House of Wolves by Shruti Deo
This short, bleak piece takes its place on stage honestly. The red-black-and-white colour scheme is harsh. Ornamentation, minimal. The content warning does not euphemise. In fact, I was expecting the warning to have been an abstraction for something much darker or more sinister, but it was thankfully not.
From the beginning, the game establishes a tone of grinding inevitability, of obedience, of repetition. Depression. Given no obvious target to fight against this ennui, I took the role of obedient student. I did the right things: washing up, studying, going to dinner. The latter is the pinch point of the day - where the presumably vegan protagonist is forced to eat meat. It’s a dramatic, visceral struggle, but I guess understandable.
As the day starts over, the same choices reappear with the same wording, reinforcing the sense of a life stuck on repeat. In some ways the constrained interactivity fits the story well. The more you stay obedient and go on autopilot, the more you disconnect from the torture of dinner. The cycle continues a few times, making short explorations into even more issues the protagonist is facing.
And then it kinda resolves.
I didn’t do anything special. It hits a crescendo but I nor the protagonist seemed to learn anything to earn this ending. It was an unearned dream of hope, getting me through an unending cycle of bleakness.
So I started the game again as a rebel. I was going to break this cycle with my bare hands. Except you can’t. Each time you are driven back to the obedient path. Given the same revolting meals, disconnecting from the same group of friends.
As an interactive piece, you cede most of your agency. As fiction, usually the writer presents a problem and through the story, provides a response. House of Wolves is just the question. All setup and no punchline. An audit of abuse, but not really an investigation.
If this story is from the author’s own experience, I hope for them not just an ember of warmth, but a glow to move towards, a resolution to a dark chapter. House of Wolves offers a raw portrayal of abuse, but its lack of resolution leaves both the protagonist and the player adrift in a sea of unrelenting bleakness.