Behind the Frame is a 2021 game from Silver Lining Studio, a small indie developer based in Taiwan. It’s about the stories behind different paintings, about the situations and life events that inspire a young female painter to create her canvases. In terms of gameplay, it’s essentially a narrative game with some light puzzle elements. You play the young painter, who spends her time painting in her studio apartment, preparing for a show. You make yourself breakfast, and watch the old man next door, and there’s a pesky cat that keeps jumping in your window and treading paint around the place. It’s very Studio Ghibli. It feels like a story that could exist in the same reality as Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example. Very homely, lots of cooking, and that specific blend of animated objects set against a painted backdrop. Now – I don’t do this often, but if it sounds like a game you’d like to play, just off the back of that description, go play it before you read any further. It is a mystery or puzzle game, and we’re going to talk about the end.

Although Behind the Frame starts out as a nostalgic slice-of-life game, it shifts over time to become more of a metafictional mystery. When it starts, it’s cute, and there are eggs – but the game progresses, there are a bunch of weird happenings that push the bounds of realism in increasingly overt ways. At first some of the puzzles are just a little bit twee: you find a painting with a missing feature, and if you paint that feature back into the image, a secret drawer will open, and you’ll discover a new colour of paint. It’s not strictly realistic, but it has a sort of pleasant whimsy that fits the broader aesthetic. Similarly, after the cat jumps in through your window, you find little paw prints leading between different areas of your room. Each time you solve a puzzle in one area, the next set of footprints appear, leading you to the next puzzle. Again, it’s not strictly within the bounds of realism – you never see the cat moving from one place to another – but it fits the genre in such a way that you never really question it. By the end of the game, however, we’re clearly in the realm of metafiction. You unlock a room filled with paintings of your apartment; as you change things in those paintings, your apartment changes in turn. You start climbing in and out of the paintings in your room, as if those environments were just as real as your own – something weird is clearly going on.

This, then, is the game’s twist: it turns out that you yourself are inside a painting. You’re not a real person – you are a self-portrait of the artist (Amber) from when she was a young woman. You haven’t been in the real world: you’ve been inhabiting the story behind the frame. The real Amber is now a grandmother. The old man that you saw across the way is Amber’s husband, Jack, painted at a later stage in life. Other paintings that you’ve explored tell their love story – your love story. The elderly Amber comes to visit you in the gallery with her family, and the game ends with your character restored to her place in the painting. You’ve been invited into her story, and you’ve seen what lies behind the frame.

So – in the most immediate sense, Behind the Frame is a game about reliving memories. It’s less about one character recalling a specific memory, and more about the process or experience of reliving memories in general. There are, let’s say, three stages: immersion in a nostalgic past, disruption of the past, and reinstatement in the present. You sink into a memory, hear your phone buzz, and remember you have to go to work tomorrow. These stages correspond to the painted Amber’s experience, and probably most purely to the experience of the first-time player. You enjoy the idyllic fantasy of painted-Amber’s life, things start to get weird, and then – oh, okay, it all snaps back into focus, and you know where you are and you understand what’s going on. The game uses the structure of its mystery to model the psychological process that it’s trying to explore.

Of course, that trajectory is only available to the first-time player. If you’re going in for a second playthrough, or if you know the story ahead of time (I did warn you), you’re going to have a different relationship to the text. You won’t necessarily go through those same stages of confusion and uncertainty. Your experience will align less with painted Amber’s, and more with that of the real Amber, visiting her portrait in the gallery. You know the memory is just a memory – you don’t have that initial false belief in the reality of the painted Amber’s world. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy the nostalgia. Maybe you enjoy it more, understanding what it is – how fleeting it is. But you don’t experience painted Amber’s confusion as things start getting weird. The transition from one context into the other is tinged instead with regret. Look at all the things she didn’t understand, we might think. Look at how confused she is. That fall into knowledge, out of the past and into the present moment – it’s synonymous with aging, with getting older. The ignorance associated with a blind first playthrough might most directly evoke the feelings of falling deep into a memory: the game withholds reality to simulate the experience of losing track of reality. And yet it’s only in later playthroughs, after you know, that the theme takes on its full potency. The power of memory isn’t demonstrated by how far we travel coming out of it. It’s about never really leaving in the first place.