Editor’s note: I think that, more than normal, pretty much everything in this game is a walking spoiler, so I advise caution when perusing this review if you have not yet played this one. I’ve still made an attempt to mark the bigger spoilers, though.
33 | 198BREW
33 | 198BREW
by: DWaM
Progress:
- I played this game for just over an hour, reaching one bad ending and what I presume to be a “good” ending. I did make light use of the walkthrough. The main things I messed up were never examining the plastic sheet, and I never saw the prompt to go into the park (the other locations you can go to are set apart into a separate paragraph), so I just never knew about that location until reading the walkthrough.
Things I Appreciated:
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Having finished the game and completed the main story puzzles (but without discovering any secrets, as far as I could tell), I feel like I have only scratched the surface of trying to understand it. This game has very unique, unsettling worldbuilding that gives the impression that its mysteries are solvable (and not just weird for the sake of being weird) but that you will need to work very hard to make that happen for yourself. I think if I wasn’t playing this in the context of a competition, I would want to spend more time absorbing the game and piecing together its mysteries.
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Weirdly, this is another game that has cannibalism as a central theme. Add that to the “Similarities and coincidences” thread, I guess. I wonder what the significance of this theme is here? I might be way off base here, but it has me thinking first on a basic level of how all survival/life involves some form of cannibalism/consumption: one could imagine how a growing baby is in some way “eating” the blood/cells/flesh of their parents in order to be born; or how the consumption of something like coffee is a consumption of the labor and material resources to produce it. But I think the game is not so literal as that? There’s a lot of focus on relationships of love and the idea of consuming one’s partner in a more emotional/conceptual way, and how that consumption changes the consumer. Or perhaps, given the painting, how consumed/absorbed/digest art affects the reader/viewer/critic? (I suspect given the church mentioned in the game that there’s a lot of religious imagery that’s going over my head as well.) I don’t think I figured out much here, and as tempting as it is to delete this entire comment and never speak of it again, I figure it’s better to leave it than not in case it helps someone else develop a more convincing reading of this text. At any rate, I found the themes engaging.
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I liked the strange and very off-putting way that characters communicate with you, owing to their time loop experiences. Like as a player: you start out, things are pretty weird, but you see that there’s a café and it’s like, alright, I have a chance to get coffee. And the barista launches into the most unexpected diatribe. It really adds a lot to the tone/atmosphere of the game to have such strange NPC encounters.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I think it would be most helpful if I, instead of casting a particular judgment as to whether or not the game should be this way, describe elements of the game that I had friction interacting with, and why I felt that way.
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(1) Clothes. When you go around, the characters constantly comment about the fact that you are almost naked. Yet, when I tried returning to the bedroom to put on some of Fiona’s clothes (with the goal of getting to have different conversations with people) I was not allowed to do so in a way that I could figure out how to phrase. Is it important to constantly tell the player that they are underdressed and then not allow them to dress? Is this thematically important in some way?
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(2) Toothbrushes. The main thing I found to interact with in the bathroom are red and purple toothbrushes, which are given narrative importance, but I wasn’t allowed to take them. I came back here after discovering that red and purple were key elements of the painting, but still couldn’t figure out what to do with them.
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(3) Telling Jacob to eat the crows. Having just received some change, I remembered that the train station phone booth needed money. So I went to use the phone, and was surprised when the protagonist automatically enacted a plan to tell Jacob to eat the crows. There are other moments where the protagonist has a different agenda than the player (for instance: refusing to examine the sketchbook), so I’m not fully against this, but it feels like a major puzzle element to have auto-solve for the player (I hadn’t made the connection yet that Jacob was the one who needed to eat the crows, but the game seemed to think I had figured that out.)
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(4) Hair color. The painting instructs you to find the living version of her, and the main feature of the painting is the vibrant red hair. So I was very determined to figure out who in the game had red hair, but found that when I tried to examine people, I would often not be told about their hair color (such as: trying to examine myself in the mirror). The uncanny aspect of this is that a feature like that would be clearly visible, so it felt like the game was withholding information, which made me paranoid as I wondered whether I needed to stab various different people or myself in case they were red haired. But also, I was afraid of resetting the time loop by stabbing random people (and as the game says, “You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.” As if “a painting told me so” is a good reason!) It would’ve been helpful to be able to rule out potential stabbing victims (
) by just being told whether they had red hair, since the red hair was made to seem important. Weirdly enough, the living Madeline doesn’t even have red hair—her hair is golden—so maybe I still did ultimately stab the wrong person. So much for my reckless campaign of anti-redhead violence. -
(Having concluded this list of random complaints, I’m adding here a reminder that I did find this game super interesting and engaging; this friction was born of my struggle to better know the game and its slippery themes.)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Personally, I love narratives that involve time loops, and I thought this was a unique example of one: the loop doesn’t reset. As far as I encountered while playing, over the course of the game, it’s not possible for you to time out of the loop “early” and restart the day. So (apparently) the loop only loops if you reach an ending but choose to play the whole game again, rather than looping multiple times in a single play session. I found that to be a distinctive and interesting feature of the piece. It’s an encouragement for writers engaging with time loops as a device to think of clever ways to implement them.
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The horror of matter-of-fact descriptions of gore. Something this game does really well is place disturbing elements in otherwise “normal” environments, that the protagonist still mostly regards as normal, but has a big impact on the player. For instance, the protagonist matter-of-factly wonders if they can get the remainder of their discarded flesh together to feed to animal. Or the fact that they just have random bits of their own flesh and blood hanging out in the refrigerator. Oh no! As a horror technique, this was well executed here.
Quote:
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“The poison of eternity coveted by many.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I randomly decided to “talk to crows” and not only did they respond, they had quite a lot to say. It gets worse the more you think about it!
DemonApologist_198Brew.txt (158.3 KB)