7 | LPM | SPILL YOUR GUT
7 | LPM | SPILL YOUR GUT
by: Cora Nulla
Progress:
- I spent 50 minutes here, with most of that time spent navigating the green section (Tillie).
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- I would describe this primarily as experimental horror. This is utterly unlike anything else that I have read and corrodes the edges of what it means to be a narrative. As a result, I found the most meaning in the emotions and anxieties that I felt while navigating the piece, so the horror here was mostly psychological, and I have to say, pretty effective from the mindset of causing me to question myself and my motivations while playing.
Spilling My Gut:
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In light of the piece’s unique presentation, I decided to amend my response structure to just… describe what happened as a narrative, and what I think about what those experiences.
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First, I jump into the story, which seems to assume some prior knowledge about the previous games. It literally says, “You know the story.” I don’t! But I thought, eh, I’ll probably get the gist of it as I go along. The game presents a choice of four characters to follow, along with instructions to start with Gemma. This was intriguing to me, because being presented a choice but being told to choose something in particular is a kind of a challenge to the player’s willingness to obey or disobey instructions. Why present a choice if there is a specific way to do it? That signals that following or not following instructions is itself important to the experience. I decided to start by picking Gemma, as instructed, and see how that went.
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GEMMA: This character answers the phone, where a mysterious voice tells her to not open the red door until instructed to do so. I felt like the theme of player agency/game authority was continuing here, so I followed along and started clicking through the white doors, which lead downward. After a while, I started to have an ominous feeling, wondering how far away from the red door I was going to get. It became harder and harder to absorb the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the text as my own stream-of-consciousness grew more and more dominant. To click to the next screen takes a not-insignificant amount of time, so the further I got, the more that anxiety grew. It can’t be infinite, right? There was a four hour time limit on writing. It actually does have to end, eventually. Right? How much could someone possibly write in four hours? (I actually went back and checked to make sure this wasn’t an entry for Le Grand Guignol.) But no, it keeps being new unique text. It will end. I started to grow resentful of the voice on the phone. What are you waiting for? I felt a bit of shame. Why am I mindlessly bowing to authority here? I noticed a theme about player agency vs. game authority, do I not trust myself to understand the theme well enough to know that I should resist the instructions? So I decided I wasn’t going to go to the end, wherever it is. I will decide for myself that I’ve seen enough of this column of perception. I began the long process of pulling back all the threads of Gemma’s thoughts and anxiety that I had unspooled, at long last ascending to the red door, at which point, the UI slowly descended until I was left staring at a blank red screen, with the ghostly after-images of wrong-color floating in my eyes around the edges of the red box when I moved my head. I wasn’t sure what to do from here, but I thought, it’s fine, I’ve already broken the “rules” by disobeying the phone call, so I just refreshed the page.
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UMA: This one worked a bit differently. Instead of a phone call, I signed a suspicious contract to not open the blue door. I was dropped into a kind of compass grid version of the previous UI that includes horizontal, along with vertical motion. I considered opening the blue door immediately, but there was text to read! What do you mean, I’d just not try reading the text? In this economy? But this temptation proved foolish. With the maze-like construction, I quickly found myself lost in a sea of copies of “I am scared,” unable to find my way back to the blue door and becoming suddenly very paranoid that the navigation was in some way cyclical or noneuclidean. Applying what I learned from Gemma’s section, I escaped by refreshing the page and this time, immediately opened the blue door, causing me to get stuck on a blue version of the blank screen after the UI slowly drifted away. So I refreshed again to try the third section.
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TILLIE: This section is by far the most complex to navigate, adding a third dimension entirely with an elevator that you can travel up. I spent a very long time lost on the first floor, unable to find my way back among the sea of “I am tired” screens, and you know what, I was getting tired. That was immersive. A lot of the narrative in this section seemed to be about resisting the call to work for the sake of working*,* and the exhaustion that entails. But I was like, well, there’s a green door somewhere, and I’m going to find it. After finally clawing my way back to the elevator, I decided to try finding the top floor. And it just kept going. As I went, I decided to check if the floors maxed out at two digits, and if a third digit appeared, I would turn back. Well, a long while later, staring at the scintillating inversions of green and black I was faced with, I reached floor 100, and wouldn’t you know it, “I am tired.” So I went back down, and resolved to explore whatever the highest floor I could find that seemed to have custom text. At this point, I had come to a growing acceptance that there wasn’t going to be a green door. Why would there be? The entire section—echoing previous characters—felt like it was about resisting that call to strive for someone else when it isn’t really worth it. And yet… I just had this feeling. It’s a bit pathetic, but I’ve decided I’m just going to say it anyway: I had this intrusive thought that if I don’t find the green door but it was actually possible, people were going to be disappointed in me, and my response to the game. And that gnawed at me. It really did. That feeling of shame that, if the green door existed and I didn’t find it, the users of intfiction.org will be let down by the fact that I inaccurately claimed that the whole point is that there isn’t a green door. I’d be such a flop! Are you emotionally prepared for that? Flopping? (It’s already happened. Countless times.) So, I stopped before finding it. And even now, I’m like… Can I trust my instinct enough that there wasn’t actually a green door? It’s totally there somewhere, isn’t it? I said to myself (this is a dramatization, to be clear), essentially, “DemonApologist, sweetie, this is a forum post. On a forum you’ve been on for like 2 months. For people you barely know. Maybe at most, like 10 people will read this. It’s completely normal and fine to not find the green door, even if it exists. Instead of mindlessly clicking for a green door, you could be doing other productive and meaningful things, like reading gay Baldur’s Gate 3 fan-fiction. What is Raphael up to these days?” Then, I refreshed the page.
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STACE: In this section, I unfolded the cosmos and reality itself by eating chips.
Memorable Moment:
- I would say that this entry as a whole was a unique and memorable experience, that was successful in picking at my anxieties in terms of playing a game specifically so that I can talk about it for other people to read. There was a quote that really stood out to me: “I know this is the age of reading comprehension.” Well, I leave that to you, now. Good luck parsing through whatever the hell it is that I wrote in the above sections.
