11 | A DREAM OF SILENCE: ACT 3
11 | A DREAM OF SILENCE: ACT 3
by: Abigail Corfman
Progress:
- I completed a first playthrough in about 40 minutes (using the settings: story mode and summarize Acts 1 and 2). After finishing the game, while the first experience was very thought provoking, I felt like I hadn’t experienced enough of the game to fully wrap my head around the mechanics so I decided to play a second time on the same settings. In total, I played for around 1h10m.
Things I Appreciated:
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Well, the first thing I appreciated about the game is the amazing cover art by cymk8. Every time I scrolled past this looking over my personal shuffle order, I was looking forward to becoming trash (affectionately) for this vampire man who looked like Astarion. I was surprised when it turned out to literally just be Astarion since I don’t think I fully grasped that fan works would be submitted to this competition (not knowing much about IF Comp). Anyway, the reason that this is in the “appreciate” category is that luckily for me, I am in the target audience for an Astarion fan work. (Even so I was expecting to get to meet a different vampire guy for the first time so I feel just the slightest bit robbed of that potential experience. I think mentioning BG3 in the front matter/blurb would’ve avoided that feeling. Sorry for putting a mixed comment about this in the positive category, it turns out the categories all blur together because of how messy my responses are, it’s actually getting worse the more of them I do somehow
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The UI and presentation of this game is fantastic. The screens feel polished and provide a lot of useful information without feeling cluttered. I especially want to observe here how the backdrops have subtle low-contrast patterns to them that are related to the scene, so it’s extra textural detail if you want to pay attention to it, but ultimately doesn’t sacrifice readability by busying the background of text.
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Something that I thought was well done even in the “easy mode” version of the game that I played was how every choice you make is a true compromise due to limited resources. My first playthrough went so poorly that I thought by choosing different stat distributions, I would breeze through the second time, but it turned out that losing the things that I had originally put points in was consequential. I feel like this game has a lot of potential depth as a result; you are held to account for what you choose to prioritize, so it encourages several playthroughs to reach the extremities of what is possible in the game.
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I thought some of the writing captured Astarion’s voice super well. There was a line after giving Astarion a knife, “Oh. Oh, this is lovely,” where I felt like I actually heard Astarion’s voice actor from BG3 speaking the line in my head. That was a wild experience.
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The “something shimmers” text effect was really cool, it was kind of like a visual frisson. Similarly, I loved the text in the final scene where you could click to cycle through words on the page, it really was effective in underscoring the exuberant triumph of waking Astarion up.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The number one question this game instantly raises is one of audience, on multiple levels. The first level is, this is explicitly a sequel work (Act 3), where people judging it have not necessarily played Acts 1 and 2. The second level is that as a fan work, the piece is radically different to experience based on the reader’s familiarity with Baldur’s Gate 3. One of the first questions this game presents is a choice between, “Play through a summarized version of the first two Acts,” which is labeled as being for the IF community, and “Go play the first two Acts in their entirety, then come back,” which is labeled as being for the BG3 community. This choice perplexed me because I have both played BG3 (I’m still on my first playthrough in Act 3 and haven’t finished yet) but I am also playing this specifically to judge for IF Comp. I selected the first option because I was perplexed by the idea of accounting of play time for the first 2 acts and how that might collide with the 2-hour time limit. Anyway, I would be curious to hear about how accessible people completely unfamiliar with BG3 found this story.
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My first playthrough was fascinating in kind of a cursed way. Essentially what happened for me was, I had no sense of how valuable the “energy” economy was, so I ran out of energy completely during the Godey scene. Additionally, the stats I had prioritized were speech > touch > sight. At this point, being completely out of energy, I started to believe that I was completely out of agency to affect the narrative. On every page it felt like there was a scene with a line “Something exists beyond your perception” because I couldn’t see anything, and all my options to say or touch something were grayed out because I was completely out of energy. I hadn’t discovered the shimmer mechanic yet, so I would just select “wait” on every page for the vast majority of the game, watching Astarion try to solve his problems on his own and dragging me along with him. What I find fascinating about this is that, there actually were things I could’ve clicked to affect the story (essentially, clicking through to find a shimmer to regain energy), but so many options had been grayed out and blocked that the game had taught me to play it as a helplessness simulator. Toward the end, I found my first energy refill during the fight with Leon and it felt amazing to finally get to intervene and help Astarion. While one could view my experience of the game as something negative (a simulation of disempowerment that was at times frustrating), I personally find it interesting when games allow me to have that kind of wacky personalized experience when I make questionable choices due to my idiosyncratic (or less politely: stubborn and misguided) way of approaching games. In my second playthrough, I had a stronger sense of what to do and felt like I was much more in control of my options.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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A feature that I want to foreground here is the emergent trackers for “His Attention” and “Escape” that got added to the UI and had distinctive visual appearances. Because of the nature of my “helplessness playthrough” I was watching the two trackers battle with each other as Astarion struggled through the scenes and I felt tense not knowing whether “Escape” would reach 10 before “His Attention” got to 20. The lesson here is how the mere threat of the “His Attention” counter and the ominous way that it would tick up was enough to create an emotional response for me. Even if I knew on some level that realistically, because I played in the story mode, Cazador was not going to be stopping us, I still felt the heat of it. So I think making variables like this visible to the player to set tone/stakes is a good thing to keep in mind. I think it would’ve been less effective if I was told in a non-numerical way through text, even if a non-numerical way on the surface would seem more organic/natural.
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Another writing trick I liked was the semi-script-like presentation. I felt that this was written somewhere in between a script format and a narrative style, and that it felt natural. I’m more accustomed to writing with dialogue tags personally, but I feel encouraged by this game’s presentation to try being more experimental with writing interactive fiction that breaks out of “static fiction” formatting norms, if I ever do end up choosing to try writing another IF piece.
Quote:
- “You’re just floating. You intangible freeloader.” (This was such an accurate depiction of my first playthrough it stopped me in my tracks. I was like, how does the game know that’s exactly how I’ve been playing this whole time )
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- There was a single moment where the game dunked on me so hard by calling my bluff on my first playthrough. There’s an option you can select during the Leon scene where you use your ghost power to whisper his daughter’s name. I clicked on it and the game said, “That would be clever. Do you know his daughter’s name?” And I gasped because of course I didn’t know his daughter’s name, I’m just a poor helpless ghost who hasn’t been allowed to see anything for the last three scenes! Leave me alone, I’ve been through enough! I was too chagrined to even submit a guess, and backtracked in shame thereafter. It was a legitimately entertaining moment for me to have the game sass me like that.