Diaspora / Longing / Memories / Carpets.
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Frayed draws similarities between the processes of making music and making carpets, both as compositional traditions that tell stories and set moods through the use of harmony, texture, layers, repeating patterns, and piecing things together.
Carpets carry on them a sense of home, but also of fragility, movement, and a kind of beauty that organizes what would otherwise be chaos.
In this vein, I use this relationship to tell the story of my own family and juxtapose our recent past with a very different present.
The player controls a simple character that’s stuck in a cycle of constantly remembering. Romanticized or traumatic, memories are inherently imperfect. If they’re traumatic, they can contaminate our present, and to cope, we might turn them into new, neat narratives. By weaving in and out of the present and into changing pasts, the character attempts to beautifully organize chaos and weave one story together.
Ultimately, Frayed is an experimental and deeply personal game-poem about learning to make something beautiful out of something ugly.