Eight Last Signs in the Desert by Lichene (Laughingpineapple & McKid)
Where else to begin other than this is delightful?
Eight Last Signs is surrealism done right. It is deeply aware of its own roots while also forging ahead into the distant now, crashing gacha gaming into Magritte and Dali. The art and writing work harmoniously across the disintegrating barrens, with Satie dreaming his way through the soundtrack. The best thing about the experience is that the creators understand that surrealism is fundamentally comic, not tragic, even as everything in the game’s world is abraded to nothing.
We enter the desert at the coda of an apocalypse, finding ourselves worshipping at monuments of humanmade and natural detritus: a road cone, an ink cartridge, some selenite. We perform rites—don’t call them rituals—at each, clicking through cycling choices of uncertain meaning.
After visiting two monuments, we are rewarded with a eulogy of sorts that intertwines them. Certain choices we made come back to us as echoes or rhymes. Here, for example, is my marriage of an ink cartridge and a commemorative t-shirt:
The banding of the ink cartridge and the commemorative t-shirt, unfathomable inner workings. A man comes down the stairway and carries bright shapes on himself. Nobody can know more. Following a gap in the map, she reaches a hole. And she is vapour! Sublimated into bitter blues. It was a different person who clawed to this belonging. The letters are empty now. The liquid bubbles and rises through the perforated chambers. She counts on her fingers: yellow as the spine of a book, a tulip, a goldfinch, a pillow, a midcentury lamp, a tomato and a simplified depiction of the sun. Initiate the next phase of cleaning only if the print quality is poor. She unclogs it slowly with warm water and she waves in the distance, relaxed, wrinkled. In the city, life is carried over with the names filed off.
The language is electric, synaptic, and awash in the yellow I had previously chosen for the ink’s color. It’s a pretty nifty trick, this procedural stitching together of words into a compelling prose poem.
Then, once we’re finished reading, the monuments burn, just two more dissolutions in the desert.
Alongside the main story is a perpetual, postage-stamp-sized sidebar—the Twine file delightfully calls it “meanwhiles”—that leans away from myth and into current pop culture claptrap:
In another world: 146 automated spotify playlists used the image of three crescent moons over three men in bowler hats in the past 16 weeks. Ground down to inert particles.
The “meanwhiles” derive from Oulipian combinatorics (indeed, Queneau is cited as an influence in the credits). Substitutes for the Spotify playlists include painkiller ads and Redbubble accounts, and the images used are descriptions of artworks of the surrealist masters of the twentieth century. Other topics include YouTube, energy drinks, Funko Pops, and SEO, but no matter which reels the linguistic slot machine lands upon, all of it becomes eroded. Indistinguishable. Sand, sand, sand. And for the final act, of course, we must succumb, too.
Did I mention the game was funny?
The overall effect is one of a cosmic collapse beneath the folderol, served with just enough cynicism to keep it sharp. It is funny to make a pilgrimage to a road cone, to ascend it from the inside, and then ultimately to be atomized alongside it.
I’m concerned, though, that this haboob of words is frequently blinding, although I concede that may be part of the point. There’s just so much weirdness here that it’s hard to not become inured to it after a while, and it becomes impossible to focus on the beautiful language line by line. This is why the prose poem is the perfect form for surrealism—it offers just enough strangeness without overloading the reader. When I’m trying to read the narrative of worshipping at the monuments and clicking through the cycling links and remembering which two monuments I’m joining together and then reading the prose that links the two, it becomes, arguably, too much. However, the game wisely allows us to reread the best prose—the poems that arise after mixing two things—again at the end.
Similarly, I worry that the language is a little too tied to Breton’s original conception of surrealism and less attuned to more modern uses. The game tends to lean on the abstract too much, and it savors individual lines at the expense of following the thread of a larger whole. This experience, with its alien imagery and cycling links, distantly reminds me of Propentine’s With Those We Love Alive, and it comes up a little short. That story—and most modern prose poetry and surreal flash fiction—has a narrative impulse Eight Last Signs lacks. There are clear sequences of events to give readers a place upon which to hang their figurative hats. And while there is certainly the fundamental narrative of visiting the monuments here, often these vignettes are more about tempus-fugit ideas rather than an experience that continues to accrete. A day later, I remember almost nothing about the wicker monument, for example, even though at the time I found the language compelling.
And then there is the adage, attributed to Emerson, that if you are to aim for the king, you must kill him. English literature already has its perfect work about monuments crumbling in the desert: Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Arguably that sonnet (the least surreal of all poetic forms) does more in its fourteen lines than the game does with its whole. Is that a fair comparison? Of course not, but it’s difficult not to make it.
Much of my commentary here is academic (read: pretentious), but I enjoyed the experience so much that it’s right to consider it not just within the provincialities of the Comp but rather as part of the weft of postmodern literature as a whole. The game is a cri de coeur, a wheel of fortune, and a linguistic playground. It is lovely.
As for a score, let’s see … take pure psychic automatism, raise it to the power of a newsstand, carry the one … and ah, yes, we arrive at tautology. An 8, then, for Eight Last Signs in the Desert.
