7 | YANCY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
7 | YANCY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by: Naomi Norbez
Progress:
- I was able to just barely clear the game within the 2-hour limit and reached the end at around 1h55m. I was worried that I was off pace, so at a certain point (maybe 2/3rds of the way through) I started ignoring the voice acting since I can read faster than I can listen to the performances. If not for the artificial constraints of IF Comp judging, I would have been fine with listening at the pace set by the voice actors, but I had to make a decision in the moment to sacrifice voice acting for the sake of completing the game in time.
What I Appreciated:
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My favorite aspect of the game is the presentation of DMs when the characters are chatting in a Legally-Distinct-From-Discord server. It can be tricky to find the right balance of writing fictional messages and making sure that each character has enough of a distinct writing style without flattening them into a caricature. In this sense, the game does an excellent job. I liked moments where, for instance, characters would make typos in their DMs and then correct them. It was used just often enough to feel realistic without becoming a distraction for me.
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Another aspect I really appreciate is the multimedia ambition of the piece. As I’ll discuss later these elements were unfinished, but I’m listing this as something to appreciate because the multimedia elements make sense for the game and I can imagine a future version where all those elements are present, thereby enriching the experience even further.
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An aspect that I find more difficult to talk about but really want to highlight is… the way this work creates what at least feels like an authentic representation of online queer spaces in a way that straddles this line of being aspirational and realistic. To say more, there are times that playing this game made me feel washed up and out of touch due to my age/identity/life experiences, and other times that it felt uncannily similar to spaces that I have familiarity with (perhaps a generation removed? I’m not sure if it really is about age or about something else). Something I want to highlight especially about the depiction is how the game portrays characters who generally mean well (minus the mother character of course who makes no attempt to meet Yancy where they’re at) but make mistakes and create conflict that has to be acknowledged and hashed out. This is what I mean by it being both aspirational and realistic—it’s aspirational in the sense that the people in this space are approaching things generally in good faith, but realistic in the sense that their divergent identities and experiences result in interpersonal conflict that they must then choose how to resolve. And the presence of a character who will never truly accept Yancy no matter what they say (at least in my playthrough) is, unfortunately, also realistic.
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This game challenged me with the depiction of the mother character, which brought up a lot of difficult emotions. I had moments where I felt legitimately tense reading and/or choosing what to do. A phone ringing made me anxious. As an example of this, I avoided going to Yancy’s mother’s house for a very long time, and then when I finally was like, “Fine I guess I’ll go,” I went knowing it would go poorly and then it did go poorly. I feel like it’s a realistic scenario where you know making that choice will go poorly, but you still do it anyway and then have to feel not only the emotional exhaustion of the negative encounter, but also the added layer of feeling that you chose this encounter even though you “should” know better. It’s really quite diabolical. Another example is when she asks Yancy to bring the blue bag to the hospital and they are forced to choose between three different bags. In that moment, I knew that no matter which bag I chose, it would be deemed the “wrong” choice. (I don’t know if that’s mechanically true within the game. I selected the drawstring bag and it was incorrect, but what I’m getting at is that it felt emotionally true that I would pick the wrong bag no matter what and I would be legitimately surprised if it turned out that the game was programmed to allow there to be a correct answer here.) By the end of the game, I felt really wrung out and had to step aside for a bit before returning to write out this commentary. I’m including this in the “appreciate” category because I appreciate that the game packed such an unexpected and authentic emotional punch, even though I also have this vague sense of resentment for being invited to feel something so raw while playing this colorful arty queer game.
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Voice acting: this is the first game I’ve encountered so far that has used voice acting at all. Encountering Yancy’s voice acting at the beginning of the game was such a pleasant surprise; they have such a warm, inviting tone and it instantly humanizes the character and I felt very connected to that performance. I appreciate that the audio quality for both Yancy and Nekoni (the only two voices that I heard during this playthrough) make them feel like real people (I mean obviously the actors are real people, but like… the performances don’t feel overacted or overly smoothed out, it instead matches the indie-ness of the game just right).
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Multimedia: Almost every image link that I encountered was broken (I believe I saw three that showed up as actual images: Beck’s papercraft quartet; Mack’s sketch of a bee; an art piece by Artemis). Similarly, with only two voice actors, it sometimes made encountering conversations strange when you are played audio clips of one person speaking in a group while still trying to read it. I think this was probably a dilemma for the submission; like perhaps for completion sake it would’ve been better to exclude those elements for the draft that’s being judged so the project is more cohesive, but I can also understand the appeal of wanting to show the possibility of what the game is yet to become when these elements are eventually added.
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Link locations within the page: I had a somewhat disjointed experience at the beginning of the game where the position of links to the next event did not behave as I expected. What I expected was that, if I encountered a hyperlink in the middle of a page, I should click on it when I get to it to reveal more text, because I had encountered game mechanics like that in prior submissions. However, the result of this was sending me through to the next scene before I had finished reading. Fortunately the sidebar allows you to navigate back to the previous scene manually, being able to finish reading. Still, I experienced the discomfort of feeling like I had to actively train myself to not click on the hyperlinks in the middle of the page until I got to the end, which was distracting until I got used to it. My recommendation is to consistently put the clickable links at the end of a passage to create more stability for the interface.
