25 | THE MAZE GALLERY
25 | THE MAZE GALLERY
by: Cryptic Conservatory, including: Paxton, Rachel Aubertin, Chrys Pine, Ed Lu, Toni Owen-Blue, Christi Kerr, Sean Song, Joshua Campbell, Dawn Sueoka, Randy Hayes, Allyson Gray, Shana E. Hadi, IFcoltransG, Dominique Nelson, Orane Defiolle, An Artist’s Ode, Sisi Peng, Kazu Lupo, divineshadow777, Robin Scott, Sarah Barker, TavernKeep, Alex Parker, Mia Parker, J Isaac Gadient, Charm Cochran and Ghost Clown
co-written by: Charm Cochran, Sisi Peng, Shana E. Hadi, IFcoltransG, Aleshani, and Pine
Progress:
- After approximately 40 minutes of play, I encountered a game-ending glitch at the Gift Shop when I examined a nebula, which froze the screen and didn’t show any clickable links to get out of. After trying a few things, I restarted and did my best to generally recreate the path I took, with a few detours as I tried to engage with some of the other things that I passed. Eventually I was able to exit the art museum at around the 1h25m mark.
Things I Appreciated:
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This game is very atmospheric. It is an intimidating game to approach based on the front matter. The music dynamically changes as you wander these cursed locations, adding another aesthetic layer atop the wraithlike writing that weaves these tapestries of almost-coherence, allow you to pass through rooms without fully grasping the implications of doing so.
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My favorite room in the gallery is one called “Jo’s Café” where you suddenly find yourself re-embodied as a barista. After spiraling through the game feeling bereft of agency, this room was an invitation to “become ungovernable” and expressly disobey the terms of your employment. This helped me let off some steam because it was more concrete than some of the other rooms. Another room I really enjoyed was “Clown Cathedral,” mainly due to the music, which is an entertaining Alfred Schnittke-esque blend of carnival tunes and a funereal requiem.
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I like the meta aspect that a reviewer could metaphorically trap oneself in the maze by choosing to go to the effort of applying some kind of literary analysis to what is happening. Each room has plenty one could comment on, as the gallery is not entirely senseless. It’s interesting to be combing through this conceptual beach where the seaglass of shattered images, symbols, and references clink together, tumbled ashore to be gathered closely or admired from afar. It’s reminiscent of other (in)famously hyperliterary work like… I guess House of Leaves comes to mind? I haven’t read much in this genre because it hasn’t been a priority for me to engage that deeply with works that are that self-consciously resistant to being read. But I think occasional exposure to them can be engaging.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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As discussed above, I (playing on Chrome) encountered a gamebreaking glitch with the nebula. This was prior to receiving the key. I ended up at a screen that said “Not that you’ve seen a nebula up close before, but this looks normal. Except that it’s the size of a wide vehicle instead of billions of light years or whatever, obviously. You can feel a faint tug from all the tiny star systems forming inside it, and probably shouldn’t get too close.” (I guess I did get too close…) This didn’t allow me to proceed in any way so I had to restart. In that second playthrough, I encountered other glitches where my inventory/map/goals became inaccessible, but I managed to cross the finish line based on my prior knowledge from the first playthrough. There was also a broken image link at one point. Since similar things have happened to me on previous resource-intensive games (namely, Yancy At The End of the World), I suspect that it’s Chrome’s fault. Therefore I would highly recommend that players save often if they are trying to play on Chrome, or ideally, try to play the game on a different platform in case that is more functional.
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A major issue (?) I had with this game was that it trained me to dissociate from what was happening. I didn’t feel like my actions had any tangible consequences. After trying to earnestly engage with the game at the beginning, reading carefully to try to make sense of it, I started to wonder if I should read less, as this was part of the maze gallery’s trap. Because so much of this game is delivered in large blocks of text that is at a high reading level, the urge to skim and just vaguely click through hoping to proceed becomes more and more difficult to resist. There was a certain tunnel puzzle involving a room of timepieces where the game tells you to find the pattern, but I accidentally advanced without figuring out what the solution was, or if there even was a solution other than just allowing yourself to be tortured by the attempt to coalesce a signal from the noise. So the combined effect of these experiences is that I slid through a lot of this game without being called to task for not doing the harder work of digesting each room deeply. At the end of writing this, I’m not sure if this is a criticism or not, it’s more of just a description of what playing the game was like for me, so take from that what you will.
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This might be a weird comment, but I think the gallery map is actually too helpful in that it provides reliable information about which rooms are connected. I didn’t like that I saw a full path to the exit the first time I looked at it. Could the map be revealed in a piecemeal way as you organically wander through rooms instead?
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The power of collaboration. This is a massive project with a ton of text that is well edited (I don’t think I actually noticed a single typo while playing, though I’m sure inevitably some are lurking in the walls). Having a lot of collaborators means that you can build something this polished that is impressive in ambition/scope. I have a preference for working alone but maybe that’s because I haven’t had the right kind of positive collaborative experience. In a community that appears to be as interconnected as this one as (at least from what I’ve seen on the forum), maybe that’s an avenue to explore if the opportunity arises.
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I think this is an interesting case study in making the text extremely complicated but the gameplay very forgiving. This feels like a very intentional choice to put the player on edge with the difficult and abstract writing they are trying to read, while still allowing them to pass through relatively unimpeded. One can imagine a true nightmare version of this game that is basically unplayable because it’s moon logic and unforgiving to solve. The lesson I take from this is that balancing an extreme element of your work with a forgiving/comforting/simple element can make your work more approachable while still retaining the effect the extreme element is aiming for.
Quote:
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“As you reach to cover your ears the noise stops abruptly, the sudden silence as painful as the cacophony that preceded it.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I looked at the wall of the café and saw that Jo had been declared employee of the month a billion times. I wasn’t expecting the game to have such a “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” moment, but Jo really did… that. I was entertained, and then proceeded to maliciously feed a child a quadruple shot of espresso. This is what art looks like. Try to keep up.