Payton Klaer

Write about your first heartbreak (not necessarily romantic).

Everyone talks about when they first gained consciousness. For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, this is basically when someone first comes to the realization that they are, in fact, a person who can make their own decisions and have their own life. That sort of thing.

For some, this is their first memory. For others, it’s in the middle of a really good movie. Sometimes it’s something really (and I mean really stupid). Luckily, this is the one thing that didn’t happen to me. There are moments I remember in my lifetime – like being four years old in my grandma’s classroom or going on a family trip to Florida when I was nine, but I think I really gained consciousness in 2015.

On January 30, 2015, a YouTuber named Jacksepticeye posted a two hour long playthrough video of Life Is Strange Episode One: Chrysalis. If you’ve known me for a while, I’m sure you know where this is going. Life Is Strange is a choice based RPG where the main character, Max, discovers she has the power to rewind time while also having visions of the future. This is really cool until she discovers that there is an apocalyptic-sized tornado heading straight for her town in five days. Then, her childhood best friend teams up with her to uncover what happened to a missing girl from the town while messing with time and learning what is going to happen at the end of the week. Another thing to know is that Jacksepticeye is a very well known video game YouTuber. He got famous online playing through all sorts of games and now has 30.4 million subscribers (I grew up watching his videos, I still do).

Basically, the game had such an impact on me that nothing was the same after watching the playthrough. The game was released one episode at a time throughout 2015 with the finale, Episode Five: Polarized coming to Jacksepticeye’s channel on October 20, 2015. And this was my first (real) heartbreak (spoilers ahead!).

In this last episode, Max is faced with the decision of saving her best friend, Chloe, or saving the whole town. This decision is a wild one. From an outsiders view, obviously, you should save the town. Saving an entire town versus one person shouldn’t be up for debate. But, for players and viewers, it’s a much more difficult choice. Throughout the entire game you are saving Chloe from getting shot, kidnapped, killed, paralyzed, the list goes on. You are rebuilding the friendship between the two girls that was destroyed years before the game starts. So, naturally, people get kind of attached to the pair.

I had never seen a game like this before Jacksepticeye’s playthrough. I had never been this attached to fictional characters in my life. So, twelve-year-old me wanted Chloe to live. I wanted the two best friends (who could have been more depending on your choices…) to stick together. Which is exactly what Jacksepticeye picked. Thank goodness! I got what I wanted! But, with that choice, you have to sit through a heartbreaking cut-scene as Max and Chloe leave the destroyed town with little-to-no survivors.

No matter what you pick, it’s tough. I cried with the ending of that game. I was devastated. At the time, I don’t think I understood why. Max and Chloe survived, why wasn’t I happier? Now, I’ve realized that it was the idea that their story was over that made me upset. There was no more of their game to be played.

The game made me who I am today. I love any choice based media from interactive TV shows to video games with different endings to choose-your-own-adventure books. Anything that I get a say in continues to be on the top of my list.

My first heartbreak ties directly into my most recent.

In December of 2021, another gaming YouTuber named Markiplier (a friend of Jacksepticeye’s with a similar amount of subscribers) posted the first episode of a playthrough for Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach. If I shared the entirety of what those games were about, we’d be here for probably over twenty pages, so just imagine the seventh game in a series starting in 2014 with a lot of mysterious story circulating around missing children and haunted animatronics.

This game franchise was huge when the new game was released. It got a lot of people onto the FNAF (Five Nights at Freddy’s) bandwagon, including me. I had played the original games when they first released as a kid, and I hated horror then. The jumpscares were too much for me. But now, post-COVID, I loved horror media. Tie that in with it being a choice based game? It was easy for me to quickly become obsessed. I was drowning in old videos of the games, lore breakdowns by the community, everything that I could get my hands on. Even now, FNAF continues to have a hold on me. New information came out about one of the games in August and I updated a presentation I have containing all of the current storyline (because the creator of the game likes to hide it everywhere). It’s ninety-two slides long.

That’s not even the most exciting thing, they announced a movie. Five Nights at Freddy’s on the big screen with the lead roles going to Josh Hutcherson (played Peta in The Hunger Games) and Matthew Lillard (played Shaggy in the live-action Scooby-Doo movie). The fans couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.

And on top of it all, it was being made by Blumhouse – the same company that made the Paranormal Activity movies. It was bound be to an amazing horror movie, and the good stuff didn’t stop there. They signed for a three movie deal. The creator of the games said the movie was so scary he was worried an R rating wouldn’t be enough. It was coming out Halloween weekend. There were rumors it was going to be three hours!

Each time new information came out, it got better and better. This was what we had waited for. With new games coming out plus the movie, I could not believe it. It was too good to be true.

It was. The official information was posted earlier this month.

It’s rated PG-13 and is only an hour and fifty minutes.

That’s my second heartbreak.