History VisualNovel / MilkInsideABagOfMilkInsideABagOfMilk

[[caption-width-right:300:...inside a bag of milk inside...]]

->Looks like 'Troper' doesn't help me at all...

Both games can be found on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} or at the author's [[https://itch.io/profile/nikita-kryukov itch.io page]].

->'''Girl''': Imagining myself to be outside of my mortal shell, but at the same time still being me. Ridiculous, like milk outside a bag of milk. And yet...

* LivingShadow: Some of the hallucinations the girl suffers from.

->'''Girl''': You'll ask: what does this indicate? And I'll tell you: nothing at all.
* MultipleEndings:
** A unique case. Depending on the items you've clicked and had you triggered the girl's "deaths" or not, [[spoiler:the dream she had after she goes to bed is different. However, the last scene is always the same; an animated cutscene where she wakes up, breaks into tears and stares at the "O" above her apartment.]]
** "You wont get it.": In a scene [[spoiler:resembling ''Milk Inside'', the girl escorts a hyperactive and moody boy named Treshka to buy a bag of milk. After getting into trouble with a stranger, having trouble finding the correct shelf and getting into arguments with the cashier, Treshka leaves the girl, telling her "you're not helping me".]]
** "This is Fine": The girl [[spoiler:prepares her first day of school and convinces herself "everything is fine" despite her messy hairdo. This scene repeats nine more times, with her reflection becoming [[BodyHorror increasingly freakier]] and the music becoming more and more distorted every time it repeats, until the 10th loop where she tells herself she is fine and the background music returns to normal. After this, her face becomes her back and she wakes up before it can repeat.]]
** "Is Anyone There?" The girl is [[spoiler:trapped in an ever-expanding dark room. A mysterious voice seemingly tries to lend her assistance, but the person isn't there and she injures herself trying to get out. She manages to escape the room and a strange blaring voice echoes around the wilderness. Mustering the remnants of her strength, she attempts her escape into the wilderness only to [[GroundhogDayLoop get trapped in the same room as before.]]]]

** "Are We Friends?": A GroundhogDayLoop [[spoiler:where the girl talks to a pizza bot and repeats the same type of dialogue among the lines of "I don't feel particularly good or bad", but in varying scales between optimistic or pessimistic. After the 7th loop, the girl stares at a stop sign and a message: "Session timeout, please reload the page" is displayed before she wakes up.]]

In December 2021 Nikita Kryukov released a sequel, titled ''Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk'', which concludes the girl's story and is much longer, with multiple endings and much higher production values including an animated intro. It takes place after the girl has returned home with the milk and deals her going about her day, communicating with her voice and dealing with her illness.

* GameplayAndStorySegregation: The girl had messy hair in her in-game sprite, but in the animated cutscenes they were tidy.

* AbusiveParents:
** Downplayed for the girl's mom. It's suggested when the girl says her mother will "throw her out of the window" if she doesn't buy the milk. The sequel however, [[spoiler:implies that she still possibly cared for her to some extent, shown when she injected her daughter with an epipen that the latter interprets as a "poison claw" when she was suffering from milk allergy, indicating that she was more burnt out than anything.]]
** On the other hand, the exact details are unknown, but based on [[spoiler:the way the girl herself described it, her dad was completely fed up with dealing with her at one point, so he got her out of school and attempted to kill her by forcing her to drink milk before he committed suicide.]]
* CloudCuckoolander: The girl, PlayedForDrama. She has some very odd mental processes, strange phobias, sees people as weird creatures, is apparently a recluse... and that's just the beginning.
* ObsessivelyOrganized: In the first game, the girl freezes when her inner voice makes her notice that she was stepping on asphalt with one foot and on grass with the other, and she tries to "undo" the fifty-one steps she took that way. In the second game, the haphazardly-placed items in her room are purposefully left that way by her because she doesn't feel comfortable about them being moved around.

* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: We're seeing most things in the girl's view in both games. However since she sees other perfectly normal-looking people as monsters and everything around her being red, goes out of her way to repress details of her traumas and can't hold a proper conversation, what ''actually'' happened is up to interpretation.

* AbsurdPhobia: The girl is apparently afraid of the letter O [[spoiler:and all of a sudden we see how she visualizes it, as a sort of black hole]]. Naturally, she meets someone that (from her perspective) is only able to say that letter.
* BeatThemAtTheirOwnGame: When confronted with somebody that can only say "O", after the player character talks to her, the girl concentrates and puts aside her phobia of that letter: she says "O" back at them, to which they finally go away and leave her alone. You also get an achievement for it, to show how difficult it was for her to do that.
* BlackEyesOfEvil: [[spoiler:How the girl's mother looks like when she comes home to her at the end. Her sudden appearance can be disturbing.]] The sequel clarifies they are meant to be empty eye sockets.

* HelloInsertNameHere: After starting the game proper, the player is asked to input their name. [[spoiler:It only comes up if the player is nasty to the girl, since she suddenly quits and says that [name] wasn't useful to her.]] It's all but stated that [[spoiler:the name you input is actually the name of the medicine she's taking, and the player character is a personification of its effects.]]

* MediumAwareness: Played with - either she knows she's a character in a visual novel, or she enjoys pretending to be one in order to face the difficulties of the outside world. Though she still seems to be aware of some elements of the interface.

* InsaneTrollLogic: The player can ask her why she won't ask her mother to buy her a new sketchbook, and she'll respond that the player is being stupid because they're suggesting that she should perform one series of actions instead of another series of actions. Sure...