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Zombie Apocalypse theme/allegory: I had a journey with this. At the beginning of the game, I was frustrated that the zombie aspect of the game was treated in such a cavalier way. This is an earth-shattering breaking news event and should be treated as such, what the heck! When the characters did talk about the zombie apocalypse, it felt more appropriate to the situation, but it seemed very under-discussed at the beginning. I expected it to absolutely dominate the first period of the game and be even more impactful. I was really surprised, for example, that Yancy had unrestricted movement to just kind of go do whatever despite the active threat. As the game went on, I began to shift my perspective to think about the zombie element as an allegory for COVID19 responses (not that it’s exactly 1:1 given the parallels with racism/human rights that are developed later, but that feels like the direct inspiration) and when viewed through that lens, I realized that the kind of ambiguous crisis-that-we-both-talk-about-and-ignore-in-equal-measure felt like it made sense. What I’m getting at here, ultimately, is that I think what would’ve felt more natural for me is to have the game frontloaded with the news/government action/shock of the zombie apocalypse dominating the conversation and then leveling off as it becomes the “new normal” and eventually over the course of the plot morphs into a distinctly non-apocalyptic situation. In the current plot structure, it feels like everyone is already at the “new normal” stage at the inception of the event rather than after an appropriate amount of time has passed.
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There was a minor technical error (in my view) based on the path that I chose (editor’s note: which I will now proceed to discuss in excruciating detail, I am so, so sorry
this entire response is an overwritten MESS). For context, there is a scene on the first day where you take a photograph of Yancy’s pet, Babbit, as your first photo, then there’s an open ended prompt where you pick a location to take your second photo for that day. In the route I chose, I went to the Latte Shop of Horrors (I mean how could that not be the highest priority with that name??) where Yancy encounters a character named Caleb who conditions the photo on privacy (you are not to post this photo online as you promise to do). At the end of the day, in the server, Yancy is prompted to share their photo, but it doesn’t specify whether this is the pet photo or the photo of Caleb. This is important because I was suddenly stuck, not knowing what path to choose. If it was the pet photo, I would post it, but if it was the Caleb photo, I would not post it due to the privacy situation. I think that a choice should be carved out to specify which photo it is if you took this exact path where posting or not posting is based on the privacy concern that for me, superseded Yancy’s comfort level with being vulnerable and sharing their photography as the determining factor in whether or not to post. -
Finally I want to comment briefly (editor’s note: it was not brief
) about an aspect of the game that I have mixed feelings about so it’s more of a discussion than a criticism. Basically, I think this game plays very differently based on your identity/knowledge of the experiences involved. The challenge for me is that, in my day-to-day personality, my hard-wired impulse for any situation of social conflict is to be self-effacing and concede in order to be agreeable and avoid people being mad at me. So given that the game is kind of… about ethically navigating social conflict, which often calls for an active rejection of avoidance, the types of choices that I would naturally pick were generally forgiving people as fast as possible to get out of the conversation. But, as the game goes on, I start to feel this uncanny separation between myself and Yancy. Yancy is agender and aroace, neither of which are my personal identities, and I was suddenly feeling very strange about being put in a situation to decide for Yancy how Yancy feels about the things happening to them. Who am I, the player, to say how Yancy gets to react to those experiences? I may have had experiences that echo aspects of what Yancy is going through, but I haven’t lived their life. As a result, I started to become self-conscious about making the choices that I personally would make from my own social position and whether I was unfairly imposing my own coping strategies onto Yancy. Fortunately, the game works with this to some extent by making it clear at times when Yancy needs more time to process/heal and forced my hand in terms of letting the process of forgiveness/reconciliation take place over a longer span of time. I put this discussion here because I think the discomfort was perhaps part of the goal of the game in challenging the player to develop a different layer of empathy if they don’t have an identity that is neatly congruent with Yancy’s. But at the same time, it made me think, from a mechanical perspective, that maybe there are conversations where it would be better if the game didn’t let me choose what was best for Yancy and instead had Yancy assert their feelings for themselves more.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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A simple thing that I appreciated was the day-by-day reminder to save files. These were pretty unobtrusive. I never ended up needing to load a save during this playthrough, but it did make me feel more secure while playing that I wasn’t at risk of losing significant progress. I think a touch like that helps, and putting them at natural stopping points is a good design decision. Perhaps better would be some kind of autosave function, negating the need for manual saves, but what this game has is working.
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I’m most used to writing narrative text and dialogue, with different stylistic concerns for each situation. However, this game reminds me that dialogue is not the only kind of communication where you can apply a different style—the DMs feel like somewhere in between dialogue and epistolary writing. I don’t really write in modern settings where something like a DM or text message would come up, but if I ever did write in that genre, I would want to return to this game to study how it curates authentic-feeling DM-style communication.
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An aspect that I am thinking about here is the challenge of pruning branches efficiently without getting “caught” by the reader. I discussed the situation above with the photo sharing that made me think I was on a branching path that didn’t account for the choice that I made. As a result, when I did share the photo, it made me actively aware that the comments on the photo would be the same regardless of what the photo was due to the vagueness of the compliments. In other words, that single moment made me consciously aware that branches were being pruned, where if my slight variant path was accounted for in the previous page, I would not have become conscious in the same way. The lesson I take from this is that pruning is trickier than it appears on the surface level, and if your goal as a writer/creator is to maintain the illusion for the player that they are on a truly unique path shaped by their choices, you have to spend a lot of energy either writing a lot of branching paths, or prune discreetly enough to avoid the reader becoming overly conscious of it.
Quote:
- “Heteronormativity can be a real bitch.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The sinking feeling—really, the banal listless horror—I had while picking between three blue bags, knowing that I have been set up to fail and still hoping beyond hope that I somehow picked the correct one.