Mad Father
This review contains spoilers for Mad Father and the extended game in the remake release.
I will be frank. I enjoy Mad Father just for Aya's character. If not for her, I really wouldn't like this one as much as I do. I'm certain I am not the only person who feels this way, either. Fanart for the game tends to be of Aya with the chainsaw or well...her father being mad (ahaha). Sometimes Robin. Either way, it seems the rest of the setting falls to the wayside.
I always felt like the dungeon and labratory were a bit overdone compared to the scale of the house. That might just be on me.
Either way, I don't have much truly profound to say about the themes of the game or what can be taken from the story underneath the story. There were hints throughout the original game that Aya was not all she seemed, even before the epilogue showed her in her father's footsteps. The way that she reacted to the many things she had to had to maim or kill throughout traversing the house, despite her apologies, always felt so disingenuious. I understand that the remake expands on this and reveals that she was evil from childhood and took after her mother, rather than her serial killer father, but even from the first release she was strange. She was frightened, yes, but had no qualms with doing anything to get to where she was going.
In that sense, I think the game succeeded in its handling of Aya. To those not really paying attention, the epilogue would come as a major twist. A shock. Oh poor Aya, twisted by her trauma of that night. But to those who have paid close attention to how Aya is responding, unbothered by the blood she draws and suffering she perpetuates and really only helpful to those spirits haunting the mansion should she gain something from in, will have expected everything to go wrong. This was not a normal child.
This was a child who had already learned to pretend to care and mask who she really was in a smile, an apology, and a facade of kindness.
Aya's mother is actually the perfect display of this, as an adult who has completely mastered this facade. I honestly didn't suspect for a moment that she, too, was "evil" or that she came from a long family line of "evil." I use the term loosely here, though. It's easy to give her, Aya, and Alfred all the label "psychopath," though that is not a diagnostic label like ASPD is. It's important to understand that ASPD is not "serial killer disease," but a personality disorder with genetic and enviromental factors with which the brain disconnects from many emotions that it has grown to see as detrimental to its continued existence. It's a deeply engrained, wired in coping mechanism to handle prolonged stress. Like with many personality disorders, you can learn to mask the traits. But unless actual work is done to heal and recover, it will forever just be a mask.
We aren't given any evidence that Aya was ever intentionally abused. She was adored by her parents, though for perhaps different reasons than fraternal love. It seems to me that the cause of her own symtpoms is emotional neglect and very simply her copying the people around her as she learned to be a person.
Aya is just a very interesting character to dissect. I don't believe she is entirely realistic and giving her the diagnosis of ASPD is far-fetched. It feels like she was simply created out of the stereotype of "psychopath" and any actual ASPD traits were unintentional. They simply wanted to create an "evil" character who would not seem "evil" at first glance.
It is interesting nonetheless.
Art by Imutsu_m