Most visual novels ask a reader to write a story forward. This one hands a reader an eraser instead, and that single mechanical inversion carries an emotional weight few games manage to pull off. Kasio has returned to her family home on Achill Island, Ireland, and on New Year’s Eve, 1993, standing in the crumbling ruins of an old mansion, she sets about destroying her diary. The last 28 days of her life get told entirely through that diary, page by page erased, revealing crossed out passages hidden underneath as a reader works through it.
McGee designed and directed the game herself, with Iris Sabo handling programming, Liadh Young and Brianna Chew joining McGee on art, and Eve Golden Woods co-writing alongside her.
Design work started back in 2016, with the small team spending two full years building it out into a complete visual novel. If Found… released May 19, 2020 for Windows, Mac, and iOS, with a Nintendo Switch version following that October.
McGee has drawn directly on her own experience as a transgender woman for Kasio’s story, pulling from her own encounters with familial estrangement and societal marginalization within an Irish cultural context specifically, though the game itself isn’t a strict one to one autobiography and folds in ideas from several other developers on the team as well.
It’s a small, strange gesture, erasing rather than writing, but Dreamfeel uses it to real, powerful effect, framing the act of moving forward as something that sometimes requires letting a painful chapter go rather than dwelling in it.
That intimate, grounded story gets paired with an entirely different register, a parallel science fiction thread following an astronaut named Cassiopeia investigating a black hole that threatens to consume Earth entirely. The pairing sounds like it shouldn’t work, a small town coming of age story sitting alongside an apocalyptic space anomaly, but the juxtaposition reads as deliberate rather than gimmicky, using cosmic scale stakes as a mirror for how consuming and world ending personal crises can feel from the inside, even when they’re really about one young woman finding her footing in a place that doesn’t always make room for her.
Kasio herself is the story’s clear emotional center, and her identity as a transgender woman gets handled with real confidence, stated plainly rather than dressed up in vague, deniable subtext. Her conflicts with family, her push and pull with old and new friends, and her own uncertainty about what she actually wants from her future all get patient attention, and the game’s willingness to sit with genuine tension around Irish Catholic conservatism rather than softening it gives the story real stakes beyond a simple coming out narrative.
Small, specific moments carry a lot of that weight, breaking back into her own childhood home, an awkward crush that surfaces at just the wrong time, a punk concert that pulls Kasio out of her own head for a while, a stray dog that ends up meaning more to her than expected, each one grounding the story in lived detail rather than abstraction.
A built in footnote system helps non Irish readers keep up with local slang and cultural context without breaking the story’s immersive, diary like intimacy.
Presentation carries the whole experience with real distinction. Liadh Young’s hand drawn art feels personal rather than mass produced, closer to an actual sketchbook than a polished commercial illustration style, and a haunting, ambient soundtrack does real work sustaining the story’s dreamlike atmosphere without ever leaning on melodrama to sell a moment.
The presence of the black hole and its looming event horizon lets the story branch toward multiple distinct endings, some landing warmer, some more bittersweet, some leaning further into the fantastic than the realistic, each one earning its own specific tone rather than defaulting to a single expected outcome.
At roughly two hours, this is a tightly focused experience rather than a sprawling epic, closer to a dream or a piece of interactive art than a conventional visual novel, a description that tracks with how unconventional its core mechanics actually are. The game went on to earn a nomination for the Games for Impact Award, recognition that fits a project built specifically to connect a reader to Kasio’s emotions rather than just move her through a plot.
Reaching whichever ending a given diary happened to erase toward left me thinking about how much of moving on really does mean choosing what to let go of, a lesson Kasio has to learn the hard way across all 28 of those final days.
Verdict
If Found… earns its reputation as an essential, deeply moving piece of interactive storytelling by using a deceptively simple erasing mechanic to explore memory, identity, and the specific ache of trying to find your place in a home that doesn’t always welcome who you actually are. Kasio’s story lands with real emotional honesty, grounded in Llaura McGee’s own experience as a transgender woman, and pairing her personal crisis against a parallel cosmic disaster gives the whole experience real thematic weight rather than feeling like an odd narrative gimmick. Its unconventional structure and dreamlike pacing won’t suit every reader looking for a traditional visual novel experience, but for anyone willing to meet it on its own terms, this stands as one of the more essential, beautifully realized entries the genre has produced.
