In the solo journaling game Anamnesis, Sam Leigh pairs the acts of digging through lost memories with interpreting tarot cards. Anamnesis is quiet, contemplative, not so much peaceful as it is disassociated, connected to the world by the thin strands of its prompts. It's a tremendously sparse game that lets your chosen deck do the talking. It holds space for the questions that follow drawing a card. Why this image? What about this prompt would summon this response from one's unconscious mind? What kind of person would think this? That's a fun exercise to apply to a character in third person. But here, there's no remove--the game positions the player in first person. It's about you. You are a stranger to yourself, as opaque as an image on a card. Anamnesis provides prompts for the minor arcana, but no guidance for the Major. No suggestions, no handholding; you are left alone, just you and the card. You are solely responsible for whatever you interpret.
Tarot is a reflective tool, a warped and shifting mirror. It is an inexact thing, and Anamnesis takes advantage of that friction, that displaced rub of information and truth that often makes playing with a tarot deck feel really dissonant. Tarot says "this random collection of ideas describes you." Anamnesis asks "what if that was accurate? who would you be?" You are an amnesiac; you do not recognize yourself in the mirror. You don't know where these scars came from, or who last styled your hair. Your body is a stranger, your personality even more distant: your reactions are contextless and come to you as powerful as they are seemingly random. Anamnesis asks, what if these flashes, these impulses, these symbols, were all you had to build an identity on? Would you accept them? Or would you judge them as intrusive thoughts, deny them as such? What sort of person would you construct from this imperfect knowledge?
The last act of Anamnesis asks you to choose a Major Arcana card to represent your present self. Don't draw it unseen, it is careful to clarify, but choose freely from the deck. I find this really interesting. You draw one Major Arcana at the beginning as your Shadow, and draw 12 more to answer 3 questions for each suit. That gives you 13 opportunities to become familiar with your Major Arcana cards. Assuming you don't draw a card twice, that leaves a little less than half of the Arcana as unexplored territory. But for the final mechanic of the game, all of the cards are available to you, unlocked at last-- if just as unfamiliar as they started. Maybe you know this deck well, maybe you don't, but you certainly haven't seen these 9 undrawn cards in the context of this game. So the choice becomes: pick an aspect of your past self to embrace, or discard all guidance from who you once were and choose to become someone completely new, based only on the potential of the card you choose.
Anamnesis leaves the game here, but I wish it didn't. I found myself hungry for a chance to ratify my character, to prove their decision in some way to the world, or to another character, or to their old self. Your internal relationship is between you and the deck, but your external relationship is between you and Anamnesis. The text guides you through each act; its three challenges within that act illustrate you in contrast to your body, your surroundings, your reputation, other people around you, the evidence of a life lived that you've left behind. I wanted to see a reaction to my final choice; I wanted one more challenge, one last chance to reveal my autonomy. But I recognize that this hunger may be misplaced for this kind of game, or maybe it's unique to me. One of my own games, Spindlewheel Detective, is a spread reading of a murder mystery that ends in choosing a culprit card and drawing from the deck for the judge's verdict of the culprit's fate. When playing Detective solo, I relish this chance to see my choice validated or undermined by the deck. But most of the time, when I run this game for other people, they are more than satisfied with having uncovered the mystery, and the final card draw gets dropped. I do believe in an oracle deck's ability to "judge" an action, or to prompt resistance to that action in an oblique and unexpected way.
But it's not ultimately necessary: Anamnesis is not about your action, it's about your reaction. The deck can say whatever it wants. In the end, the only judgement that matters is yours.