The Whale’s Keeper
Here we go, custom IF engine right out of the gate!
Thoughts
I played this on Telegram, as recommended - in the Telegram desktop client, and glad I did because these would be fairly long passages for a phone. Made it through to one ending.
What worked for me
The best idea: There’s something surprising and compelling about the inside of the whale being the safe and comfortable place that we’re repeatedly drawn back to. There’s kind of a mystic draw about it for the cetologist that goes beyond their scientist-self.
There are evocative bits of prose throughout. I liked this image:
Great bones curve upward from floor to ceiling. This whale has swallowed everything, you think. Whole cities might be deeper in its gut. On the wall: Japanese fishing floats and Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls and great fish hooks. A pegleg, disconnected from its owner, rests in the corner.
Also the descriptions of the great bassy voice of the whale stirred the senses.
Somehow it avoided the CYOA pitfall of choices that seem to give random consequences; in part I think it gets away with a lot because of the dream-like nature of the experience, but also the action was paced appropriately, with moment-to-moment “go up/go down” kind of choices tying to a next paragraph that I’d expect. Well done on this.
Jonah is a well-sketched and memorable character, in large part because our POV character sees him through many lenses: Pity, disgust, desperation, scientific curiosity. I was disappointed when he sort of just disappeared in the middle of my run.
It’s well-implemented and polished. It’s got nice art, and a rewind feature. This is impressive for also premiering a new platform!
What worked less well
This is a tough idea for an interactive story. In some ways, Jonah is all about being disempowered - stuck inside the whale, redirected with every escape attempt. And the whole experience being dreamlike means it’s difficult to strategize about anything. So while the author does a great job making the choices and consequences make moment-to-moment sense, it was difficult as a player to pick a goal and work towards it. It worked better when I gave in to the dreaminess of it all, but there’s a sense of urgency in the prose and the sanity meter that made me think up front that there’d be more “gaminess” to this work.
The sanity meter never seemed to fully come into play in my one time through. It was kind of neat to watch it go up and down over the course of the game, but it never got particularly close to zero and it would often change after “non-choices” where there was only one way out of a passage - like after the first turn of the game! So maybe it needed a little introduction?
I’m not particularly interested in playing IF on Telegram. I don’t personally use Telegram for much. Setup was painless, but the whole time I was playing on desktop my phone would buzz for about half of the messages coming in, which was annoying. It has a bit of a “timed text” effect too (I didn’t mess with the reading speed settings) and I miss other niceties like transcript export and copy/paste from the UI. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this platform has an audience, but I’m not it.
Bugs
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A couple of times at the end of a passage I’d get an error message like this, despite having entered a correct command.
Ahoy! ‘allow him’ is not one of your available choices. Type ‘help’ if you need it, or answer with one of: workbench | scavenge
The big downside of this was that I seemed to also miss the last paragraph of the passage in question, so I didn’t quite know what “workbench” and “scavenge” meant - at one point it even seemed like maybe I jumped nodes within the story. But I was able to proceed anyway.
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Less of a bug, more of a nit: One passage ended:
You smile, despite yourself, and watch him [forage].
Where unlike the most of my choices, “forage” here was not actually an action I could take - “watch” probably should have been the key word.
Overall I liked parts of this, but felt like the core concept fought against the “interactive”-ness too much for my taste. Ben, thank you for sharing your work!