Kind Words 2 review: as good-hearted as a city built on the internet can get

Worriers Anonymous

Kind Words 2 review
A tiny, cute city where you can spill your guts or sit in a hot spring dispensing life advice like a happy, wrinkling monk.

• Developer: Popcannibal
• Publisher: Popcannibal
• Release: Out now
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £17/$20/€20
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

A paper aeroplane falls at my feet, with a note written inside: "Even through everything that has happened... I never stopped loving you." Kind Words 2 is full of touching and drifting remarks like this, written by other players and tossed into the winds for you to find. If you're allergic to vulnerability, or find cuteness or the "wholesome" games trend hard to digest, you've probably already turned your face away. But if your heart is open, even a smidge, if you carry a deep craving to peer through the cracks in the internet to discover a small realm of common humanity, then Kind Words 2 can show you a glimpse of that warm and welcoming world.

It's a simple world of comfortable and colourful dioramas, which you navigate as a big-eyed avatar in cute glasses or baggy tracksuit bottoms. Yes, there's a fashion shop with a limited collection of clothes. And your own home (a simple room with a window and a writing desk) can be decked out with items and decorations earned as gifts from other players. But this isn't really the type of game about investing in your character's appearance. It's more about the act of writing to others.

There are a bunch of ways to communicate. The one that will feel familiar to players of the first Kind Words is the act of sitting at your writing desk and replying to "requests". These are short cards another player has posted, lamenting recent break-ups or venting about an annoying family member. You type out a reply to these and send it off. Or you offer your own worry as a prompt and wait for the advice and sympathies to roll in.

But this is just the most vanilla of back-and-forths. There's also a shop specialising in asking for recommendations. What's some good Spanish language music? (Ana Tijoux). What should I play on browser during my lunch break? (Scrambled Maps). Outside, you can scribble a sadness or a joke into one of those paper aeroplanes and send it off into the ether. Or you can have a piecemeal "chat" with other avatars in the street, again more akin to snail mail than an actual chatroom (the wandering characters aren't directly controlled by other players either, but simply represent them).

I sent off a letter in which I worried about a recent disastrous moving plan (an apartment I was due to move into fell through). I got three responses - two of which felt nice to hear but didn't shift my feelings all that much. The final one, however, made me feel better simply because the reply came from someone in a very similar position to me. Sometimes all it takes is to be shown you're not alone. This is something Kind Words 2 does a lot.

There are yet more places to share thoughts. There's a hot spring full of people trading wisdoms. And a notice board that simply asks for cat descriptions. There's an open mic café where you can write poetry or listen to other people's free verse (think Comedy Night but without the heinous offensiveness). One interesting feature is a big blobby monster called the Wiggling Void, who will simply eat your words without recording or sharing them at all.

At the top of a mountain, there's also a bench where you can look at the stars and make a wish. I found something particularly moving about this spot. It was stirring to just sit here for a moment, listening to the game's lo-fi warbles and reading people's desires. Their hopes for a steady job, a healthier body, more cats. Overwhelmingly, people wish for connection: friendships, family, and romance. Given that close relationships are increasingly found to be the basis for a life of happiness, it makes sense that loneliness is the number one source of hurt.

In this, and in other ways, Kind Words 2 brings up a lot of feelings. It's like taking a hot bath in other people's emotions. Inevitably, some of your own will come sweating out. It is cathartic and fleeting all at once, and reminds me a little of the feelings-first vox pop videos of Thoraya. I would call it therapeutic, but don't want to prescribe this game as some sort of substitute for true human bonding and support, even if it is a comforting balm. Much of the connection and release offered here is still better experienced in the real world, by talking to strangers or confiding worries in real friends (this is comforting, because Kind Words 2 will someday lose its playerbase - something hopefully not applicable to the real world any time soon).

It also brings up some worries of "toxic positivity". It's evident that some elements of the game are ferociously happy, as if by mandate. All the hairstyles have names like "great", "happy" "desirable" "neato" - you won't find a "meh" hairstyle here. There's a "pop-up" stand that offers a simple question every day to people gathered in the plaza. A recent one was: "Pumpkin spice latte. What is its place in the world?" Which made me wonder if the developers pick purposefully mild and uncontroversial topics (pineapple on pizza did not even make the cut). This fits with the idea of a space designed to avoid conflict and nastiness. The game is called "Kind Words 2" after all, not "Reddit 2".

Yet despite the framework feeling almost repressively nice, it's not fair to say it is toxically so. The notes you get are often full of hurt or trouble. People share thoughts of violence or painful memories. Many messages are not solvable problems (at least not by you), they can be missives of anxiety, fear, rejection, loss, and friendlessness. If you chose to respond to these with a relentless attitude of positivity - ("Don't worry! Everything is actually okay and good!") then that might not be truly helpful. But from my experience, most replies are along the lines of: "That sucks, me too lol."

Your requests and prompts can feel helpful in the short term, in other words. I struggled for years to discern the difference between "personal" thoughts and "private" thoughts. Still do sometimes. But more and more I understand that sharing a messy bit of your brain is actually a type of social glue. This is just another avenue for practising the habit of sheepish self-revelation. It feels good to throw paper aeroplanes! Even if doing it IRL is healthier.

As for the replies you get, it's easy to make fun of the truisms and platitudes that come most freely to people when we're asked to sympathise with others. ("It will all work out!" ... "Plenty more fish in the sea!") And it can feel like there's an element of performance to some responses you get. But it's also hard to judge the author's level of authenticity from behind an avatar. If you can give people the benefit of the doubt, even a cliché can be heartwarming. And I say this as a person who hates clichés, yet has felt their worth firsthand.

Roughly 22 years ago, I was sitting by a shop on a city street, feeling miserable and invisible. My friends seemed to have all evaporated, depression was at the door. As people passed, one woman in a sari smiled as she walked by and looked me in the eyes. She said: "It's not the end of the world." And then she vanished into the streets. She was a stranger, all she offered was a simple, commonplace phrase of encouragement. If I remember right, it even annoyed me a little. Why was she so fucking chipper?

And yet... the spell of sadness was broken. Her words were enough for me to see that I'd been spotted and noted, that not every passer-by was oblivious to my sadness. I got up and went on with the day. We have this idea sometimes that connections with others must be long-lived to be meaningful. Yet years later, I still think of this random woman who offered me a smile on a grey day. I encountered her for less than five seconds.

Relationships don't just encompass those with whom we drink our pumpkin spice lattes, or those we work beside, or take out to the cinema, or plan a roadtrip with. There is meaning in the anecdote you share with a train conductor, the mini-rant about the local council you have with a fellow dog walker, even (god forbid) the blue joke you get from a taxi driver. Kind Words 2 isn't about forming friendships (it admits as much when it asks you never to identify yourself). It isn't even about community, as every live service game seemingly wants to be for its own purposes. It's simply about passing someone in the street, seeing their hurt, and telling them it isn't the end of the world.