Yeah, this is gonna be a weird one. I mean that as an utmost compliment.
The “Milk Bag Duology” as I prefer to call them are a pair of visual novels by Russian developer Nikita Kryukov, carrying themes of mental illness, trauma, hallucinations, and the struggles of everyday life. I'm playing the Switch version that compiles both into one package- they're really better experienced as two halves of one whole.
They're fairly light on choices or meaningful dialogue options, but the vibes in these two are off the charts. I haven't seen a piece of media unsettle and sadden me in equal measure in a long while. They're short, but they're VERY impactful.
If you want to go in spoiler free, stop reading this and go play them now, because I'm about to dig DEEP into it. Nothing I say can substitute the experience of playing it for yourself.
PART 1: MILK INSIDE A BAG OF MILK INSIDE A BAG OF MILK
PRESENTATION
This game takes intentionally low-quality visuals to its most logical conclusion, and it is all the better for it. Everything is dreary, covered in black, pink, and red, with anything you see being barely comprehensible. It’s one of those games that really lets your imagination creep in and fill in the blanks, dragging you into the bizarre mood that the game's trying to set. I'll give more specific examples later.
The music is equally negative in the best ways possible. It’s full of horrible, repetitive droning that gets under your skin and dies there. I mean this as a compliment- this is NOT easy music to listen to, and it conveys the unsettling nature of the game as a whole perfectly.
THE STORYLINE
If you want to go in spoiler free, stop reading this and go play the game now, because I'm about to dig DEEP into it. No attempt at analysis I give can substitute the experience of playing it for yourself.
The spoiler-free synopsis is "A girl tries to buy a bag of milk, while dealing with the struggles of mental illness." That's as much as I can say without giving away everything that makes this game special.
Got it? Good. Then here we go- this is going to be a trip and a half.
It starts off with your unnamed protagonist outside a store, trying to work up the courage to go inside and buy a bag of milk. Such a mundane thing, but the bitcrushed visuals and droning synth music make it sound like something terrible’s about to happen. Keeps you on edge, even though for the most part, nothing is there.
What's also interesting about this game is that you the player are NOT put in the shoes of the Girl. (She's never named, so I'll call her Milk Girl for convenience.)
Rather, you play as a voice in her head, guiding her through occasional prompts that come up. Not that you can do much to influence the story, here- you’re a passenger, along for the extremely surreal ride.
I mean, the girl is losing it over taking unequal numbers of steps on the asphalt and grass, so… that should illustrate the kind of madness we’re dealing with here.
But I have to say, I'm a huge fan of this idea. Rarely are we the player so obviously treated as an outsider. If the player is acknowledged in games it's usually as some all-powerful figure, or the fourth wall doesn't exist. Here, you're just along for the ride, strung along in the bizarre existence of Milk Girl.
Getting to the store is a struggle, but actually getting to the store is any better, really… as you just get locked in an infinite loop of “Excuse me, What?”, the guy saying “O”, and explaining the girl’s fear of the letter O.
Yes, this is as utterly inexplicable as it sounds. And it gets better!
The entire game has a recurring motif of getting stuck in mental loops, perseverating on the same thought over and over again until something snaps you out of it- in this case, you, the voice in her head. Most famously with the phrase “milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk…” You get the idea.
It's not a fun problem to have, and the game conveys that feeling of being stuck expertly.
Even checking out at the cash register is an entire ordeal, having to prompt the girl to pay for the milk with a profoundly unhelpful cashier. Whether that guy is actually supposed to be this taciturn or this is the Girl’s neuroses talking is up to interpretation.
And how the interaction is described as taking up DAYS gives a ton of insight into how exhausting regular tasks are.
There's plenty of little tidbits to chew on, that give a bit of insight into Milk Girl’s psyche. Mentioning how hefting the bag of milk feels like physical therapy, how her mom will be really mad at her if she comes back without it, going on huge tangents about complex- and slightly incoherent- math related to said bag of milk, which reeks of a hyperfixation…
And comparing the tail-lights of a truck to the eyes of a bear- one of many hallucinations that she experiences. Especially given the revelation that she’s taking pills to combat… something, and they’re not working. If they did before, they’re not working now.
And when you try to confront the idea that a lot of this is in the Girl’s head, at any point...
You get this lovely image along with ear-piercing chiptune noise. It definitely spooked me since I wasn’t expecting it at all. This can also appear if you deliberately insult the Girl, or otherwise don’t go along with her mindset.
And then you’ll have to start over at the beginning again. Thankfully, the game's short enough that it doesn't feel like a chore.
