56 | HOUSE OF WOLVES
56 | HOUSE OF WOLVES
by: Shruti Deo
Progress:
- I read through this twice, making different choices to see some of the different text. This took around 12 minutes total. (I ended up going through a few more times while writing this response to add more to my notes.)
Things I Appreciated:
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I really liked the clean visual presentation of the piece, with the inset card that helped focus my attention to a smaller space that’s appropriate for the amount of text. It’s sharply crafted from that perspective, and there’s a particular line where font size is used to great effect to loom within that space.
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Given the subject matter, the game was the perfect length. This is essentially a depression/abuse/torture simulator and is deeply unpleasant to read, but it uses a kind of rule-of-three logic to its construction where the dinner scenes and interceding dreams escalate alongside one another. This is just enough time for the player to test out different approaches to the day to see if agency is possible. It conveys the emotional weight of the piece over the course of those events and feels correctly paced for what it is trying to do. Because it demands a lot emotionally from me in that time, I’m glad it wasn’t longer.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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For a short game with straightforward prose depicting abuse, I feel less sure what the piece is “really about.” I’ll say a bit more about how I interpreted the piece as it went, in case that’s helpful to anyone else making sense of this piece. This narrative depicts a depressed student, and the depression is within the context of remote learning. You can see scenes where previously, school had been an escape from their abusers where they could spend time with friends, so having that escape removed puts them under perpetual surveillance. Since the abuse takes the form of being forcefed slabs of raw meat, the next place my mind went was that this was a kind of vegetarian/vegan horror piece showing how alienating it is to be expected and forced to eat meat as a cultural/moral norm when you have developed an ethical stance against doing so. But the scene that really throws me is the second dream. In this dream, the protagonist imagines being served meat that has been thoughtfully cooked for them by kind people, and is actually able to enjoy eating it. It made me feel like, it’s not the meat itself that’s important, it’s the people serving the meat. If the meat was meant to be enjoyed, the protagonist could enjoy it, so the meal reflects the intention of the preparer. At this point, I set aside the vegan horror take and my interpretation pivoted in a strange direction to another cultural association I have with raw meat: that there are people (mainly like… bro influencers?) who promote eating raw meat as an expression of masculinity. From there, the threads of the piece aligned to being more about gender instead. The focus on being “presentable” for dinner (washing up is one of the mandatory steps every day). You are told off for crying at dinner, that you’re not being “normal”. You are thinking about masking your true self as a lesson from the programming lecture. I thought about the title. Why wolves? Another cultural touchpoint here is the “alpha” vs. “beta” etc. language used around this branch of masculinity, which apparently originated from an inaccurate scientific study about wolves in captivity. The protagonist’s gender is never directly foregrounded, exactly, but that’s what I take away from this piece—a kind of concatenation of abuse methods that points toward gender/queerphobia as the site from which the horrors ultimately flow. That’s what I think the piece is about, but is it? It’s hard to say for sure, it seems like House of Wolves is flexible enough to result in a lot of different interpretations.
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The pervasive tone of this piece is pessimism/hopelessness. As I played, I naturally tried doing things “out of order” and was rebuffed by the game. But it plays out largely the same even if you do things “in order.” I get that it’s illustrating the hopelessness and powerlessness of abuse. But I’m left feeling kind of empty as a result. The dreams are presented as an escape, but it rings pretty hollowly. If I just dream harder… pull my dreams up by their dream-bootstraps (the way I said that doesn’t quite make sense but just go with it I guess), I can imagine my way out of this situation. And maybe that’s what you have to cling to to survive this kind of abuse. That’s the main agency/refuge left, until the opportunity for new agency arises. I guess I can’t fault a piece for choosing to be so pessimistic, but as a result it feels less poignant and more enervating to finish reading.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The cyclical narrative structure—where the game trains you to complete the same steps in the same order over and over again—can be used to create a sense of escalation. During each round of these actions, the descriptions and threats intensify, leading to a sense that the cumulative effects of this abusive treatment are getting worse and worse. So I thought this was an effective narrative device.
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In the scenes where you need to click “swallow” over and over again, I was thinking about time again. The player is forced to stay in that time by clicking every third word so many times. This made me feel like there was an opportunity missed to have the last meal be even slower. Instead of clicking “swallow,” what if you had to click “bite,” “chew,” and “swallow” one word at a time to reduce the pace even further. This would’ve been excruciating. Perhaps too much, even. But I bring this up as an illustration of how having to do more “work” as the reader to get less progress in the scene and slow it down can be, unfortunately in this case, immersive to the story.
Quote:
- “When you set out on your path again, you will be warmer. Not because the path is any less cold, but because an ember, fed by love and hope, burns hot inside your heart."
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When the LARGE TEXT appeared with an expected, but nonetheless disconcerting message about what my choices were.