“YIIK contains quite a few homages to the writer Haruki Murakami. Our intent was to include little nods to Murakami’s lesser known works as tributes. Within the game, the tributes served a narrative function,” Allanson said.
“As the game revolves around the themes of broken reality, much of what the protagonist Alex experiences is colored by the lens of fond or strong memories,” he added. “We picked out a couple of novels, films and video games to become the subjects of Alex’s memories that influence his reality in-game, through the allusions we talked about. Some of these appear as more subtle homages to other authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Thomas Pynchon, David Mitchell. Since it looks like people are asking specifically about the reference to After Dark, let me try to explain our intentions as best I can.”
The explanation behind the offending scenes in our previous report is the “Proto Woman character speaking the words from the novel is part of a distorted reality being presented to Alex,” and as such “they’re not a character from the regular, grounded reality Alex believes he knows. A regular person would have been written to speak with the intention and knowledge that they were quoting a book. Instead, the role ‘Proto Woman’ plays is more like a pseudo ‘narrator’ of After Dark.”