A winter morning on the beach by E. Cuchel
I’ve been replaying A winter morning on the beach for a while now, and it remains somewhat enigmatic to me. I’ve just reached the fifth, and likely final, ending, where the game calls me an arsehole. Naturally, I find this to be the best ending.
We are cast in the role of a sixty-year-old man with hypertension. Our doctor has advised us to walk ten thousand steps every day. And so we make our way along the abandoned beach toward our goal.
The beach is well-described, as is the sea. But we best get moving. In the game, admiring the scenery too long will result in us becoming bedizened with seagull excrement, forcing us to return home. Similarly, walking for too long will cause our leg to cramp and elicit a sanctimonious message from our narrator, also sending us home for the day.
Thus, we must walk along the beach but take frequent stops. At regular intervals, we also encounter informational signs with quotations about ecological virtue.
If we are neither hamstrung nor shat upon before we accumulate our daily steps, we reach a bathhouse where we find a red toy car in the sand and a crying child to whom we can give it. We do so, and are told, “You have always wanted a grandchild to play with, and today you proved that you would be a great grandfather.” Then our daughter calls, and informs us we will soon be a grandfather. (If we show the child the car but do not give it to him and leave, we are instead met with news of our arseholery.)
The game is put together well, but it’s difficult to see the purposes at which it aims. The experience is so serene, and the final choice so obvious, that it seems slight. The signs seem to hound us into becoming more eco-minded, but the ending is unrelated to that. And the “correct” end feels as sticky-sweet as the child may very well be.
Perhaps we could imagine, if our sacred texts were more concerned about high blood pressure, the story as a salted-air passion play—our body almost too much to bear, the scourge of the seagulls, the long journey, the beseeching signs, the red of blood, the recognition of the mother, the promise of new life. Of course, that would be quite a stretch, even more than the ones our doctor has prescribed for us.
It’s delightful to see Mathbrush’s Simple Multimedia Effects in the wild, and I found the game’s use of hyperlinks to be quite effective—sometimes using them and sometimes not, and the gliding between clicking and typing was effortless. The visual presentation of the game is more head-scratching; the beach background is fine, but nothing in the story seems to justify the deliberate choice of an ancient green-on-black computer monitor.
The game is implemented quite well and is easy to play. The author has labeled it as experimental, which seems appropriate. But I leave the beach feeling unsatisfied. The net effect is too tame, and the final choice and message too insistent, for A winter morning on the beach to travel anywhere beyond its rather suburban strand.