I'll be Brave, Tomorrow

I spent my time with this one in a single sitting, and I think that is exactly how InkForge Studios intended it. The game drops you into the first-person perspective of Robyn, a child laid up in a hospital room set firmly in the 1990s, surrounded by cassette tapes, a Walkman, plush toys, and a SNES-shaped console. The dual-layer structure is the whole trick: you explore the 3D hospital room by looking around from the bed, poking at objects and starting small distractions, and then you drop into the pixel-art platformer Robyn plays to escape the fear and boredom of her situation. The robin in that platformer is searching for his lost father and trying to overcome a fear of flying. Robyn is trying to get through her diagnosis. The mirror between them is quiet and deliberate, and it earns its emotional weight rather than announcing it. The 2D platformer side is a short, old-school affair: jump across platforms, find three feathers per level, deal with enemies and bosses, unlock a double jump that broadens where you can reach. It is not a mechanically deep platformer, and community feedback flags a genuinely frustrating issue with the double jump input, which can feel unresponsive at the wrong moments. That friction is real and worth knowing about going in. The mini-games tucked around the hospital room, including a DeLorean-shaped toy car racing track built around the room itself and a paper airplane throwing challenge, are charming filler rather than standout content. One achievement tied to the airplane game requires a high-skill score that has the community baffled, which feels slightly mismatched with the rest of the experience. What the game does with its 2 to 2.5 hours is harder to dismiss. The 3D and 2D worlds feed into each other in small but meaningful ways, new mechanics discovered in the platformer reflecting shifts in Robyn's circumstances. The retro visual palette and the overall soundscape carry that specific kind of warmth you find in hand-built indie work, the kind where every object in a room feels like it was placed by someone who cared. TheGamer noted that it highlights the importance of escapism through play, which captures the core idea plainly. For a game rooted so heavily in childhood illness, the tone is careful rather than exploitative, and it carries trigger warnings upfront. The story, for what it is, resolves with a good ending. The personal origin matters here too. The game's creative director spent time at Great Ormond Street Hospital as a child, and that experience is visibly threaded through the design rather than used as marketing shorthand. Half of the Steam revenue goes directly to GOSH Charity. That context does not make a flawed double-jump forgivable, but it does mean that the parts of this game that work, the mood, the metaphor, the restraint, feel earned by something real. If you have ever used a game to get through a hard day, this one is about exactly that.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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