This is once again a tiny game that was part of the Humble Narrative Bundle and that I would never have noticed otherwise. This isn’t really a game at all. It’s basically an attempt to tell a linear story using a bunch of unconventional elements. It’s told from the point of view of the game’s creator, Nina Freeman, and is apparently based on her real life. She’s a college student who feels insecure and seems prone to self-denigration. She likes playing video games and this story tells of how across a number of months spent in a fictional MMO called Valtameri, she falls in love with a boy she meets online.

The game gives you control over Nina’s desktop computer and so you get to know who she is by browsing through the various files on it: her old diary entries, blog posts, emails, pieces of homework, selfies and so on. It all feels very intimate and voyeuristic, which is obviously what the creator intended. Eventually with nothing else to do, you log in to Valtameri which shows you interacting with the online boyfriend Blake. Although you can move your character around and attack enemies, this isn’t a real game by any means. There are no game mechanics and everything is on rails, so it’s just a channel over which Nina and Blake hold their conversations. In between there are some amateurishly shot videos starring Freeman herself to show what happens offline.

The story goes pretty much as you would expect without any unexpected turns. Nina’s life, as portrayed here, is fairly typical as well. When you consider how short the whole experience, probably about an hour at most, well, it’s easy to be disappointed. I do like that it’s earnest and well-intentioned but the only really interesting thing about it is the unconventional manner it employs to tell its story. It would be great if the format was used to tell a more substantial story or that Freeman had something insightful to say about online relationships but it isn’t and she doesn’t, so Cibele isn’t all that noteworthy or worth spending money on.