it—or what we fish out of it, what we gut and clean—i feel like that, at least, i understand. 

bottom of the pool, breath released, bubbles few and far between: i'll share an old poem of mine that this vn reminded me of. i hope it feels relevant: https://pastebin.com/u4BVHJ3s

thank you all for making SWIM4SWIM.

---

fcrnxvat bs flapueb: jnf gur fvzvynevgl va gur svany npg gb qrygnehar'f erprag jrveq ebhgr vagragvbany ("qnex lrg qnexre") be pbfzvp flapuebavpvgl? v jbhyq oryvrir rvgure rnfvyl, ohg v jnf pregnvayl fgehpx ol vg.

for the first time in probably a decade, i thought about how i did competitive swimming when i was very young and a girl the first time. my body wasnt made for it.

incredible story that made me feel emotions about memories i didnt know i had. i was really moved by the mention of the beginning that sports are inherently unfair - how can people say trans athletes make sports unfair when the unfairness is the point?

i was enamored with how the story was not a typical narrative. it felt like long-form poetry to me, and the presentation really enhances it. the watercolor visuals, the waving backgrounds and sprites, all help contribute to an intoxicating atmosphere. the swimdex added so much context to the story, and even felt like a narrative extension to it.

this team did an absolutely phenomenal job. thank you all for making this!

extremely beautiful and an almost meditative read, even as it dealt with some harrowing subject matter with a careful touch. i feel like ill need to revisit this one to string it all together, but i was really struck by how much you have to give of yourself of a sport to be truly great- or even just mediocre- and how maybe more than any industry, your identity is a calculation. a data point for others to rank you by.

i get in the pool biweekly and swim very slow laps. i imagine i’ll think of this vn whenever i do from now on. thank you for sharing.

adored every moment of this game's presentation. the visuals are a perfect complement to the writing - wavy, hazy, atmospheric, but grounded in specificity. 

the sensory details sold the intensity of the sport, and the characters' anxieties over their bodies. the shaving plotline kept me especially on edge, and the restraint shown made it even more memorable. i was tense throughout, waiting as the pressure built and built, constantly certain something was about to pop. 

like many of my fellow narps in the comments, i appreciated the amount of context built into the story. i loved the swimdex as a method of both providing further context and extending the narrative!! very cool trick, i gotta steal that sometime >:)

as i read, i was often reminded of tillie walden's "spinning." there's this sequence where she talks about making her bedroom as cold as possible before sleeping at night, A/C on full blast, no blankets, just so her body doesn't have to re-adjust when she gets to the ice rink...  competitive sports institutions really fuck kids up, huh?

Stunning work.

I had the honor of playtesting this game a few different times, and seeing the full game in front of me all I can say is wow. This is the kind of game you experience that leaves you wanting to gnaw on it even more. So you play through it again. And you look through the swimdex. And you really truly absorb what it means to transform your body to glide through the water, the intimacy yet isolation of being a swimmer, that sort of 'othering', even amidst your peers. There's something to be said about how haunting it is that we live in a world so possessed by a need to limit athleticism of transgender competitors, as if the thralls of competition weren't harrowing enough. As if breaking your body down, undergoing a metamorphosis to outclass your peers, isn't a challenge in and of itself.

I would continue to wax on about the nature of the narrative but I also want to really praise the visual direction of this game, and the programming that made it possible! I'm always a sucker for mixed media, but the little snippets of video, the bobbing of the sprites as if everyone was in a state of idling within the pool, and the textured feel of everything flowed together to create a genuinely stunning piece of art.

You can really tell the team is passionate about this, and that love and attention to detail really shone throughout this work.

LOOOOOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE

I'm in awe with how effective the display of raw emotion shone from behind this piece even while the more clinincal pieces of the presentation were on screen. This was really powerful and I felt how intimately the differenct facets of this were worked with. thank you for letting me experience it!

i am Not a SPORTS BRO!!!

...but, i really enjoyed this vn. swimming is the one sport my own body tolerates and actually enjoys, so reading about it in a more competitive lens was quite interesting. 

the artistic value here is what drives this vn through to the finish line. at times, it read as a poem, with the usage of epiphora and repetition in general really standing out. the interjection of real video footage of pools / lake added such an intimate feeling to it all. the constant presentation of water through the visuals, the effects, the sounds really ties it all together.

really beautiful piece of work. i have a feeling that, like a poem, it should be read several times over to parse it 100%. excellent work from everybody involved.

Very pretty. The artistic drive and presentation here is this game's biggest standout factor to me. I admire the passion that went into crafting this thing.

Smiles. This made m e vomit and sob.

Jvtwlapapvu ohz hsdhfz ovyypmplk tl, iba pa’z zvtl zayhunl hzwlja vm Htlypjhu zvjplaf. Av kv zvtlaopun fvb svcl pz av jvtwlal: av zovd fvb svcl pa huk aoha fvb hyl aol ilza. P jvbsk ulcly kv zwvyaz. Pa dhz avv mypnoalupun. P tlhu P kpk kv aolt iba xbpa, iba P ohcl hsdhfz dvuklylk ovd aol zaylzz wba vu haoslalz’ ivkplz jvbsk il hyapjbshalk huk aol ovyyvyz hjyvzz aol zwvyaz.. jvuapubbt. Haoslalz klzayvf aolpy ivkplz mvy lclyfvul’z lualyahputlua- lzwljphssf haoslalz vm jvsvy. P dvukly ovd aolf mlls hivba pa. P dvukly pm aolf mlls hufaopun hivba pa. Aopz dvyr ylhssf lewsvylk aopz pu h dhf P svcl. P ht zapss jyfpun.

