5 | LPM | THE COLUMN
5 | LPM | THE COLUMN
by: Passerine
Progress:
- I read through the different choices and reached the various endings in around 15 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This is an interesting one! So I view the horror here as mainly psychological (with body horror as well). And the reason I focus more on the psychological aspects is because the piece really brings to mind the anxieties of colonialism. At the outset, there is a team defined not by their names but their role in forming the “civilization”/“frontier force” that will document and claim the mysterious island, mapping their own systems of meaning onto it. But, as is often the case in pieces narrated from the perspective of a colonizing force, the island’s Indigeneity is reduced to an inhuman form. Here, the column is this ancient almost cosmic horror that undermines the very social structure that the expedition is trying to impose onto it. So to me, the piece exposes the paranoia of “civilization” toward its own fragility and disorder in the face of the unknown it has taken upon itself to supposedly bring to order. It presents the impulse to expand and map and explore just for the sake of doing so, as inherently self-destructive.
Things I Appreciated:
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I was gripped by this narrative from the outset. The column is a powerful visual, and the stakes are established and escalated quickly. I liked the time mechanic of recounting the previous events day by day to arrive at the present, and finally having just enough exposition done that I had a good sense what I was choosing between and why.
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Importantly, while there are only two choices, all options sound similarly (un)appealing. It is not obvious what the better choice is each time, so I really tried to think about why I was making each choice. (Unfortunately, I made poor choices and ended up dying on the first attempt, but at least I felt like I had plausible reasons for my decisions at the time.) I like when I’m legitimately torn when I face a choice, it makes the decision feel more consequential.
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I thought the replay element was well-structured, sending the player back to the first decision point rather than requiring a full restart.
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And just, as indicated above, I found it really thematically rich. I think because the characters are identified by their roles rather than names, it directed my attention to think of them less as characters but more as societal archetypes, which worked for me in a short narrative. Had this been a larger scale narrative, I think the emotional distance this creates between the player and the characters would have weighed on me more.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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The “flaws” in the piece are basically things that would be fleshed out further without the time limit. I’m kind of blown away by how well developed this is given those limits, it takes some serious skill to pull all that off in four hours! The first thing I want to highlight though, is the way that the linguistic tasks of the protagonist are handwaved away. We jump right to the fully translated/interpreted ritual rules, in a way that is discordant with the unsettling, alien way that the column is presented. I don’t feel that I know enough about the linguist to understand how they were able to arrive at these conclusions with such slickness. So I’d imagine, if this piece were developed later into something more, there would be more struggle between the protagonist and the meaning they are trying to render from the island.
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This piece makes use of a large cast and has a conceit that is focused on social strategy and awareness. But because of the limited permutations branched out in this narrative, it feels like trying to deduce anything is more a theater of strategy and social awareness rather than feeling like that in practice. A hypothetical post-comp version that fleshes out the characters way more and gives the player the opportunity to make a wider range of choices to try to navigate the situation could be really interesting. But I do think it works as is, perhaps overly gamifying the ritual would undermine it.
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One of the things I kept thinking about was what would have happened mechanically if the group had started out with an even number of people rather than an odd number. Say they start with 10. The photographer dies, leaving 9, but only 4 pairs could form, leaving one person left over, unable to perform the ritual. The stakes of being the one person left out and doomed by default would be extreme, and I feel like the player character being directly responsible for causing that one person to be un-paired is an untapped gut punch here.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I mean one thing is just like, the scope of what is possible to do in four hours, if you are fluent in the medium and have planned well. This is a great illustration of time management and control, at least as far as I can tell looking at it from the outside of the creative process that brought it into being.
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An element that I want to highlight here is how the atmosphere of social paranoia is conveyed. In a short few paragraphs, we can witness different pairs or groups of people whispering to each other or accusing each other, trying to figure out who they can trust. Because of the player’s lack of deep familiarity with the characters, this is immersive because it’s hard to track who to trust or not, similar to how the characters would be feeling in-universe.
Memorable Moment:
- The most enduring image is the column itself rising as the group approaches, and specifically, the faces that grow and emerge from it as the curse takes hold. “The steadfast chimney of a burned-out house” is a punchy visual for me because I’ve spent time passing through places devastated by wildfires and the surreal field of charred chimneys is the kind of thing that you don’t easily forget.