20 | A DEATH IN HYPERSPACE
20 | A DEATH IN HYPERSPACE
by: Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Progress:
- I played through this game once in 40 minutes and reached an ending called “A Hyperactive Imagination”. After taking a break to process that experience and consider whether I should play again, I decided to play for another 40 minutes, reaching the ending “O Captain! My Captain!”
Things I Appreciate:
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The timer. Both its presence, and the ability to turn it off. When reading the instructions at the start of the timed sequence I hadn’t scrolled down far enough to see the timer yet, so when the text said 30 minutes in relative time, I thought it was going to be a turn-based system (perhaps each click counts for 10 seconds or something), and was legitimately shocked when I finally reached the bottom of the page and learned that 2 of my 30 minutes had already been used up. I immediately panicked and considered turning off the timer, because the amount of time seemed completely insufficient to solve a complicated puzzle, but I decided that the timer was chosen for a reason and I should trust the process. The resulting experience was unique, a kind of nightmare of sensory overstimulation as I desperately clicked through options, gaining more impressions of scenes rather than truly reading them. Every few minutes, the people switch rooms, causing disorientation as you struggle to track them down again. There are characters like VKB who seem like you could potentially talk to but are apparently unreachable, adding to the surreal atmosphere. There are even similar names, like Petro, Primus, and Pax, which I’m convinced was a malevolent design choice on part of the authors to instigate this overall atmosphere of frenzy/chaos that I’m describing. The time pressure caused me to be less deliberate in my dialogue choices, unable to gather my wits enough to adapt responses to a situation and just instinctively picking what stood out to me. In the second playthrough, I turned off the timer and explored the game much more calmly to actively decide what I wanted to do. It also allowed me to recontextualize the first ending I received now that my emotions had settled. So I appreciate that I played it this way: timed first, untimed second.
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Thematically, I think what this game is getting at is the rush of dissociative emotion that can happen as a result of a shocking death/grief. The game starts off with a more serious tone, (I mean this game has epigraphs, how formal!), which Pearl then diverts, completely shifting the tone with the phrase “murder most foul.” This gave me pause in my first playthrough, as I was trying to get hold of what this game was trying to be. I thought, how campy and cartoonish to transform this extremely serious moment into a murder mystery pastiche. This thought dogged me as I rushed through the brutally swift 30 minutes. The game tells you to be careful what you say to people, but most of the dialogue options are written in this similar cartoonish way, with you approaching random people and accusing them of murder or trying to intimidate them, rather than using any kind of rational or tactical approach. For me, that became the point of game: in the desperation of grief your character has dissociated from the reality of the situation to try and find answers. In a sense, given its delusive nature, “hyperspace” itself functions as a metaphor for the state of grief. The process of adjusting suspicion levels feels like a mechanization of confirmation bias. Each time I would raise someone’s suspicion level, Pearl would react enthusiastically, but I felt unsure. My impression of almost every character I met is that they had their own issues and challenges in life and that hardly justifies the accusations I was making. I think the ending I received was fitting: with only a minute left, I happened to ask Lament if I was a child, and I read her response as confirming that to be true. Unlike when I made other suspicion changes, when I unlocked the Ceri explanation and switched it to “high,” the UI changed and it made me think I had finally found the real answer. It made sense to me: the ridiculously phrased dialogue options, the failure to take the situation seriously in an authentic-feeling way. Playing a second time with the timer off felt like I was simulating the experience of coming down from the initial chaos of grief, to finally accept what had happened. Re-visiting Lament’s comment, I realized in context with a clearer mind that she wasn’t literally saying I was a child, just annoyed with me. I was being child-like by pantomiming the detective while Lament was actually seriously trying to solve the grim situation. (And other context clues indicate that the Hyperactive Imagination ending is an escapist hyperspace delusion, to be clear). So I really appreciate how, in my view, the game uses the cartoonish aesthetic of an overzealous detective fiction fan as a mask for something deeper.
