12 | LGG | YOUR LIFE, AND NOTHING ELSE
12 | LGG | YOUR LIFE, AND NOTHING ELSE
by: Lionstooth
Progress:
- I reached the end in about 13 minutes
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This reminded me the most of the depiction of hell in No Exit, a Sartre play. The characters are trapped in a liminal, mostly empty room. You might not be so surprised to learn that they… can’t exit. (Or, perhaps, won’t exit, due to their character flaws.) What I gathered from this IF piece is a kind of blurring of afterlife concepts, an eternal existence where the protagonist could choose to experience anything but is tormenting themselves in this disturbing space. You can choose to show interest in what your neighbors are doing, and sometimes help them with whatever they are struggling with, but none of them will ever check on you. The game in this way is also a kind of depression simulator, where the repetitive going-through-the-motions of it all is mainly punctuated by horrific imagery or self-loathing. In that sense, there’s a strong psychological aspect to the horror here.
Things I Appreciated:
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Well this game gets the first of my Selina-Meyer-what-the f*cks of my EctoComp playing experience. What really stands out to me is the gradual weirdification of what starts off as a very ordinary space, enhanced by text effects like motion, appearance/disappearance, and so on. At first, I caught motion out of the corner of my eye at the beginning of the game and dismissed it, but then that turned out to actually be happening. The game made me doubt what I had already experienced when things were slightly askew, which I thought was an effective way to escalate the tension.
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I liked the gradual buildup of hell/afterlife imagery: the oppressive heat (not to mention the fire risk) of too many candles, the pomegranate, dizzying fumes. These images are what grounded the piece for me.
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I really liked the use of red “visited” links, if that makes sense. One of the most disturbing moments of the piece came early for me. After the first round of visiting the neighbors and delivering some water to one of them, I returned to my room to rest. And then… well, I was greeted with a screen with all the links already red. That was a moment of genuine horror for me, because I thought… wait. Oh no. I’ve already done… everything? That’s all there is? Am I stuck here? What now? So over the course of the game, the red-stained links came to represent entrapment for me, that I had already reached the limits of my eternity and would still, nonetheless, have to keep going.
Miscellaneous Comments:
- A tricky writing challenge I think in writing something like this is that, when you write something in an ambiguous or abstract style, the gap between the player and the narrative can widen. I tried to latch onto anything specific I could to get a stronger sense of the characters, especially the protagonist, but the dissociative aspect of the presentation made it difficult to form a deeper emotional connection. Arguably, that might be a good thing, because of the nature of the piece and what it seems to be getting at—the denial of mirrors preventing the reader from using visual cues to make sense of who they’re playing as, for instance, feeding into the character’s self-denial. But I’m left with a feeling that I’m not fully sure what I experienced.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This piece made great use of timed effects to create paranoia and unease. Using these effects to disorient the player and make them feel off-kilter makes a lot of sense for this kind of horror piece, so it has me thinking about how I could use minor timed effects in a subtle way, or in a more dramatic way, to control the pace of a piece’s tension.
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I thought it was interesting that there were a lot of dead ends in the piece, as in, places you could click to visit but the character will refuse to visit. Upon reflection, I realized that this happens a lot in parser games for a much different reason: to constrain map size. Like I could go into a random room, attempt to head north, the parser is like “lol no you can’t go that way”. But in a Twine narrative that is more controlled, these dead ends are intentionally constructed (I can’t just type “go north,” “go north” would have to be programmed in to specifically appear to me as a hyperlink) as ways to simulate the experience of feeling trapped or unmotivated. I wouldn’t have questioned the lack of a “go up” link, but since it was there I clicked it and was told I couldn’t go up, which is part of the core theme of the game. I don’t know, I just found that to be an interesting narrative technique.
Memorable Moment:
- Honestly it was when I went to fetch the mail and the mail was just like… gibberish symbols. That’s when things reached a tipping point where I knew that everything from now on was going to get weird af.