The Gift of What You Notice More
I love Dar Williams, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a game whose title references her music. I assumed at first that the connection ended there, but no; in fact, The Gift of What You Notice More is substantially based on Williams’s song “The Blessings”—it would have fit right into ShuffleComp back when that was a thing. (Of course, this is largely inconsequential to a review, unless you also happen to be a Dar Williams fan who wanted to know exactly how Dar Williams this game is, but I wanted the writers to know that the whole concept of it made me smile.)
The PC of The Gift of What You Notice More is in the process of separating from their husband, and is going back through dreamlike, surreal versions of key moments in their relationship to figure out where it all went wrong. You go through three rounds of this, at intervals getting items that unlock new areas within each memory (the game calls itself an escape room, but structurally it’s more of a Metroidvania—as funny as either of those descriptors sounds when applied to an introspective game about relationship failures). This is all in the service of digging progressively deeper in the hopes of unearthing the most fundamental problems with the relationship and figuring out what you need to take away from this experience. The problems are all very plausible, and the game struck a nice balance between being relatable and making the characters specific people with a specific relationship that isn’t meant to be a vague stand-in for every soured relationship ever.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the author’s first major foray into choice-based IF after releasing a number of well-received parser games. The Gift brings a parser sensibility to Twine in a way that I thought worked very smoothly. You have an inventory of items always displayed on the right side of the screen; if you think you can use a particular item in a particular location, you click on it, and if you’re right, the relevant link appears. This provides a taste of the parser-style puzzle-solving satisfaction that you don’t get in games where the link appears automatically once you’ve got the right thing in your inventory, but only having to worry about the noun makes it less clunky than the attempts I’ve seen to incorporate verb selection into choice-based gameplay. (It’s a little too late to take inspiration from this for the inventory-heavy choice-based game I’m currently working on, but I’m taking notes for the future.)
But although I liked the mechanics of the puzzle-solving, the design of the puzzles themselves didn’t always work quite as well, largely owing to the dream logic that the game operates on. When the internal logic of it works, it works (of course I have to drop a banana peel so that the jester who keeps popping out to put my armor back on whenever I take it off will slip and fall!). But there were puzzles where I could figure out each individual step based on the tools I had available but had no idea what my end goal was (e.g. all the elephant business—yes, I get the “elephant in the room” metaphor, but it wasn’t really clear to me what I was trying to do with the elephant), and others where I had no idea where to start (e.g. the moving van scene with the sticks). This is fairly subjective and I suspect that if you polled players you wouldn’t get very strong consensus on what clicked and what didn’t, but there must be some way to give the player a bit more of a nudge in the right direction now and then.
Another minor complaint is that each round involves coming up with three possible sources for the relationship’s issues and then picking one as the issue; this is clearly a reflective choice meant to encourage the player to engage with the story, with no gameplay implications. The thing is, the options didn’t seem mutually exclusive, and there was at least one round in which two of the options felt like facets of the same underlying problem. So it didn’t feel like there was strong in-universe motivation to be choosing just one thing to focus on, and I didn’t feel like I was guiding the character down a significantly different path into their future based on which thing I chose. It felt like the PC realizing where the problems were and what they could do differently in the future was what was really important for their growth, and picking one was a formality that ultimately fell a little flat.
But these complaints aside, I did enjoy The Gift. I like when introspective, issue-focused games have a little bit of whimsy and/or a fantastical edge to them, and this was a lovely example of that, with some smart ideas about gameplay design on top.