Camille and Laura

I have played a number of shorter, intimate experiences this year, and while those games left their impact, none of them have hit home as much as Camille and Laura have. Having grown up in a single-parent household myself, I know all too well how much of a struggle it can be to just survive on a week-to-week basis, and despite the game’s colourful visual style, it really nails the tension that comes with that.

It’s not something you’d automatically assume when you see the game for the first time. The visuals are something rarely witnessed in video games: they’re a child’s drawings, like the ones we all used to make when we were little. If we were lucky, they’d make it onto the refrigerator for everyone to see, in all their simple glory. It makes you wonder whose viewpoint this game is going to be from, the mother or the child.

Interestingly, the game does take the mother’s perspective. Laura is a single parent to Camille, and she is having some trouble. The game starts right when Camille is going to school for the first time, which is a period of excitement but also of worries. Is she going to adapt well to this school (especially with it being indicated that there is a language barrier), is she going to make friends, are the school supplies we got her sufficient, …?

It also quickly becomes clear that Laura has been struggling for some time too. It’s never made clear how she became a single parent, but she’s been at it for a while. She does her best to keep the routines going: a healthy breakfast, with both food and a drink, spending time together, and telling Camille a bedtime story. Laura tries to do it all. At the same time, work is catching up on her, and she hasn’t even had the time to go on that all-girls night out.

Gameplay is pretty simple. Camille and Laura is a point-and-click game, but in a very rudimentary way. While making breakfast, you just get the right ingredients from the cupboard and fridge and combine those elements with the bowls and glasses you need. At work, you just open an email and then click to either discard the mail or answer it. There’s nothing more to it, but there doesn’t need to be. It perfectly conveys how Laura is going through the motions and trying her best to keep going despite everything.

Luckily, through the choices you make in the game, you have an opportunity to make Laura realise that she can’t keep going like this. There’s the chance to open up to a colleague, who might also be a friend, and apparently she has also reached out about getting therapy, with a spot with the local psychologist finally opening up. The game leaves it up to you whether you’d like to actually take these opportunities, which feels like the adult way of bringing this game to life. Because no matter how much we need help, we can’t always accept it.

In the meantime, while Laura is trying to make ends meet, Camille is also struggling. While she’s excited for her first days at school, that enthusiasm seems to waver at times. The language barrier, with her speaking English but the school being French-based, seems to be a bit of a bother. She also doesn’t seem to be making all that many friends, turning out a bit more quiet than the lively presence she is at home.

The game shows us perfectly what happens when these two worlds, of mother and daughter, collide. Laura’s sadness affects her daughter, while Camille’s actions don’t exactly help with her mother’s anxieties. It’s a sad reality for a lot of people, and this game represents it perfectly. As a parent, you always try to do the right thing for your child, but sometimes life gets in the way of that. You’re only human after all, just like a kid is only a kid and will test you, test their boundaries, and react to whatever emotions you’re going through yourself.

You get to spend a week with Camille and Laura, and that week might prove significant in the long run. In a similar way to society, things keep changing at an increasingly fast pace. Both mother and daughter seem to have their own struggles keeping up with things and struggle to share these emotions with each other, despite their best efforts. It’s both beautiful and heartbreaking at times to see both of them reaching out to each other but not always being able to reply with what the other needs at that time.

Camille and Laura is a fair reflection of modern times in this way. No, it doesn’t deal with increasingly important things like the effects of social media, but it does shine a light on how the infinite growth mentality is even influencing our daily lives. We have to do more, do better, and be faster to adapt. And what gets lost in all of this is the time we need to deal with things, to recover the time we need for ourselves, and to spend with our loved ones.

My favourite thing about the game has to be the bedtime stories you get to tell Camille. In these, Laura finds a way to convey everything that she’s learning herself into lessons she wants her child to learn, without ever being preachy. And when you see all of those stories come together at the end of the game, it feels intensely satisfying, suiting the emotional crescendo that rounds off the story.