15 | IMPRIMATURA
15 | IMPRIMATURA
by: Elizabeth Ballou
Progress:
- I was able to play through the game, completing a painting called “Effacement” in around 20 minutes. For reasons I will get into later, I actively chose not to replay this game.
Things I Appreciated:
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There’s a lot to love here. The descriptions of my grandmother’s paintings were really evocative and interesting. I thought that there was a good balance between offering paintings that had a wide range of moods, subjects, aesthetics, while still seeming plausible that all these paintings could’ve been done by the same person.
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I thought the implementation of sound and music was effective, it breathed life into the choosing process.
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The game used choice mechanics in an interesting way. When starting out, unless you actively go out of your way to keep skipping paintings, you might choose to keep something early that, by the end, you might not have kept if you’d known what the range of options was. I thought this was engaging because early on, I didn’t know how many possible paintings I could encounter, the stakes of skipping a painting seem higher because you don’t know if you’ll see it again. This was contrasted by the end, where you are allowed to go back and undo elements of the painting that you are making, which I thought was a subtle and interesting indicator of your agency as a player. After being handed the brush, suddenly, you are more in control of the process. Personally, I chose to undo one of my painting’s choices (I originally chose cool tones but didn’t like the result, so I went back and was allowed to pick the black and white tones that fit the painting I had made better). And finally, the game ends by giving the most agency of all: a text box where you are no longer choosing between pre-determined choices but can simply name your painting what you think it should be called. I love the escalation of that sense of creative control, mirroring what the main character is experiencing as a result of this encounter.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Early on, (I believe this was the 3rd/4th or 4th/5th paintings that I encountered), I had an immersion-breaking moment where I selected the option to check a new painting, and got the same painting with the same description twice in a row (“The Tear”). This was jarring as it took me a moment to understand what had happened, and it kind of weakened the atmosphere of the game by showing a seam (why would the character re-select the same painting twice in a row so early in the process?). The recommendation I would make is to set the option so that, if you go to a different painting, it is not possible to receive that same painting consecutively.
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I find the painting-memory associative exercise interesting. As the game’s final screen notes, the paintings aren’t necessarily tethered to one specific memory. As I was playing, though, I didn’t know that yet. So I tried to make sense of the connections between the paintings and the memories as I went. Some of them made perfect sense to me, but there was one—the painting “Winter Nor’easter” combined with a memory about being at a playground where I couldn’t make sense of the connections between them. That made me feel like I had missed something important about the painting that would’ve led to this memory, but it also reminded me that associative chains don’t necessarily follow neat, clean lines, so there is a bit of realism to that.
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A moment in the text that brought up real emotion for me was the line “At night, when she slept, you could hear the soft whooshing of oxygen.” Unfortunately, I have spent a lot of time around oxygen machines. I had a moment of sudden… anger, I guess? Because I thought, “That’s not what it’s like.” For me, the oxygen machines have been these loud, noisy, oppressive things commanding the spaces that they are in, and I couldn’t imagine thinking of them in a peaceful light as this line suggests. After I had this response, I remembered, well obviously everyone’s experience is different, so why couldn’t it be a “soft whooshing” in certain contexts? I write this mainly to just indicate a moment of rupture in my experience, which I don’t think is a bad thing on its face, but also wasn’t necessarily something that I fully enjoyed either.
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As I mentioned at the very beginning of this response, I said that I actively chose not to play the game again, so I want to explain why that is. I think it can be tempting to replay a game like this to see what all the options are and exhaust them, but for me, I think that would inhibit my memory of it. Having already encountered one uncanny moment (the consecutive repeated painting), I felt like it would weaken the experience for me if I was able create a mental map of what all the options actually were and wring the mystique out of the game. I also don’t want to lose the specificity of my experience—I think if I went in to make more choices and generate more paintings, the experience would become indistinct somehow, as if I were sacrificing the particularity of how my organic playthrough I went to have it muddled by future attempts.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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One of the skills proudly on display here is tight visual description. Each painting’s description is only a few sentences, and you are given just enough pieces of the image that it draws something in your mind’s eye. I can easily imagine an alternative where the painting descriptions are overwritten and lose their impact. This was well-balanced writing.
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I thought the side panel was employed well to store the key information you had collected, as an alternative to encouraging the player to actually backtrack to previous scenes. This shows that, if you don’t necessarily want players to be able to backtrack a lot, finding alternative ways to allow them to access information they might want to revisit is a great way to do that.
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The “consecutive repeated painting” moment reminded me of a thought I had in creating the one IF game that I did for Single Choice Jam. When making that, the game uses randomization to set players on a path, and there’s something like a 2% chance that they could just happen to get the same path twice in a row if they chose to replay. I was fine with that being statistically possible to happen. But having experienced one such “2%” scenario from my playthrough of Imprimatura, I realize that in hindsight, I should’ve been more critical of how I chose to deploy randomness and account for fringe outcomes for that player’s experience. So that’s the lesson I learned: sometimes true randomness is too neutral, and it needs to be rigged slightly to smooth out the player’s experience. I guess I should’ve already learned this lesson from song shuffle algorithms, but it’s good to be reminded once in a while.
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The painting construction at the end feels like a triumph of choice-based gameplay. You get to build a painting and see the result. But also, you don’t have so many choices that it feels overwhelming. What an aspirational game mechanic to encounter.
Quote:
- “After that, it was impossible for her to paint.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The final act of revising my painting, then naming it, letting me feel like I had attained creative control.