4 | LPM | 39 TRILLION AND 1
4 | LPM | 39 TRILLION AND 1
by: MiloMesdag
Progress:
- I explored several branches of this narrative (all of which, that I found, led to different types of bad endings) in around 15 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- Well. This is far and away the most disturbing thing I have read out of the 23 entries I have read thus far. The content warning for “extreme body horror” is accurate! This is a story where you play as a kind of viral infection with a consciousness that spreads itself. So it inverts the framework of an apocalyptic pandemic by playing as a malevolent entity that has no morality other than replicating itself and infecting more, as opposed to centering the perspective of human survivors as you might find more typically. One layer of the piece is the specifically gendered violence here. You play as an It, but a masculinized It, who infects and traumatizes women in particular. You start in a woman’s body, and can, depending on your choices, manipulate her social connections to target other women she is acquainted with. It feels thematically important that the “it” changes to “he” at the very end. To me, this is a huge part of why this is capital h Horror.
Things I Appreciated:
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To be a bit blunt, I did not really enjoy reading this. And that’s fine! No one asked me to play every game here, I chose to do that. I figured I probably wouldn’t like it based on the content warnings alone. But, the thing I appreciate is that the piece is very effective in what it sets out to do. The disturbing imagery is well-crafted. It is disgusting, oozing, and full of personality. It elicits a strong emotional response. So I appreciate that, even though this isn’t really a piece “for me,” I think people who are into this type of extreme body horror might get a lot out of the richness and intensity of the descriptions, and the ghoulishness of the choices presented.
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I was impressed with the general quality and execution of the writing given the four-hour time limit. There wasn’t a huge number of branches, but I thought that time was spent effectively to where I didn’t find branches that felt underdeveloped or under-served.
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I liked the rhythm of the writing voice, the way that there is variation in sentence length such that it takes on a stream-of-consciousness quality at times (without sacrificing clarity). The repetitions and runaway clauses add an eerily melodic quality to the text even as it describes terrible things.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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Some very minor typo cleanup, if a post-comp update is planned: It’s voice is indescribable. → Its; Then think about how the batcteria → bacteria; a hanging one of these | after Restart in the run-away-from-Colleen branch; various quotation mark inconsistencies (curled vs. uncurled).
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The content warnings are pretty good at communicating what’s in the piece already, but you might consider adding something along the lines of gendered violence? I’ve never been the best at developing content warnings, but given the emphasis here and the way the virus/disease calls upon the concept of consent in its thoughts about the woman/women it is infecting, it feels like something like that would add even more emphasis to what is in the piece. Like I can imagine a reader who might be more down for extreme body horror in general, but find that focus of the horror specifically a reason not to read.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Since I don’t really read work in this genre normally (extreme body horror), I thought it was good to be exposed to an example of it as a case study in how to use imagery and writing voice/cadence to create/amplify intensity.
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I also thought the branching structure of the piece, considering the 4-hour time limit, to be interesting. There were times I was surprised at how the branches fed back together based on your choices, but it made sense. I liked that there was this element of nonlinearity to the narrative. Pretty cool to see a structure like that developed on the fly.
Memorable Moment:
- It’s kind of hard to condense the experience of playing this into one moment, but I think what sank in the most to me is the conversation with the immunologist where you can offer her many different rationalizations to try to convince her to side with you. It felt immersive into the morality of the character I was playing as.