Content note: Murder and sexual abuse of a child
This is a medium-length (~30 minute) Twine mystery. The blurb describes the setting as “the end of the last century,” which made me expect the late 1800s until I looked at a calendar in-game and saw that it was 1996. Hrm. That’s on me, I guess.
Anyway, the protagonist is investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl allegedly committed by his uncle in Big Fish, a small town on the shores of a bay filled with crocodiles. The uncle has already been found guilty and executed (by being thrown to the crocodiles!), but we believe him to be innocent, and are trying to clear his name and find the real killer. It’s no surprise that the town, its inhabitants, and even the local wildlife are not entirely what they seem, with dark secrets below the surface. Points of comparison that occured to me include Twin Peaks, Midsommar, and even Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing.
Unfortunately, however, the writing isn’t really good enough to live up to that promise. You can see what atmosphere the game is trying to evoke, with the town’s pleasant surface, culty undercurrents, and mysterious figures in the woods, but it never really came together for me. There are also confusing switches from second to first person and present to past tense that should have been resolved with another editing pass.
(Spoilers from this point on.)
Despite all this, I did enjoy the ending. Much of the investigation seemed railroaded, with the clues being uncovered by quite obvious means and no significant choices made, but the endgame does require you to weigh all the clues and make a risky choice. The necessary information is there, but it’s not signposted so heavily that it ruins the suspense; I had to stop and think here after breezing through the prior parts perhaps too quickly. Revealing the answer then leads into a very weird and creepy climax.
Unfortunately, this is followed by an anticlimactic epilogue, which also raises troubling questions about the protagonist. The specter of child sexual abuse haunts the game, and not just in the discussion of the crime itself, which is believed to be attempted rape as well as murder. In the victim’s bedroom, we find “things that shouldn’t be there” (hinted to be porn magazines from her father’s collection), which give us “despicable thoughts.” At this point I remembered the very beginning of the game, where the protagonist had to resist the sexual thoughts arising from the action of brushing his teeth (of all things). The protagonist is apparently struggling to work through some psychosexual issues, in which thoughts about the dead 12-year-old girl in particular are involved. No, there’s no suggestion of him doing or intending to do anything wrong, but the issues are brought up and then never resolved. This gives the epilogue, in which he decides to adopt the murder victim’s teenage sister, a girl he hardly knows, an unsavory taste.
Despite my qualms about the execution, there are some memorable nuggets I’ll take away from this game. The best one, for me, is the note found in the uncle’s house, in which the “big fish” that swallowed Jonah, finding that Jonah is dead, takes on Jonah’s mission. That little story is a real brainworm in the way that the best scripture commentaries can be, hitting the target that the game as a whole often missed.