6 | LPM | YARRY
6 | LPM | YARRY
by: Zachary Dillon
Progress:
- I played through a few times, taking about 15 minutes total.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- The horror element revolves around the subsumption of identity that takes place when one becomes a parent and has their priorities (willingly or not) dragged in a different direction by that situation. Personally, I found the aspect of being thrust into the role of being a parent in the first place discomfiting. Growing up, I was the youngest child in my family by a significant margin, and as a result, I was basically never around people younger than me. Now as an adult, I don’t really have any interest in becoming a parent—I honestly find the idea of it unsettling in a way that is difficult to explain. As a result, I felt primed to read into the horror angles. There’s the psychological aspect of being constantly worn down by exhaustion, creating a pressure to appease, causing you to mistakenly say/write the wrong name through sheer repetition. The social world around you pressures you to accept this new identity. You are not able to explain or rationalize with your child because of the communication gap. But you could also see it as more of a comedy piece with darker undertones. Because it is also funny—the idea of a meter calculating the percentage between Larry/Yarry is inherently absurd, and the situations have a comical edge to them.
Things I Appreciated:
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As I touched on briefly above, there’s something really absurd about the Larry/Yarry meter, and just watching “Yarry” gradually overwhelm the “Larry” side, taking over your identity. Like with a previous piece that I encountered earlier (Forevermore: A Game of Writing Horror), this meter has a dual role as an absurd joke and also communicates to the player roughly what path you are on in the narrative, so it is an important part of the narrative experience.
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I appreciated the child as a kind of antagonist. It’s a fascinating inversion of the adult-child power dynamic. Because Jasper is so young, you are not really able to communicate to them why you don’t want to be renamed Yarry (assuming you care either way, though as presented it feels like the protagonist doesn’t really love that), and Jasper’s ability to disrupt any situation by screaming and/or crying gives them (unknowingly) massive social leverage to influence the protagonist’s behavior. I thought it was one of those funny-but-with-an-undercurrent-of-truth kind of portrayals of how raising a child at that age could be like.
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I liked the efficiency of characterization for the main family, as well as the side characters you encounter in different scenes. I felt like I was able to quickly grasp the perspective of everyone involved, which helps set the table for later in the narrative when the social pressure to become Yarry intensifies and you have to decide how Larry should respond.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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My main critique of how this piece is structured is the abruptness of the “resistance” ending, which I received the first time through. As I played, encountering the power struggle between Jasper and Larry, I tried to balance taking reasonable actions while retaining my identity where it felt safe to do that. The first ending I received felt distinctly unresolved, like it hadn’t built up to anything. I was completely caught off guard by the fact that this was the ending text, since I hadn’t really felt the narrative arc. When I played it again, and chose the “appeasement” ending of embracing the new identity, it felt much more solid to me. So I guess, if given more time than four hours to work on this piece, I think some smoothing out of the ending/structure could be warranted. Taking both endings together, the “resistance” ending does give the impression that, eventually, you will be forced to succumb to the “Yarry” identity, one way or another.
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You know what, I was about to give a formatting recommendation, but I double-checked and this piece was also simultaneously submitted to the Barebones Jam, which prohibits the use of non-default formatting. So I guess, uh, there’s no real point in mentioning it since it can’t be changed
. But for what it’s worth, I think adding some kind of visual flair to distinguish the final page/choice box would help to better prime the reader that the piece is ending. Because the choice box looks identical to the previous pages, and the player gets lulled into the rhythm of clicking through, it sort of obscured the other signals that this was an ending page.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I haven’t been discussing cover art much during these responses, but I want to take a moment to mention how effective it was. The choice of cropping/zoom gives the child a hint of sinister energy, and made me feel a little unsettled going into this story. This felt like an approriate mood to be in as the narrative unfolded, so job well done there.
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I thought this was a great example of drawing horror out of the presumed-to-be-ordinary. Everything depicted here could actually happen. The piece’s kind of intimate focus on the family and Larry’s inner life contributes to a sense of isolation, where he feels he has no one he can turn to as a means of resolving his identity crisis. It paints a portrait of parenthood that feels both realistic and unsettling. It feels like an invitation to examine what in my own life could be reframed as a quotidian horror.
Memorable Moment:
- When it turned out that Larry had been so subconsciously influenced that he had told the barista that his name was “Yarry,” without realizing it at the time.