And don’t think that mashing through will save you, either. Sometimes the game places the correct choice below the wrong one. Carefully paying attention is the only way to- I hesitate to say "win" in this context. Let's say, 'progress'.
Near as I can figure out, this feels like an examination of the problem that sometimes, people with mental illness- or any problem, really- are happier in their own head, the space they've built for themselves… and trying to drag them out of it forcibly won’t work.
And having to start the game over again and again constantly, punishing you for mashing through, feels like an encouragement of being patient and not just trying to brush off folk out of hand in ways that aren't productive.
I feel like this one quote perfectly encapsulates the themes of this game.
“The world is cruel and dangerous.”
“I’m not in that world you’re talking about.”
Of course, it gets more and more surreal when the Girl starts actively addressing you, the player, explaining how her pills aren’t working… and brings up that she's trying to act like a visual novel protagonist to make getting the milk easier.
It's a rare fourth wall break that doesn't feel cheeky or abrupt- because the barrier's been blurred already by casting the player as a voice in Milk Girl's head.
She gives a few interesting details- like how the shades of red in the game’s color palette are her actual vision. And when she shows you her “dad”- or rather, what’s left of him after he jumped out a window- it’s yet more pixelated gibberish, like it’s filtered through the eyes of madness, or childhood innocence.
I stared at that picture for like two minutes trying to parse it, but I couldn’t. And I”m sure that’s on purpose.
Eventually, the pills she took wear off, leaving her on her own without you to guide her...
And when the Girl finally gets back to the apartment, her mom appears.
Not only does she look like THIS, the music cuts off when she shows up, killing the atmosphere stone dead. And since the pills wore off, you’re not there to guide her anymore. All she does is ask if she brought the milk, and tell her to go to bed. But before anything can happen…
The game ends. Just like that.
Well, good thing there’s a sequel!
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Mental illness is HARD to portray properly. It’s all too easy to fall into sensationalism. But there’s nothing sensational about this girl. She’s just stuck in a rut, with nobody around her seemingly giving a shit. And only a voice in her head- that isn’t even real- to guide her through life, with even the simple act of buying a bag of milk being difficult.
It’s subtle, and that makes it all the more depressing and frightening.
This game is full of subtle yet worrying bits of dialogue. Stuff like her mentioning that she knows her hallucinations can’t hurt her, yet seemingly walking into the path of the “bear” anyway…
And of course, the last scare of the Mother appearing, which puts a lovely bow on the whole thing.
Maybe I’m being melodramatic about this. But this game feels like a VERY personal statement that is only barely glimpsed through its brevity. It may only be like… 20 minutes long, but it’s a VERY impactful twenty minutes.
All of those words i wrote about it, and that’s only the first game. There’s a sequel. And it’s so much worse- and so much better.
PART 2: MILK OUTSIDE A BAG OF MILK OUTSIDE A BAG OF MILK
This game has a HUGE increase in production quality compared to the first, and it’s obvious right from the start with this GORGEOUS intro cutscene that recaps the first game in glorious anime style…
Complete with text boxes from the player in the Girl’s head. Thankfully, we don’t get to see the Mom in this. But she will appear, don't you worry.
ACT 1: THE OPENING
As soon as the game proper starts, you see this. Oh dear. Unlike the first game with its deliberately garbled and minimalist still images, Milk Outside A Bag of Milk is MUCH more detailed. The red color palette remains, but it's enhanced with subtle bits of movements in the images.
I'm a huge fan of monochromatic graphics, and this segment speaks to me heavily on that front.
The internal monologue is a hell of a lot more detailed now that the Girl doesn’t have the player to guide them, drinking in every bit of her thought processes and hallucinations. Shadows on the walls, creeping up everywhere. They may not be real, but they’re every bit as intimidating.
The familiar eyes shot from the first game is recontextualized here, being much more ominous since the Girl isn’t talking to you. She’s talking to herself, and she’s scared.
I do also have to shout out the prose here- this is common across both games, but the narration is very verbose and well written, knowing exactly what to focus on to heighten the tension.
Then the Mother appears. Backed to horrific guitar droning, her face visible in the dark, with the rest of her terrifying form only occasionally blinking into existence…
Oh, she lives up to the creepiness from the last game, tenfold. If this is how the Girl sees her mother… yikes. The increase in pixel resolution in this game does WONDERS here.
It injects something into the Girl’s arm- is it an epi-pen? It could be. After all, drinking milk is bad for the Girl, isn't it? In all likelihood, this is something fairly normal, but filtered through the eyes of madness makes it immensely unsettling.
