Visual Novel / Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk

...outside a bag of milk outside...

HELP ME BUY MILK!

>OKAY.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk is a very short Visual Novel made by Russian developer Nikita Kryukov and released on August 26, 2020. It is about an unnamed girl who has to go to the store and buy a bag of milk for her mother; it sounds simple enough, but she is affected by some mental illness that makes her perceive the world in very odd ways. The unusual part is that the player does not take the role of the girl, but rather of one of the voices in her head, that can either help or hinder her on her task. A psychological game with minimalist graphics and soundtrack, all provided by Kryukov, that offers an interesting insight in the mind of a person affected by various traumas and medicines.

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 night, communicating with her voice and dealing with her illness before going to bed.

Both games can be found on Steam or at the author's itch.io page.

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Both games provide examples of:

General

• Parody: Someone only known as "Mystael studio" made a parody of the first game named "Bread around bread around bread around bread", featuring an old man who needs to buy bread instead of the girl who is told to buy milk, with an approximation of its rough style. The part with the animesque girl talking directly to the player seems to be a parody of REFLEXIA (which in itself is already a parody of sorts) by mahoumaiden, who is a collaborator of Nikita Kryukov.
• Psychological Horror: Both games follow an unnamed girl with severe mental illness trying to go about her day. The first game is about her going to the store to buy milk and the sequel is about her trying to go to bed when she gets home. Both games feature strange and at times creepy imagery, but the actual horror of the games comes from the very honest message it has about living with mental illness. There is no easy, magical solution to your problems. You can't escape from your own mind, and sometimes the most you can do is to try to get through each day, even if that can seem impossible.
• Surreal Horror: 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.

Milk Inside

• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Played with. The girl talks to the player, but since we play as one of her thoughts/inner voices, she acknowledges she's monologuing inside her head.
• Broken Record: The person/creature the girl meets after entering the store is only ever able to say "O". She in turn always answers "Excuse me, what?" (Or, in one occasion, "W h a t ?"). This exchange goes on for a while until the player character tries to put a stop to it.
• But Thou Must!: At one point, the girl asks the player to promise to never ask her about the cause of her trauma. You can type "Yes", but this will only cause the girl to reply "Really?" and repeat her request endlessly, until you finally type something else.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Sort of. During her monologue near the end the girl talks about how her father committed suicide, and we're suddenly shown his bloody corpse... only, because of the extremely minimalistic three-color graphics, it's more or less impossible to tell what we're looking at, other than a bunch of pixels.
• Jump Scare: Certain graphics in the game pop up on the screen without warning, potentially startling a first-time player. This includes: a closeup of the girl's eyes once you get a Game Over, the image of the black hole which represents her fear of "O", and the girl's mother, depicted as an eyeless doll-like figure with an unnerving smile.
• Mind Screw: The whole game is seen from the perspective of a heavily medicated girl under severe mental distress, so players can't be sure about anything that is going on at all.
• Nameless Narrative: Nobody has a name in-story. Fans usually refer to the girl as "Milk" or "Milk-chan".
• No Ending: The girl goes back home, gives her mother the bag of milk, mother tells her to go to bed and then the game restarts as if nothing happened.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: When the girl gets back home, the chiptune-ish soundtrack stops and only a sound that could be the wind is heard. The final minutes of the game and the brief dialogue with the mother are set in complete silence, to make everything even creepier.
• Title Drop: The game's odd title comes from what the girl says after finally finding the bags of milk at the store. When she buys it, she also notes how the cashier gave her a bag to put the milk in, resulting in a bag of milk inside a bag.
• Video Game Caring Potential: 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.
• Voice Grunting: All part of the game's minimalistic style. The sequel keeps it despite the more advanced graphics.

