booting up smile for me, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to get myself into. I'd taken to my usual strategy of fervently avoiding any and all information about the game, but from what little promotional material I'd picked up on, it seemed like a very...tumblr sort of game? I don't mean that pejoratively, to be clear! but it showed the same sort of faintly surreal off-the-wall humor incubated on the platform around the late 2010s, and a "please look at my blorbos" intentionality that permeates the experience. but at the same time, I also got the impression that this was a spooky game that wanted to try to scare me, what with the rather menacing title and overtly menacing spooky shadow man featured across the game's iconography.
but it turns out that I was largely mistaken? despite the occasional bit of unsettling elements, I wouldn't call smile for me a horror game by any stretch of the imagination. my impression of it is more akin to an eccentric retro-adventure game, largely focused on talking to absurd characters and solving inventory puzzles. it's a comfortable, pleasant little yarn, mellow in overall tone and mostly content to let its character writing take center stage.
speaking of, let's talk about the game's central premise a bit. the story revolves around this place called the habitat, advertising itself to the troubled people of the world as a place that will improve their lives. as you meet the residents of the habitat, it becomes clear that the kinds of people this brought in are varying degrees of awkward and unwell. characters range from "extremely autistic birdwatcher" to "lounge bouncer struggling with toxic masculinity" to "anxiety-riddled businessman buckling under the weight of his father's expectations" to "a girl who is literally never not drunk for a second in her life".
this, as well as the fact that everyone in the habitat is barred from leaving and is subject to the inept attempts of dr. habit to cheer them up—whatever that means or is meant to accomplish—means that the setting is overall very reminiscent of a mental institution. here you have people going through various mental or emotional issues, and here you have a childish hack of a doctor who thinks he knows best for people despite everyone's constant protesting that the habitat is awful and they want to go home. he even takes a great amount of frustration as you go around helping people and generally doing a better job than he is, insisting that being happy only counts when it's his kind of happy.
this theme is strengthened by what the player is predominantly concerning themselves with: over the course of completing various requests for people, the habiticians (as they're called) are made to reckon with their instabilities, strengthen their relationships with one another, and generally progress as people. the game is, through its themes, taking a stance on the side of community-focused care and mutual aid as the best way to help each other deal with themselves and the world, and that's spectacular! it's not horribly complex, but smile for me is a game made to be friendly and familiar more than anything else, so I think high-minded aspirations aren't really necessary here.
there's quite a bit I want to say about the climax of the game, so let's go ahead and...
⚠ ENTER THE SPOILERZONE ⚠
so, there's this thing dr. habit keeps alluding to throughout the game that he calls "the big event". the day before it arrives, you manage to formulate an escape plan for all of the habiticians that you completed the quests of, leaving you and whoever's left in the habitat when the day comes. and then, the truth of the matter is revealed: dr. habit's "big event" involves flooding the facility with nitrous oxide to render all of its denizens delirious and helpless, so he can whisk them away to the operating table in his big tower for plans that involve forcibly yanking out all of their teeth.
this was harrowing! I was sufficiently harrowed! I didn't get to see it on account of having gotten everyone out on my first playthrough, but the dialogue you get from the habiticians during this sequence is dreadful, and the scene where dr. habit prances around the room giving manic rants about smiling and happiness while intermittently pulling out some of your character's teeth made my skin crawl. but eventually, I managed to get out of there in an escape sequence that was so effectively designed, I only realized in hindsight that I don't think there's actually any sort of failure state. I shoved the doctor out of a window to his death and got out of there.
what follows is a delightful credits sequence where the characters you rescued (which in my case was all of them) are shown living their lives and getting up to shenanigans. I was thoroughly charmed by this game, and got to enjoy that very special sort of credits-sequence afterglow. it's a really good feeling! one of the best feelings you can have, I think.
but then, over the words "Thanks for playin!" was a blank outline of dr. habit holding up a flower pot with a little seedling in it, and I realized oh son of a BITCH, that was the bad ending.
I truly struggle to describe the extent to which this immediately put me off from the game. it didn't come out of nowhere, though—what I haven't mentioned up until now is that, through various means including gathered diary pages and a slideshow you can sit down and watch, you start learning details about dr. habit's childhood that explain his past as a child to an abusive family. I haven't mentioned them until now because these details are thrown into the narrative with little build-up or generally any reason to care about dr. habit as anything more than a caricaturistic antagonist, clearly intended as story-upending revelations but presented in so gauche a manner that it completely kills the impact.
and for that matter, let me recap: dr. habit is a character who has deliberately lured unhappy and vulnerable people to what's basically a prison so he can pump them full of horrific amounts of nitrous oxide and permanently disfigure them—something that he does to the player character regardless of whatever decisions they take. he's consistently demonstrated to be malicious and generally lacking in regard for human life. that the intended response to this kind of character is to go through the rather significant trouble (there's a whole secret sidequest and everything!) to extend the same kindness to him without regard for his blatant atrocities, to the point that to do anything else is framed as incorrect and explicitly confirmed in later materials as non-canonical, is glaringly distasteful.
somewhere in here, there's a compelling story about the difficulties of rehabilitation and what to do with victims who themselves become abusers. but smile for me doesn't put in nearly enough effort to earn any credibility on the subject, instead just presenting the issue in the most cloyingly juvenile "why can't we all just get along" rhetoric I've ever seen in the medium. at least undertale earns some weight to its moral discussions through its well-done efforts to establish various antagonists as complex characters with equally complex motivations, and even that's a game I still end up having some disagreements with.
there's even something terribly infantilizing that I can't help but feel about the narrative's overall approach to the character of dr. habit. though, really, I don't need to feel it anyways, because the character is outright written to be immature on basically every level—but in such a way that I can't tell if this character is genuinely supposed to have a developmental disorder or if that's just The Bit that's being run with, and this is an uncertainty that makes me horribly uncomfortable the longer I think about it. it's like we're supposed to see all of these premeditated atrocities as the senseless tantrums of a child who doesn't know what they're doing and needs to be placated, and for that to be the tone the narrative takes with one of its most important characters is a downright sickening reversal of all the thematic elements I was just praising it for.
it's horrible. I hate it. it immediately ruined all the goodwill I had for this game, and it came after an experience that I enjoyed in every single moment except those few seconds at the very end. I didn't even know that could happen.
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