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I want to add that the music that played during the investigation phase added significantly to the disorienting experience. I found myself distracted by whether the music—which plays overlapping rhythms at slightly different tempos, causing the notes to line up and then fall out of sync with each other over before lining up again—was glitching out or if it was intended to be doing that. (To be clear, at this point I feel certain that it was an intentional choice on the part of the composer rather than actual glitched audio. I think I’m just not accustomed to listening to polyrhythms much more extensive than something like a hemiola).
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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There are some minor coding errors in this game. For example, sometimes when I would click through to a new page, a ghostly line of code would appear for a second or two at the bottom of the page before vanishing. I suspect this has something to do with the 5-minute timer where characters switch locations, but I’m not sure. Similarly, there were times when the plain text left behind from underlined click links after you click them retained the underline (example: “dim and depressing” stayed underlined). I don’t view these as significantly harming the experience, but I figured I would mention them since I noticed it.
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More significantly, I encountered a moderately disruptive situation in my first playthrough. Since I was playing with the 30-minute timer enabled, I went down to the wire, picking an accusation and proceeding to the end with only 40 seconds to spare. However, while in the midst of reading that ending, the timer went off, causing me to be ejected from that ending into a screen that ultimately re-started the ending that I had already been reading. My recommendation is that if the player has reached a “point of no return” like being in the middle of an ending narration, the timer should stop or pause automatically to avoid this type of disruption.
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There’s another moment that I encountered that I’m not sure was intentional or not. In a conversation with Pax, the text proceeded as if I had picked a dialogue option accusing him, and led through a conversation with only singular dialogue options along those lines. It made me wonder if the dialogue tree had been mismapped somehow. Unfortunately I couldn’t go back to 100% confirm what I had clicked, so it could’ve been my mistake.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This game most obviously raises the question of real-time events, and whether or not players should have the ability to turn off the timer. The alternative I’d consider here is having the timer be mandatory for the first playthrough, and then enable the option to turn off the timer after that. (In other words, deciding that the way I have played it is the “correct” one. How reckless and misguided of me!). But upon reflecting more, I think having the option to turn the timer off even the first time through is essential. I think as a player, even though I chose to keep the timer on, I would’ve resented the inability to turn it off. By having the option, it gave me the opportunity to consent to the timer, essentially. I actively chose to take the invitation to experience the fever dream that results from trying to legitimately solve this without outside help in 30 minutes of real time. And I look forward to reading, I hope, from players that managed the timer differently and might have wildly different interpretations/endings as a result of playing it differently. That wouldn’t be as likely to happen without giving players the control here.
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Another lesson this game teaches me is one of voice. I had trouble connecting with the voice of the character, most of whose dialogue options I did not want to click on because I wanted to extract information in a more tactical manner that was seemingly impossible with the clumsy and aggressive way that Pearl confronted people. In the end, I have come to a better understanding of why it was like that. Moments of disjuncture between the player and the “2nd person narrator” (Is that what I’m meant to be calling it? The version of “you” that is in-universe, as opposed to the out-of-universe person playing the game? I’ve never had to reach so much 2nd person prose in my life as I have this week, I’m not really used to trying to discuss it in a technical way.) are an interesting tool. They necessarily hinder immersion by making the player conscious of the voice feeling wrong. Yet that can pay off later and better help the player empathize with Pearl’s character with a more rounded/informed perspective of their grief. So the note here is: consider how a character’s voice might appear to “ring false” first before “ringing true,” and what types of narrative contexts in which that could be thematically enriching, such as this one.
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The choice of the underline styling to distinguish between links that will reveal more/new text from links that will send you to the next page was interesting. Making this kind of distinction helps reduce the cognitive burden about whether or not to click an interactable element in the middle of a page. So the lesson would be: in situations where I want players to avoid that type of decision fatigue, having a distinct style for that type of link is a strategy that can work.
Quote:
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“Are you sure you want to find out the truth, Pearl? I mean, if you do, then this game you’re playing will be over.”
Lasting Memorable Moment
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When with under a minute left on the clock, believing Ceri’s story resulted in a sudden change of the UI, letting me recklessly believe that I had finally found the “right” answer with moments to spare. It was emotionally and thematically engaging, while also being a great illustration of confirmation bias at my expense.