* MediumAwareness: Even more blatant. The girl states that last time pretending to be a visual novel protagonist helped her, so this time she's trying to be a point-and-click adventure protagonist. Guess what do we have to do at one point?

* MoodSwinger: As a part of the girl's condition, she's prone to shifting between happiness, sadness, anger and anxiety within a few sentences. It's also mentioned that she went to abrupt meltdowns before.

* SleepDeprivation: Towards the end of the game, the girl talks about how she experienced insomnia for an entire week and began to experience hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. She eventually collapsed of exhaustion, but the hallucinations never went away.

* TraumaButton: The girl says at one point that she hates milk, and it's heavily implied [[spoiler:she's deathly allergic to it.]] There's also implications that [[spoiler:her dad tried to kill her with that, and she drinks it because of OCD, often to disastrous results.]]
* UnreliableNarrator: The girl's worldview is so warped that her words cannot be taken at face value.

In December 2021 Nikita Kryukov released a sequel, titled ''Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk'', which concludes the girl's story and is much longer, with multiple endings and much higher production values including an animated intro. Both games can be found on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} or at the author's [[https://itch.io/profile/nikita-kryukov itch.io page]].

!!The original game provides examples of:

!!The sequel provides examples of:

* {{Animesque}}: The animated intro that recaps the events of the first game is made to resemble an anime, complete with yellow subtitles and odd camera angles. The intro has shades of ''Anime/SerialExperimentsLain'' and ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'', that share some of the same existential themes and disturbing sequences.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:...inside a bag of milk inside...]]

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/capsule_616x353_65.jpg]]

* MultipleEndings: A unique case. Depending on the items you've clicked and had you triggered the girl's "deaths" or not, [[spoiler:the dream she had after she goes to bed is different. However, the last scene is always the same; an animated cutscene where she wakes up, breaks into tears and stares at the "O" above her apartment.]]

* VideoGameCaringPotential: As her inner thoughts, the player can, through the multiple choice system, either help her on her quest [[[[VideoGameCrueltyPotential or tell her she's worthless, insufferable, that nobody loves her]]... Insulting her too many times will cause her to get fed up with "you" and restart everything all over, with another "voice" in her head.

* VideoGameCaringPotential: As her inner thoughts, the player can, through the multiple choice system, either help her on her quest or tell her she's worthless, insufferable, that nobody loves her... [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential Insulting her too many times will cause her to get fed up with "you" and restart everything all over, with another "voice" in her head]].

* VideoGameCaringPotential / VideoGameCrueltyPotential: As her inner thoughts, the player can, through the multiple choice system, either help her on her quest or tell her she's worthless, insufferable, that nobody loves her... Insulting her too many times will cause her to get fed up with "you" and restart everything all over, with another "voice" in her head.

* OverlyLongTitle: The girl says she's fond of these recursive structures (see TitleDrop below). Usually the two games are referred to as "Inside" and "Outside".

** In the other hand, the exact details are unknown, but based on [[spoiler:the way the girl herself described it, her dad was completely fed up of dealing with her at one point, so he got her out of school and attempted to kill her by forcing her to drink milk before he committed suicide.]]

* SuperOCD: One of the symptoms of the girl's condition. In the first game, she freezes when her inner voice makes her notice that she was stepping on asphalt with one foot and on grass with the other, and she tries to "undo" the fifty-one steps she took that way. In the second game, the haphazardly-placed items in her room are purposefully left that way by her because she doesn't feel comfortable about them being moved around.

!!Both games provide examples of:
* AbusiveParents:
** Downplayed for the girl's mom. It's suggested when the girl says her mother will "throw her out of the window" if she doesn't buy the milk. The sequel however, [[spoiler:implies that she still possibly cared for her to some extent, shown when she injected her daughter with an epipen that the latter interprets as a "poison claw" when she was suffering from milk allergy, indicating that she was more burnt out than anything.]]
** In the other hand, the exact details are unknown, but based on [[spoiler:the way the girl herself described it, her dad was completely fed up of dealing with her at one point, so he got her out of school and attempted to kill her by forcing her to drink milk before he committed suicide.]]
* CloudCuckoolander: The girl, PlayedForDrama. She has some very odd mental processes, strange phobias, sees people as weird creatures, is apparently a recluse... and that's just the beginning.
* SuperOCD: One of the symptoms of the girl's condition. In the first game, she freezes when her inner voice makes her notice that she was stepping on asphalt with one foot and on grass with the other, and she tries to "undo" the fifty-one steps she took that way. In the second game, the haphazardly-placed items in her room are purposefully left that way by her because she doesn't feel comfortable about them being moved around.
* SurrealHorror: The duology's storytelling relies on ambiguously described situations with multiple interpretations, surreal imagery and unreliable exposition. However, it's more of unsettling than outright horrifying. Though there still are disturbing moments.
* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: We're seeing most things in the girl's view in both games. However since she sees other perfectly normal-looking people as monsters and everything around her being red, goes out of her way to repress details of her traumas and can't hold a proper conversation, what ''actually'' happened is up to interpretation.

* AmbiguousDisorder: It's never stated what the girl actually suffers from, and she herself says she doesn't want to tell what her diagnosis was. However, based on her actions, it appears to be a combination of obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and autism. These aren't simply quirks and are played as seriously as they could.

** "You wont get it.": In a scene [[spoiler:resembling ''Milk Inside'', the girl escorts a hyperactive and moody boy named Treshka to buy a bag of milk. After getting into trouble with a stranger, having trouble finding the correct shelf and getting into arguments with the cashier, Treshka leaves the girl, telling her "you're not helping me".