9 | CRIER
9 | CRIER
by: Antemaion
This is a Main Festival entry.
Progress:
- I reached what seemed like the main ending on my first playthrough which took about 16 minutes. I spent another 20 minutes or so re-playing and trying different routes, arriving at a few game-over states along the way. In hindsight, I would recommend that players save the game since I was naïve to the possibility of getting game-overs (maybe because I’ve more often encountered non-branching renpy projects) during my first playthrough and hadn’t saved at all.
Things I Appreciated:
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For some transparency, I was a little worried up front that this would feel like indecipherable semantic soup. My sensitive palate cannot always handle evasive abstraction for the sake of it. However, I felt like this game struck a great balance of being challenging and stimulating without feeling like it was trying to push me away as a reader, and I found myself enjoying the creative linguistic flourishes. Despite its rank and disconcerting aesthetics, I still felt invited invited in. Once I got to the end, I immediately went back in to see more branches, not out of a sense of obligation, but because I found the experience legitimately engaging. “A puppet-theatre of murk and slime” turned out to be a pretty accurate self-description of what it was like. This isn’t to say that I have some grand analysis of what any of this means—I don’t know that I feel equipped to delve that much into the poetics and such—but I felt like there were a lot of encounters with interesting characters and a general sense of progression toward the end.
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The presentation of this game is a delight. It feels like an eclectic audiovisual collage, the underground groaning and echoing and squeaking as dithered sprites of fantastical entities drift into and out of the narrative. Each character had unique and distinct characteristics while still feeling at home in the techno-organic environments.
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I enjoyed the way the tone slid between seriousness and unseriousness. For all that is murky and dismal, there is also a sense of playfulness to the piece. One moment you’ll be contemplating the violence of, say, whaling, and in the next you’ll have an opportunity to ask whether you can pet Glospia’s “dogs.” The Mad Prophet offers up some incredibly self-serious dialogue, all the while interacting with characters that say typos and textspeak like “u” instead of “you” (it kind of reminded me of the Homestuck trolls, of all things).
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I really appreciated that there was a menu that allowed me to turn the cool stylized font into something that I could comfortably read. It was the first thing I looked for, so I’m glad it was possible.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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I’ll offer a little bit of analysis, I guess. This game seems very concerned with the power of creating and interpreting language. The Mad Prophet’s exile underground is precisely because their words had the power to threaten the “sovran,” while a mysterious lichen, when not directly serving as Glospia’s surveillance network, has “evolved to maximize attention … emulat[ing] written speech,” which the Mad Prophet can interpret as contradictory prophecies, and the lichen itself is craved on the surface, collecting in places of power, or that become nodes of power because of its presence. There’s got to be something here in terms of the idea of capitalist algorithms co-opting the ideas/art of marginalized people into its systems, and the tension inherent in trying to navigate one’s relationship to that extraction. But maybe that’s just what I was expecting to see, and therefore, I saw it.
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The game has a number of game-over choices. On my first playthrough, I happened to make it to what I think was the main ending, but after that I found myself bogged down in either trying to speed through the story to get back to the choices I left off at, or mucking about in the save/load menu. After a few playthroughs I felt like it wasn’t going to be worth searching every permutation, as they kept eventually routing back into a familiar scene (such as proxydrone humorously peacing out before it had a chance to affect the Duchess of Limbs encounter, for instance). I still feel like there are interesting things that could be possible that I missed, but hopefully other people will encounter and talk about them in their own responses to the game. So I guess I would say that the mechanics (of renpy itself maybe?) created some friction in exploring the narrative.
What I Learned About IF:
- While there’s a lot of different things you could look at for this game, something I want to draw attention to is the quality of the soundscapes. They were eerie and disconcerting, but also looped and transitioned pretty seamlessly. I can only imagine how much work went into that, the one time I looked into anything related to sound in Twine I was like, haha, no, I’m not figuring that out. But the soundscapes really contributed a ton to the atmosphere and characterization, it felt like a very thoughtful and worthwhile inclusion.
Memorable Moment:
- The line that rattles around in my head the most is “All communication must be destroyed,” perhaps because it is repeated even in the “about” menu for the game. It’s kind of an interesting paradox, perhaps sincerely, perhaps sarcastically using language to invoke its own end.