https://gnomestew.com/turn-review/ 

I saw a comment on small-town life last night that cast it in an entirely negative light, and that put me in mind of @Brie_Beau's Turn, which I reviewed on @gnomestew. I grew up in a town of 600 people, and this game encapsulates my conflicted feelings.

Whenever I see someone dismiss living in a small town as a hell to be escaped, I don't want to dismiss that experience, because I haven't lived their life, by my exodus from my home town was so much more nuanced than that.

In small towns, narrow-minded ideas are present, but there are also bastions of people that are open-minded. There are people that have worked their whole lives to "earn" the ability to have contrary opinions, because of their ties to others.

There is that weird threshold where half the people in town might have a positive view of you because you are X's son, even if you've never met those people personally, and there is that worry that people will "know" something about you because you are Y's nephew.

The degree to which people are on your side or against you is so heightened. Sometimes you don't leave because the place is terrible, but because the narratives for and against you have been written by everyone but you.

Sometimes you worry that even the people on your side are on your side because of the web of connections you have to family and friends. That deep, comforting support you can't get anywhere else in a second turns cold, because you don't know where it REALLY came from.

You don't move because you are escaping hell, you move because you're afraid the person you see in the mirror isn't the person everyone else in town is seeing. You don't move because you want to control your narrative, you move because you don't want a narrative for a while.

But once in a while, in your new town where nobody cares what your story is, you miss people remembering the time you were the ringmaster in the school play. You miss people knowing who your childhood friends were, and that you rode around on your brother's bike.

Nobody is ever going to "know" you as deeply ever again, even if they connect the dots of your identity in a way that you don't recognize. They know all of the dots, even if they don't know where you would put the lines.

@Brie_Beau's game is the best synthesis of this weird mix of feelings about small-town life I've ever run across, and I'm glad I backed the game.