17 | UNREAL PEOPLE
17 | UNREAL PEOPLE
by: Viwoo
Progress:
- I played this game for 55 minutes. I arrived at a game state that appears to be the end, but I am honestly not 100% sure is the true ending. (The screen I ended up on says “You have become”).
Things I Appreciated:
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The game had some funny moments to it. Despite being set in “early mediaeval India,” many of the jokes and language used were decidedly modern, creating a sense of wacky humor. Examples of lines like this: “Shaming them for yielding to feudal dominion in a post-barter economy is hardly bullying,” and “As usual, we accept donations in cash only.” This is a narrative that half-invites you to find immersion but thwarts attempts to take it too seriously, which I think is an interesting tone to strike.
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I appreciated moments where the game uses click-replace links to control the pace of the narrative intentionally for effect. Those were some of my favorite pages, because I felt a more active sense of curation of what I was experiencing, which made me more invested.
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At first, due to the nature of the vessel jumping, I had no attachment to any one character or anything that was happening. But as it went, I did start to gradually build familiarity with the social world of the game, and I was at least engaged with the question of whether Mazboot really was the king’s heir, or if it was an elaborate red herring after all.
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I enjoyed the description of perceiving as non-human vessels. A vivid example that I liked was the tactile feeling of breathing as a banana leaf. That was an exciting moment and made me curious to see what it would be like to perceive as all sorts of non-human entities.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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If I can be a bit blunt here, this game is unfinished. I don’t mean the ambiguous ending either. I can live with that, in fact I find that interesting. What I mean is, there are many technical glitches and formatting errors. For instance, there are many notes encased in double exclamation points that seem like coding comments that should’ve been taken out (e.g., “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!”). I also encountered a Twine error that said “The (click-replace:) changer should be stored in a variable or attached to a hook.” There is pre-formatted leftover text, links to click that result in a blank page, and so on. My point is not to exhaustively document each and every error, as I find that mean-spirited. Rather, I want to illustrate that it is impossible to play this version of the game without encountering a lot of immersion-breaking moments like that.
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A system that I think could be added to this game would be to have the secrets be revealed with a special formatting (e.g., gold font or something that makes them really stand out on the page) and a sidebar where you can revisit them. As I played, I ended up taking a significant amount of notes about the secrets I collected to avoid forgetting them, in case they were important in solving a puzzle at some point. I don’t mind taking notes too much, but having now seen other games that have done this sort of thing automatically, I think it’s worth considering implementing something like that.
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I didn’t appreciate the use of generative AI for the cover art. Before playing, I wondered if having AI-generated art specifically would be relevant in some way to the narrative, perhaps offering some kind of attempt to rationalize weathering the ethical concerns that players would raise about AI-generated art, but I left feeling like the narrative did not do that.
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Ending spoilers: The ambiguous ending is interesting in its own right, but it is also a bit anticlimactic to feel like as a player, you are collecting all these secrets to piece together some great mosaic (aided by the mandala imagery on the way) to solve the core mysteries of the game. So the fact that the game ended how it did made me feel like I was missing something. Perhaps the game is intended as a critique of the the player’s desire to see the full tapestry, as it points out how boring it would be to know everything and attain full control of the narrative. In that case, I think that message did successfully come through for me.
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I would encourage even more use of text-reveal timing to control the reading pace, as I saw it being used well in some places and thought it added to the experience. For instance of an obvious one that stuck out to me: “Drop. Drop. Drop. Seconds. Pass.” Each “drop” could be a link, forcing the player into the pace of the dripping. I’m sure going through this again, one could find other ways to enhance the interactive elements along similar lines.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I liked the premise of a bait-and-switch where the player thinks they are doing one thing (building an index of secret knowledge to solve a grand social puzzle) only to encounter a “gotcha” at the end. However, because of technical errors and unfinished sections, when I reached the end, I wasn’t sure if it was the actual end or if I had encountered an unfinished branch of the narrative that I needed to backtrack to escape. So the lesson I take from this is that if I want to pull off an ambitious meta twist, the technical aspects of the writing need to be secure to ensure that the impact of the twist can be strongly felt.
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In terms of the dialogue options, many of the dialogue options felt unnecessary as they were two variants of a very similar answer. I wondered about the effects it has on the player when presented with many choices that appear inconsequential. I found that after a while, I became careless when picking dialogue choices instead of weighing them each time, because so many of them felt like it didn’t make a lot of difference. The lesson is I guess to be judicious about not adding options for the sake of adding options, and making sure that there is a reason to be giving a player less impactful choices if you’re going to do that.
Quote:
- “The last man saw of god was man unseen by god.” (This really makes you think, doesn’t it?)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When at the end, I was suddenly empowered to write dialogue for a scene. That was a super interesting meta moment in the narrative that will stick with me for sure.