When the Mechanic Is the Message: Designing Feeling in As Long As You're Here
Marlène Delrive at Playable Stories — Part 2 of 2
How Marlène Delrive and her team translated the inner experience of Alzheimer's into the grammar of play — and why every mechanic is an argument.
There is a moment early in As Long As You're Here where you go to make coffee. The machine takes a while, so naturally you wander — look out the window, glance at something on the shelf. When you return, the cup is gone. You find it eventually, on the windowsill. You're almost certain it wasn't there before.
Almost.
That tiny sliver of self-doubt is the whole game. And it didn't happen by accident.
At our last Playable Stories evening at Somerset House, moderator Ed Sibley spoke with Marlène Delrive about how As Long As You're Here was built — specifically, how she and her team translated the inner experience of Alzheimer's into the grammar of play. What emerged was less a masterclass in game design and more a meditation on a deeper question: what can games do that no other medium can?
The answer, in Marlène's case, is this: they can make you feel something from the inside.
Look-away logic
The missing cup is an example of what Marlène calls "subversions" — small changes made to the environment behind the player's back, detectable only because something is now different from how you remember it. The technique borrows from horror games, where objects move when you're not looking in order to frighten. Marlène's inversion is elegant: the same mechanic, redirected entirely. Here, it doesn't frighten. It unsettles. It makes you question your own memory.
This is the craft leap at the heart of As Long As You're Here. The player isn't being told what Alzheimer's feels like. They're being put inside a version of it — however partial, however interpreted. The medium becomes the message.
What surprised Marlène was how little it took. "At first we thought it was going to be too simple," she said. But playtesters found even the smallest subversions "surprisingly evocative." The cup on the windowsill was enough. Which is itself a kind of insight: the experience of early memory loss isn't dramatic. It's quiet. A thing slightly out of place. A nagging feeling you can't quite resolve.
Subversion fatigue
The team learned quickly that more was not more. When subversions came too frequently, something unexpected happened: players stopped noticing. Worse, they stopped caring. Marlène coined a term for it — "subversion fatigue" — and it points to something important about designing for feeling rather than spectacle.
If nothing is stable, nothing is strange. Disorientation only registers against a backdrop of familiarity. The design challenge, then, wasn't how to disorient the player — it was how to carefully protect their sense of ground, so that when the ground shifted, they felt it.
This is a counterintuitive lesson that goes well beyond this one game. Designing powerful emotional experiences often means knowing what not to do, and when to hold back.
The pillbox that isn't a puzzle
Not every mechanic in As Long As You're Here moves things around. Some simply sit there, quietly resisting resolution.
The pillbox — a weekly medication organiser with days that don't quite add up — is one of the game's most haunting objects. Players encountering it for the first time almost inevitably treat it as a puzzle. There's a calendar on the wall. There are documents with dates. Surely these things connect. Surely there's an answer.
There isn't. And that's the point.
Marlène described going back and forth over whether to add consequences, puzzles, something to solve. They decided against it. "You quickly figure out," she said, "that it's just — it's beyond my control. It's kind of escaping me." The pillbox doesn't ask you to solve anything. It asks you to sit with the feeling of things being beyond your grasp. For a game about dementia, that restraint is everything.
What's clever is that the game teaches you this without explaining it. The early sequence where you unpack the apartment — placing objects on shelves yourself — trains you to pay attention, to notice where things are. And then, gradually, that attention is undermined. The game uses your own careful observation against you.
The bathroom door
Perhaps the clearest illustration of Marlène's design philosophy came in a story about a scene that took a very long time to get right.
Early in the game, the player gets locked in a bathroom. The team's first instinct was to make the disorientation visible and active — the lock appearing in different places as you looked around, a kind of shell game with the room. It wasn't working.
"It was giving a whack-a-mole feeling," Marlène said. "Like a magician's trick. And that's not dementia."
The final version is much simpler. You try the door. You try the handle. You hear water behind you. You turn, and the sink is overflowing — and when you look back, the door is open. Time has passed. You were distracted. You forgot what you were doing.
The simpler solution is more true. Not because it's more realistic, but because it produces the right feeling: not confusion about a magic trick, but the quiet horror of realising time has slipped by without you.
This is what separates good personal game design from merely interesting game design. Every mechanic is asking a question: does this make the player feel what we need them to feel? And the answer almost always requires stripping something away rather than adding something new.
The mechanic as ethical statement
There's a dimension to all of this that Marlène touched on carefully: the responsibility that comes with using game mechanics to represent illness.
The memory chalkboard — a mini-game where players tried to memorise words that would later be scrambled or replaced — was cut, despite being clever. The stove left on, with smoke in the kitchen, creating urgency and immediate stakes, was cut. Not because they didn't work mechanically, but because of what they were saying. Urgency contradicts the slow dissolution of time that defines early dementia. A memory trick feels like a designer showing off, not a patient living through something.
"It's always a really kind of touchy thing to work on when it's something like an illness," Marlène said. "You want to be really mindful that the metaphors you're making are respectful and proper."
This is the deepest insight from the evening. Mechanics are not neutral. They make arguments. They tell the player what something is like, what it means, how it feels to be inside it. In a game built from personal grief and genuine research, every design decision carries ethical weight. The question isn't just does this work — it's does this say something true?
This is the second of two posts from our Playable Stories: Inside As Long As You're Here evening at Somerset House. The first post explores the personal and professional journey behind the game — read it here.
As Long As You're Here is available now.