Getting Started With Recollections Of My Nonexistence
Recollections Of My Nonexistence is an interactive narrative experience that has been floating around forums and indie gaming circles for a while. It is not a conventional game with a store page, and the lack of formal documentation means people who haven't used it yet often get stuck before they even get started. This guide covers the actual process of getting it running and a few things that are not obvious from looking at the source files. The core of the project is a text-driven interface that simulates memory reconstruction. It uses a custom parser that reads a small set of JSON files and an associated media folder. Most people treat it like a visual novel and immediately get confused because the engine is not built for branching dialogue trees in the traditional sense. The narrative logic is event-triggered through a state machine, which means progress happens based on conditions being met rather than choices being selected in a menu. The developer released this under a personal blog domain and never set up formal distribution channels. You will find it scattered across a few GitHub mirrors and sometimes hosted on itch.io without official confirmation. That scattered presence is one of the first reasons people struggle with installation.
Installation Process
The safest path is to pull the latest commit from the primary repository rather than downloading a ZIP from a mirror. I spent about three hours debugging a version mismatch once because I had grabbed a stale fork that was missing the updated parser library. If you clone the repo directly, you avoid that entire problem. Here is the order that actually works: Install Python 3.10 or later. The project does not work reliably on 3.9 due to a dependency on a newer dataclass feature. Clone the repository into a clean directory. Run pip install -r requirements.txt from the project root. Launch the executable or run python main.py from the command line. The first launch will take longer because the parser compiles the narrative tree into an intermediate representation. This usually takes between 30 seconds and 2 minutes depending on your hardware, and it only happens once per update.
Common Pitfalls People Miss
The encoding issue is the most frequent problem. The source files use UTF-8 with BOM, and if your terminal or IDE strips the BOM during a copy operation, the parser throws a silent error that makes it look like the save system is broken. It is not. The save system works fine. The parser just cannot locate the narrative nodes because the byte order marker was removed somewhere along the way. If you encounter a blank screen or an immediate exit with no error message, check the encoding of your local copy first. Another thing nobody mentions is the asset path requirement. The engine expects the media folder to be named exactly assets and sit at the root level of the project. If you extract the files in any other arrangement, the game launches but skips all audio and image rendering. You will still see text. I assumed it was a graphics driver issue on my end once and spent two hours troubleshooting GPU settings before I noticed the folder structure was wrong. That cost me more time than it should have.
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Save System and Workflow
Recollections Of My Nonexistence does not use automatic saving in the way most players expect. The save point system is manual and tied to specific narrative thresholds. You save by pressing the F5 key, and the save file is written to AppData/Local/RecollectionsOfMyNonexistence/saves by default on Windows. On Linux and macOS the path shifts to ~/.config/recollections_of_my_nonexistence/saves. If you lose progress, it is usually because you assumed the game auto-saved at a point where it actually had not. I recommend keeping a second save slot open before entering any major sequence. The parser has been known to crash during long narrative branches on systems with limited RAM, and while the crashes are rare, they do happen on machines with less than 8 gigabytes of usable memory. Loading from a previous save is instantaneous once you know where the files live.
Advanced Configuration
For people who want to modify the experience, there is a config.json file in the root directory that controls difficulty parameters, text speed, and whether the parser validates narrative state transitions before writing them. Setting validate_transitions to false speeds up loading but disables the consistency checks that catch broken references in custom content. If you are building your own branches or modding the story files, leave it enabled. The extra validation catches more errors than you would expect during editing. The project also supports a custom debug mode accessible through the command line with the --debug flag. This outputs a log to the console showing state transitions, parser cache hits and misses, and timing data for each narrative block. It is genuinely useful if you are trying to understand why a particular sequence is not triggering as expected.
Where To Find Recollections Of My Nonexistence
The original repository is hosted at github.com/understandable/recollections-of-my-nonexistence. There are mirrors on itch.io under the same name, but those versions sometimes lag behind by several commits. I always recommend pulling from the primary source. If you are looking for a direct download, the releases section contains compiled versions, though using the source build is more reliable because you avoid whatever the pre-built environment is missing on your particular machine.
Limitations You Should Know About
This is not a polished commercial product, and the limitations are real. The UI framework is minimal, which means controls can feel unresponsive on high DPI displays without adjustment. The text rendering does not support custom fonts unless you modify the source. There is no official multiplayer or shared save functionality. The developer has indicated interest in expanding the parser but has not published a timeline. If you need a stable, feature-complete experience, this may not be it. If you are willing to work around the rough edges, it is one of the more interesting approaches to memory-themed interactive fiction available outside of major platforms.
