DemonApologist's Ectocomp 2024 Responses

11 | LGG | DARK AND DEEP

11 | LGG | DARK AND DEEP
by: Amanda Walker

Progress:

  • I reached the end in about 36 minutes.

Engagement with Horror Genre:

  • I would describe this as maybe, gothic literary horror? Not that it’s necessarily gothic gothic, but the atmosphere of decay is pervasive enough that it brought that to mind for me (in addition to the plot details making me think of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Tell-Tale Heart” a bit). The haunts in this piece are mostly atmospheric, though they burst out in spiky moments of horror (most memorably, the saw incident…), and the piece is very concerned with the spiritual and emotional lives of the characters as they cause, experience, and recount what they have been through.

Things I Appreciated:

  • This piece is very capital L Literary. I struggled to parse the sinuous grammar in some of the sentences, especially in the beginning of the narrative. The thought, “why is x word here instead of there” snagged me a few times before I trained myself to just let it wash over me more. This style of writing can be rewarding once you get accustomed to it, I think. I slowed down my reading pace considerably to try and absorb more of the interesting turns of phrase. The language is rather evocative, with many bits and pieces adding to the overall web of imagery. For some reason, the most powerful image in this piece to me is the description of the box of mismatched buttons spilling all over floor. I think it’s because so much of the piece is unraveling layers of containment, the sins and secrets and regrets, and a box of buttons is something collected over the course of a long life. It’s like we were finally seeing, at long last, all that was concealed, scattered before us.

  • I really enjoyed the theme of guilt intertwined with perception. Amy sees the skeleton emerging from the cellar (and we see it, as her), but her husband Toffile does not. The game plays with that expectation that you will see the skeleton (as the reverend) in the attic, but you instead find only the finger bones that have slipped out of the button box. I was left to wonder whether the walking skeleton is “real,” but that matters less to me than the fact that the guilt and doubt are emotionally real, and the reverend will continue to be haunted by this knowledge because of his spiritual crisis. Speaking on perception, I thought it was fascinating (though perhaps not surprising :skull:) that the reverend did not accept what she saw even when he experienced her perception directly, blaming her for witchcraft only now that he feels threatened by her knowledge. Amy is by far the most powerful character in the story, even (or perhaps, especially) in her state, and it feels like the men are always reacting to her agency (resentfully or not)—even the reverend, going and doing exactly the things she directs him to, so that he experiences her narrative in the order she means him to.

  • The dialogue-based gameplay was engaging to me. While some of the stuff I tried asking about didn’t work, that was by far the exception and most things I tried asking or talking about led to some interesting or disturbing new text. I thought this social approach made the game feel more intimate and involved.

Miscellaneous Comments:

  • I am not very familiar with poetry canon (it isn’t an interest of mine) so I was somewhat disoriented by the final text as it was the only time I recognized the poem being referenced (the previous ones being lost on me). My reaction was like, wait, why is a Robert Frost poem randomly happening in the final moments? Well… :skull: Fortunately, the author’s note helped explain what was going on and I thought it was a really clever approach to developing a piece. Even though the allusions went completely over my head, the piece itself felt internally consistent in terms of writing style and atmosphere/tone, so I wouldn’t have ever expected that it had that kind of origin.

  • I found a minor continuity error. On returning to the living room after the scene where you take the woman’s hand, the room description said that the cellar door was closed, but when I examined it, it was still open. (Feel free to look through the attached transcript in case in case it can help.)

  • A game mechanic I thought could be adjusted was the way the screen text cleared when you are transported to one of the memories. This created an issue for me where I was trying to remember what to “sense” in the barn, but I couldn’t scroll back up to reread the dialogue because it had been cleared by the wall memory scene. Unless there is an unavoidable structural reason to reset the text like this, I think it would be better to allow the reader to scroll all the way back up to avoid the immersion-straining awkwardness of situations like this. (To be fair, it is my fault for focusing on the “barn” part rather than the “saw” part, I could have taken notes, etc.)

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

  • I thought this was an interesting case study of taking a parser game in a very serious, literary direction. I commented in the past how parser games seem to naturally generate comedy because of the wacky things that can happen when there is a struggle between the player and the program. Here, because of the very clear up-front instructions, and well-crafted responses, I never felt like the parser aspect was getting in the way of the tone or atmosphere of the piece. So it turns out, I guess, that if you really work at it, you can make something as janky as parser gameplay feel very tonally appropriate for subject matter like this. In fact, I really want to emphasize the role of the instructions: by telling me to focus on dialogue and how to format it, it helped direct my attention in a useful way as a player to be guided along and have a better experience of the piece than I think would have happened if I wasn’t given these specific instructions. It’s worth considering, if one is designing a parser game, how to nudge the player toward doing the tasks that you implemented for them to experience the story, and this is one way of doing that.

Memorable Moment:

  • When I tried to ask her about the depression in the cellar and she said, essentially, oh, we’ll GET to that!

DemonApologist_DarkAndDeep.txt (49.7 KB)

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