Hello!
I started a bit late on this year’s crop, partly because I was playing this Twine murder mystery game called Type Help which as a side-note is great, you’ll need to break out a notebook for it, recommended!
First few Spring Thing entries here I played a week or two ago and am getting around to writing up now.
Wayfarers
This is certainly an interesting one to start with. Not a bad one, definitely ambitious!
Near future, and war, war never changes. War also never ends.
You’re a soldier, in a world where medical technology has advanced to the point where the military can keep people alive through injuries they’ve suffered that would’ve been fatal in today’s world. People like you. There’s a long path through rehab, and so your mind needs to go through virtual therapy in the form of video games in order to re-acclimate to your new body. It’s while playing through a 2-player 90s style RPG (Chrono Trigger, Zelda, stuff like that) that you partner up with the virtual avatar of a fellow casualty of war called Ada. And so you keep playing, through the pain and through the memories, in order to get through rehab so that you can rejoin the fight, in a war that has already taken so much from you.
Written in Twine, with a first person POV. Your character, an enlistee, lives in the virtual space throughout, so they’re narrating the experience of playing the game, sometimes reflecting on the war or their past, chatting with Ada, chatting with doctors, sometimes needing to stop a session because of the pain. This also isn’t, to be clear, a very happy game; it deals with a lot of trauma and injury and death. But there is hope.
The RPG your character is playing through is also called Wayfarers. One of the tags the author chose for their Spring Thing entry was “90s rpg nostalgia” and boy, does this ever nail that. It’s described in fragments of gameplay, NPCs and enemies and locations and quests, which gives glimpses of this marvellous little world and sends a bunch of bursts of warm recognition in my brain. Like wow, does this make me kind of wish to play it myself! There’s a little JRPG type background song, even. You really get a sense of a sprawling, charming adventure.
The writing is generally pretty good while navigating through a bunch of different, tricky tones, between painting a JRPG world, providing backstory and world exposition, and delving into some heavier emotional territory. Some sentences I found got over-the-top at times, but then the descriptions are also willing to stretch out beyond common cliches and really reach for more imaginative imagery and phrasing. The text rarely ever got bogged down or dragged.
I think the only real thing is that the commentary is pretty heavy-handed at points. When your character, right near the start, is explaining the world, and they’re telling me about the endless cycle of violence that is the war they’re stuck in, as if that’s not even just their point of view, but just… a fact of this world, then, well, where do you go from there? What am I, the player, wanting for the character during the rehab, what realizations can they come to, what can the rest of the work say about war when that’s the starting point for them? I’m not saying the rest of the story or experience doesn’t go anywhere, just that the war always seemed a bit hazy… like slightly disconnected, and somewhat nonspecific. You do learn more backstory about your family. You think about your experiences during the war. You grow closer to Ada. You reflect. And finally, you make a choice.
That’s the overview. I think people might enjoy it, its really just deeper structural quibbles I have (which I get into more below). I liked the writing and the description of the journey through a vivid JRPG world. The personal story is fine, the commentary on war is uneven.
More discussion
And when I say uneven, I’m thinking about which parts of the story are providing the commentary, and also which parts aren’t. There are other games-within-the-game besides Wayfarers which you briefly get introduced to. One of them is called “Forever War,” a mindlessly violent shooter where you can trample over human rights and dehumanize others with glee. The way this game is described, it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to acclimate the player towards war or becoming a better soldier, or anything like that; it sounds like blatant anti-war satire. Which is odd, considering these games are presumably hand-picked or commissioned by the military to help the patients re-join the war after rehabbing. Maybe that’s just because of the character’s anti-war views skewing things? It almost seems like it should be going the other way, and be overt military propaganda instead. All the negative sentiments when the character is describing the war or the rehab program persist–the military having endless money, your recruiter keeping tabs on you–but in actual interactions you have with something military related here, with the rehab program and the doctors running it, you seem to be treated fine, and they’re never pushy about getting you back into the front lines. The whole program sounds extremely dystopian, but it doesn’t feel that dystopian in actuality. And the final choice: that the military would be willing to put that much money and time into rehabbing you, and then would let you just leave afterwards? That seems off.
The question I never really understood in the end was, why did the protagonist enlist in the first place? They seem certain the war is bad, at least at points. They’re not fighting against the war, this isn’t a loss of faith, or a realization they seem to have come to later. The only thing they repeatedly say is that they had no choice, but I never quite understood why. I think the “no choice” thing is feeding into a story choice you do have later on. But it doesn’t necessarily seem like you joined because of lack of other economic options, since your sister didn’t join and she urged you not to. Your mom joined, and that’s a story point, but not in a way that I could understand as a more specific motivation (like feeling the need to follow in her footsteps?). So I could never fully understand where the character was coming from in that regard.
For me, I think if the explicitly anti-war exposition was toned down or maybe more back-loaded, and the focus was on the personal, the journey, the rehabilitation–which is good, all that stuff is fine to excellent–then there’s enough inherent in the story anyways that the anti-war sentiment would still emerge, but it would feel more personally involved and follow along the beats of the story more.
One other note: there’s a major choice near the end that was presented in a couple of in-line links (those are links which are words within a passage, as opposed to for example links that are at the very bottom of a page). And there were a whole bunch of warnings on the page telling me it was an irrevocable decision, and I still clicked on the first inline link before I read the rest of the page. Oops, my bad! But as a general design choice, should major choices be in-line links? If they’re that important, maybe they should be at the very bottom, after all the text? What do people think? I also feel that use of in-line links as story continuation hadn’t been as well established in the rest of the game, which mostly used single links on a page, or just links at the end.
End choice (spoiler)
I chose to keep on fighting. I would’ve chosen that anyways. I think the story was probably pushing me towards a different realization. But also, if the story keeps telling me I have no choice…