Hypnosis. Fact or fiction? Who knows. Some claim it works wonders, forcing them to quit habits they’ve had for decades or to pick up things they always wanted to do but never could. Others say it’s complete hogwash—a snake oil sale reliant on placebo and your own convictions.
Whether it’s true, I don’t know, but a movie theater seems to believe in its powers to the point of wanting to hypnotize viewers into forgetting their favorite movie.
The reason? You get to watch it for the very first time—again. As reported by Dexerto, a Dutch cinema chain called Pathé is hosting an experimental project called REWIND, which would theoretically allow viewers to mind-wipe and memory-hole their favorite movies and then experience them as if they had never seen them before. The project is taking up 30 moviegoers and kickstarting on Nov. 9 at its Buitenhof venue in The Hague.
It seems to work by bringing people into a session with a hypnotherapist—in this case, Victor Kraemer who apparently has decades of hypnotic experience under his belt—who would then, well, hypnotize you into forgetting. However, Pathé seems to maintain the procedure isn’t 100 percent certain, since it is unclear whether hypnosis can actually make you forget an entire movie. I’m positive it’s even more difficult if you’ve seen the thing dozens of times, as many do with their favorites.
If it does work, however, I would love to memory-hole The Witcher 3 from my mind and get to play that masterpiece for the first time again. In 2015, I had a HD 6670 and a dualcore Pentium G2030 supported by six gigs of DDR3 memory, running TW3 at a 12-15 FPS average. It was a horrible experience overall, but even as such, it became my favorite game of all time, to the point where my family invested a lot in a new machine that I bought the year after just so I could play TW3 on high graphics and a great FPS.
The story was just so gripping, so enticing, enthralling even that no amount of poor performance or lag or slow-motion could deter me from playing through it. Between 2015 and 2016 I probably put in over 300 hours in the game on that original hardware, and have come back to replay it time and again over the last 11 years. Blood and Wine is especially close to me, and I can’t even remember (pun intended) how many times I had seen that TW3 trailer with Orianna in it.
It’s the perfect game in almost every way, and I envy those who are yet to try it.
