There’s something strange about seeing your youth depicted in a video game.

I grew up on the internet. Sure, I had friends in real life, but the overwhelming majority of people I spoke to regularly weren’t local — they were my “internet friends” in the parlance of the time.

Back in the 90s and early aughts, dial-up was still very common, so hearing and seeing your friends online was very difficult. There was a lot of chatter on AIM and in-game chats, but it took a while to even get to a point where I could hop on a Ventrilo or Skype voice call to hear from these far-away entities. Video chatting, while technically possible, was usually out of the question until much later.

All of that is to say that “Cibele” is a wonderful time capsule of what it was like to be a young person in a very specific moment. Smartphones and the expectation of 24/7 access hadn’t proliferated quite yet, so you’d schedule times to log in and chat with your pals. You formed bonds through text and (eventually) voice chats — you could build them up as something else entirely in your mind.

Based on the real youthful experiences of Nina Freeman (“Lost Records: Bloom & Rage,” “Tacoma”), this lovely indie has the player navigate a fake PC user interface, log into a fake game, and live through a budding remote romance as it plays out in glorious full-motion video.

That’s right! This is the first FMV game on the list, and I couldn’t be happier. Just you wait, and we’ll be chockablock with FMV games here soon enough.

As you might expect, two young people who barely know each other probably aren’t going to stay together very long, but we do get to live vicariously through semi-fictional Nina’s longing and lusting for the internet boy.

I feel embarrassed playing “Cibele,” but not because fictional Nina nor her real-life development team did anything wrong. Instead, I start to blush because the honest depiction of this kind of relationship brings up memories of some of the silly decisions I’ve seen and made in my own misspent youth.

I knew someone here in Delaware who ended up selling most of his possessions so that he could fly to Vancouver to see a girl he met in “World of Warcraft” for just a week. Young people make bad decisions sometimes, or at least have unrealistic expectations of their online crushes.

I never did anything quite so dramatic personally, but I did spend a lot of time and effort courting girls that never really went anywhere. I feel the sincerity in my bones even if it isn’t a one-to-one of my online longing experience.

So many memories were made in online chats sitting in front of your PC in this one specific time and place, and “Cibele” is an excellent facsimile of that. People 15 years older or younger than me have their own stories, but this is mine.

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“Cibele” is available on PC.

Image credit: “Cibele,” Star Maid Games