Never has something has simple as an allergy been so terrifying. And this is just the opening!
ACT 2: WELCOME BACK, VOICE IN MY HEAD
The Girl is still perseverating on random thoughts, again. Getting stuck brushing her teeth in the middle of the bathroom, reminiscing about how going into the world of dreams used to be fun…
Before the incident, at least.
Now, more than ever, we get some details into her mental state. The phrase “dead inside” has never been more fitting, swallowing so many pills without thinking… combining them willy nilly… it’s a bit of a mess. And the most unsettling part is that Milk Girl just kind of treats this as blase and normal, even though it clearly is not.
And the music conveys this expertly, with just droning synths that don’t even have a melody. More of malaise-like tone that drags out longer and longer, or at least it feels that way.
And just when it seems like the Girl is going to go crazy from loneliness, you the player are finally given a way back into the narrative from the cocktail of pills she took. And no matter how much you admonish her for taking the pills too much… how can you say no to those eyes?
She needs company. Even if its not real. And that’s something most can relate to, I feel. No matter how much she tries to deny it.
I have to shout out the graphics here- this game looks absolutely gorgeous. The red environments are rendered in fine pixelly detail, and the Girl is absolutely adorable, in a sad sort of way.
Even more than the last game, this feels like a deeply unsettling look inside a person who’s trying their best to take care of themselves but can’t muster up the mental energy to. It’s not a great headspace to be in, and this game conveys it expertly. The looping monologues are more frequent, the swinging between defiance of her condition and being terrified of it…
It’s upsetting. And realistic. And that makes it worse.
(All of this is a compliment, by the way. This game is EXTREMELY well written, as if my gushing about it wasn't enough of a clue.)
When the Girl is lying in bed, musing about the concrete ceiling falling on her head one day, nothing you say can get her mind off it. It’s depressing knowing that so little can reach her.
Trying to get her thoughts in order, but they’re all jumbled. I can relate to that to some extent.
(Try scanning that QR code, by the way! It works, and it's very unsettling.)
And when she starts trying to finish her thought, and you say the wrong thing... you get jumpscared by a vision of being strangled. Things are getting worse.
ACT 3: COLLECTING FIREFLIES
After that, the environment descends into hallucinatory gibberish. And unlike last time, you can see it all in grisly detail. Vague suggestions of things. Bottles, eyes, noses… but it’s all too garbled to see.
If this is what the Girl is seeing, then that is worrying indeed.
Especially when you bring up drinking milk… that’s a real mess.
And now, finally, once that cools down, you get to the heart of the game. Checking on all the objects in the room to find the Girl’s thought fireflies. Literal bugs representing her train of thought that she has to track down. It’s not much, but it’s relaxing. And the banter that she provides is always amusing and depressing in equal measure.
You get more nuggets of backstory here- like how her last day of school involved a lot of scratching and biting… and her dad buying milk, oh dear.
But only if you press her to tell you things. Thankfully, she won’t end the game early this time if you push, so feel free to ask away.
There are five fireflies lurking around in this room, and finding them all will be important later…
I’m not going to summarize every single conversation from here- just play the game and find it out. But they run the gamut from cute, to depressing. As per usual with this game.
The most interesting monologue here is the one from the computer… she had a lot of hobbies on the computer. But one day she went on the internet, and had a lot of friends…
Who the Girl believes are just lines of code, and not real people.
But she gets interrupted before she can finish that story…
Just don’t click the glitched out pile of boxes in the corner. They don’t work.
Of course, if you go outside to the balcony after you finish searching, you get a revelation. So this is the fear of the “O”... the moon itself, rendered as a hellish void through her crimson vision.
ENDINGS
This game has five different endings to collect, all dependent on different outcomes in the searching segment. Each changes the dream that the Girl has after she falls asleep. Some fill in a little bit more of her backstory, some are just unsettling for the sake of it. But all are equally interesting to unpack. Of note is that Milk Girl mentioned earlier that she's stopped dreaming for a while. Do these dreams represent some sort of breakthrough in her mental state? They could. The mind is a fickle thing, isn't it?
Ending 1 is the default, which you’re locked into if you trigger the strangulation cutscene. And it’s as depressing as it comes. The Girl meets a mysterious boy named Treska, and takes him to the store… To buy MILK.
This is very familiar, isn’t it? The store closing in fifteen minutes, the aisles, getting frozen in front of a customer… but with Treska instead of the girl.
It’s the same sequence of events from the first game, but now in higher resolution…
And then, he says “It’s like you’re not helping me at all…”, turning the game over quote from Milk Inside on its head. Perhaps this is a way of the Girl realizing how she looks to everyone else...