Thank you for letting me playtest. It was an honor to vomit for the creation of dry mode (the shaders are so so beautiful). It’s really lovely seeing you were still able to keep the water effects for the dry mode too.

I read this and wanted to let it fester in me before I commented. This was one of my most anticipated releases, particularly so because the way rom had seemed to truly dedicate every ounce of brain power into swimming-- I wanted to know how water can consume someone so deeply. I was not disappointed. Reading through really takes you into the rough waves of the ocean, or riding the aftershock tide being in the deep end of the pool as someone canonballs in. Your head goes above and under and above and under the water, constantly bobbing and reminding you that you need to take a breath in between plunges, lest water fills your lungs.

Did I ever swim competitively? God no. Did I ever do any competitive sports? Nope. But I can tell that this clearly embodies the constant weight and stress of dedicating yourself to a sport that scrutinizes your body, your comparison, your mind, your relationships to others. I always wondered what the kids that went to 6am swim meets experienced, and im reflecting on a lot of the past classmates I had that did just that. To compete is to prove yourself, which is beautiful and fulfilling, but so deeply humiliating and brutal.

Thinking about the beauty and horror of competitive sports is enthralling, and makes you even more bitter when you think about the gendering and degendering and transphobic festering that bites at it. Why the fuck should anyone be attacking athletes for something like gender identity when we already suspended our disbelief watching them perform superhuman feats? What sort of priority is that? So I really, really, really liked the swimdex. I recognized the story was referencing real world discussions but to see the last names of characters was awesome. This is barely a VN and more like the coolest presented essay I've ever seen. It even cites sources!! The intersection of gender, race, abuse, and sport is easy to acknowledge but also easy to glaze over, I liked that I had a room to sit down and open 10+ tabs to absorb real life experiences.

And all of this is doesn't address that the game is awesome as a game. The mixed media is awesome. The sound design is awesome. The pacing is awesome. I was always going into history to see what I could chew on, and enjoying the waves lapping at my screen. 

Anyways. I would like to play in the pool with you all. I would like to go to the shallow end where I can still stand and we can pretend to be mermaids, and we each have a special power. I think your tail would be silver and your power would be empathy.

sublime. 

athleticism and competition are two of the greatest vehicles of self expression but are rarely examined in spaces like this. rather we tend to see the flip side of things in media meant for the majority: articles on the abhorrent and loud anti-trans push in sports at every level, endless clinical reports on harassment and abuse in the locker rooms, even feel-good stories about people who are "different" but manage to compete. all things that need to be written about, maybe, but rarely are they handled on a personal level and doubly rare by those who despite it all understand the heart of an athlete. 

but i wonder why it's so rare? i often think about "all stories are trans stories" in the sense that all stories are about transformation and the sometimes hilarious implications that that idea can lead to. but really there's something about sports with the inherent physical transformation that comes with activity, the manual transformations that participants enact on themselves in order to participate, the undesired transformation of assimilation that might be required to fit into ones team that makes sports a powerful medium for this kind of story.

stunning work by all involved, no other words needed to praise the technical excellence on display here 

disclaimer: i am not a swimmer. or rather, i haven't been one since secondary school (where 30 minute classes and rushes back to class in the bitter uk winter sucked the joy of being in the water out of me... and of course, learning i was the slowest swimmer in school ) so if i bungle the swim side of things that is 100% on me. 

the presentation is top-notch. water permeates this game's identity from top to bottom: watercolors, wave effects everywhere, droplets as transitions — and the cherry on top — the IRL pool footage. i could tell from second one that everyone on the project was invested in this sport — the level of detail on it is insane (the full-body shaving, how will get psychic damage from this game. 

SPOILERS BELOW

the ending was great too. the rapid button pressing at the end, in lake ontario really captures the anxiety of the scene. and i'm guessing the reason why you put 0 endings in the description is because these swimmers stories haven't ended? when i read through the swimdex, you cited news articles for each of the characters, and i realized they were all references to current queer + trans swimmers (like lea thomas, schuyler bailar, etc.)...

also the swimdex itself was great. extra character tidbits alongside articles about current events and discussions in athletic swimming — the good, the bad, and the ugly. i wanna read through them all on my own and dive deep into this world you've known for so long

if i had one crit, it would be that the ui contrast was hard to read at times... (blue dialogue on blue background) but other than that, great work!

IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU TO RELEASE THIS, IT WAS AN ABSOLUTE HONOR TO PLAYTEST IT HERE AND THEREE!! i loved the atmosphere of swim4swim, i was totally absorbed in the vignettes happening from the beginning to end. there are so many times where i feel like the presentation is really clever or really surprises me :D and the mixed media?! would absolutely love to see more work like this!! good job swim4swim team <3