Milk Outside

• 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 Serial Experiments Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion, that share some of the same existential themes and disturbing sequences, while the protagonist bears a heavy resemblance to Lain herself in both looks and demeanor.
• Art-Shifted Sequel: The art is no longer extremely pixelated and minimalistic, looking more like rough sketches for the backgrounds and a vaguely animesque style for the girl. There's a dream scene that uses the same color scheme of the first game, with an approximation of its style.
• Bad Bedroom, Bad Life: The girl's room is an obvious mess, fitting her mental state. There are assorted items placed haphazardly that the girl insists that's how they should be, things such as a laptop and the stationary in the girl's schoolbag in incredibly poor conditions, a sleeping bag instead of a proper bed, and oddly, a sink with her medication on top of it and emptied cartons of milk below it.
• Body Horror: In the "This is Fine" ending, the girl looks at herself in the mirror during her first day of school, while (almost) repeating the same monologue, but the girl's image on the mirror becomes increasingly distorted, such as her neck becoming unnaturally long and twisted like a pretzel, growing three pairs of extra eyes below her face or even her whole face becoming a hole. This is accompanied by the music becoming increasingly twisted per loop. At the 11th loop, the girl's face becomes her back, and she wakes up.
• Cyberbullying: If you check the girl's laptop, she will imply that this happened to her a long time ago, causing her to no longer use her computer, although she actively denies and represses the incident. If you trigger her "second death" event by entering the balcony however, she will explicitly confirm that she once knew someone who seemed friendly to her on the internet and told them openly about her mental condition. They however, simply spread it over the web to ridicule her, something that contributed to the sorry mental state that she's currently in.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The girl being treated so badly by all sorts of people over her mental illness issues make a lot more sense when one considers the game's setting was implied to be Russia (based on the cylindrical apartment the girl lives at), where ableism against mentally ill/unstable people are rampant from the Soviet era, to the present day.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Two in the animated intro: the first one shows a flashing "O" with the subtitles "excuse me, what?" (referencing the conversation with the monster in the second scene of the prequel), and the second, happening right before the girl goes back to her house, shows the girl standing next to a bloody limb presumably from her father's, followed by an image of a smiling woman, presumably her mother, or how she actually looks like.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The girl had messy hair in her in-game sprite, but in the animated cutscenes the hair is tidy.
• Guide Dang It!: The Multiple Endings have obtuse requirements for getting them, and the game gives little, if any, information on what triggers an ending. Despite the many dialogue choices you have, only a few of them actually determine what ending you get, and it is also dependent on clicking on specific items in the point-and-click section or whether you get all 5 fireflies.
• Hypocritical Humor: Of sorts. The girl has this to say about Treshka: "He's weird. Constantly shifting between happiness, sadness, loudness, silence. He's a wacko. And his name is stupid." She's all of these bar the name.
• Immediate Sequel: "Outside" starts exactly where "Inside" ended, with the girl coming back home and going to her room to sleep, or at least try to.
• Insane Troll Logic: The player can ask the protagonist 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.
• Living Shadow: Some of the hallucinations the girl suffers from in the intro are shadow figures that creepily gaze at her.
• Metaphorgotten: Among the various weird tangents the girl talks about the people in her apartment complex being like hamsters being taken from their habitat and put inside cages at the pet shop, but despite "our" gentle nudging, it quickly goes nowhere.
  Girl: You'll ask: what does this indicate? And I'll tell you: nothing at all.
• Multiple Endings: A unique case. Depending on the items you've clicked and had you triggered the girl's "deaths" or not, 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. The five endings are:
  • "You wont get it.": The default ending. In a scene 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 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 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 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 get trapped in the same room as before.
  • "I Looked Down": A spiral staircase erects from a vast darkness, with the girl trapped on it. She tries to travel upwards, but quickly can no longer before a "supercreature" starts talking and taking control of her body, and more steel staircases emerge from above. She travels downwards, and the "supercreature" gives her life advice before she wakes up.
  • "Are We Friends?": A "Groundhog Day" Loop 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.
• Non-Indicative Title: Bizarrely, the intro and some of the graphics show that the girl bought a carton of milk at the store, not a bag.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Averted. The new graphic style shows that the girl has red eyes, but she is basically harmless.
• Title Drop: A partial one.
  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...

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O!

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