The second ending is obtained if you find the Girl’s phone sitting on the floor without triggering the strangling cutscene. The Girl is sitting at the top of a building, on a balcony… and it’s one of only two parts of the game that are in normal colors.
She keeps monologuing about how she’s kept her weird thoughts in her head, all intercut with pizza delivery order conversations…
And long dialogues about how everything is utterly pointless… eventually looping back in on itself. Repeating the same lines of dialogue, again and again, only with minor variations..
I feel like this ending might be a commentary on how trying to get out of one’s own head feels futile, and it’s easy to get stuck in yet more loops.
The third ending requires getting all the fireflies… and it features the Girl’s first day of school, which she’s convinced will be absolutely horrible.
The scene keeps repeating, with the reflection in the mirror getting more and more distorted with each repeat, and the music getting similarly screwed up, slowing down…
But only the last one has different dialogue. And that’s the one where she has NO face in the mirror.
I interpret this as being symbolic of hiding one’s own “real” self to fit in to the wider population, and having to distort yourself ever further. Eventually, after enough of that, there won't be any of you left?
The fourth ending requires viewing the full laptop monologue, then going out to the balcony, where she promises to finish her story about her internet friends.
As she’s falling off, down, down down down, she elaborates on her best friend. The only one to convince her that he was a real person on the internet… and proceeded to harass her heavily with an army of bots.
…which may explain the Girl’s deteriorating mental state even more. But that’s not the end… there’s still the dream.
It’s another monochromatic one, but this time it’s green. The Girl is trapped in a dark room, with SOMETHING outside… but it gets worse. The room keeps getting bigger. Somehow, I never considered that that would be more terrifying than a small, crushing space… just getting lost in an infinitely expanding, featureless plane.
And the music is not helping, sounding like bizarre knocking and grinding noises…
And yet somehow, getting outside is even worse. The loud buzzing of the outside world, the infinite expanse… and a person outside.
One that’s chasing the Girl, but never getting closer. Just maintaining a constant distance… until it catches up. Then the Girl wakes up. Again. Perhaps this ending is about the fear of being alone, in an infinitely silent and seemingly uncaring world, with nothing but yourself to keep you company, to keep you grounded.
The fifth and final ending requires deliberately failing at every requirement, but NOT triggering the strangulation scene. Definitely the hardest one to get.
And this one is just as inexplicable as the last. A giant monochrome megastructure, extending infinitely into space. The stairs keep going, up and down… where’s the end?
And then comes the reveal. The music drones louder and more oppressively, backed to the intimidating sight of TONS of those infinitely tall columns covered in stairs. The sheer enormity of it is striking… Girl is having some very weird dreams.
The entire time there’s tons of weird quotes that make absolutely no sense- it reminds me of the ending to Cruelty Squad, almost. Perhaps these quotes are from her psychologist? And the way the Girl is possessed by the giant structures, compelled to walk up them… it’s terrifying. I interpret that as the fear of the world being so much bigger than you, being strung along as part of massive social structures you can't begin to wrap your head around, before you're even born. Picking a path, while having no idea what's at the end.
It’s a very striking image, to be sure.
And at the end of all of that, Milk Girl wakes up, tears in her eyes from finally being able to dream again. No matter what terrifying things her subconscious showed her, she's made a breakthrough. Perhaps she'll heal, as much as she can, one day.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If Milk Inside was an appetizer, Milk Outside was the main course. The production values are massively increased across the board, with delightfully unsettling graphics that are beautiful and haunting all at once. The point and click segment is an appreciated addition that has a lot of lovely dialogue in it-
But the star, as with the last game, is the writing. This is a DENSE game, several times longer than its prequel, and carrying much more thematic heft. The dialogue is unsettling, upsetting, and deeply human, with the symbolic endings leaving you on a note of "what the hell did I just play?"
I don't know, to be honest. All my interpretations of this game are just that- interpretations. But perhaps if you play it, you might have your own.
That's the power of good art- to get people talking about what it means. Most of the stuff on this blog I cover because it's fun to play, not necessarily because of any deeper message. But this one just spoke to me. The themes of getting stuck in your own head, finding everyday tasks difficult...
All I'll say is, I get it.
Needless to say, I highly recommend this game if you like disturbing fiction, visual novels, or just want something strange that'll stick with you.
GAME LINKS:
Milk Inside a Bag of Milk:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1392820/Milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk/
Milk Outside a Bag of Milk:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1604000/Milk_outside_a_bag_of_milk_outside_a_bag_of_milk/