EJ's 2023 IFComp Reviews

The Sculptor

This game follows a sculptor in his eighties who has toiled away for years to get the money to afford a block of marble to create his final masterpiece. Then he is confronted with forgotten medical debt that forces him to decide whether to sell the sculpture, or refuse to sully his art with crass commercialism and instead lose everything he owns.

I feel that if you are going to make your game revolve around a single moral dilemma, you ideally want to make each choice a complicated one that leaves the player with mixed feelings, rather than making it black and white as The Sculptor does. Selling the sculpture is the morally bad choice that you will feel horrible about and regret forever, even if it does let you pay your medical bills; refusing to sell it and destroying it so they can’t just repo it anyway is the good choice, the only way to preserve your all-important artistic integrity and thus the only right thing to do.

Maybe it’s not meant to be a dilemma; maybe it’s just meant to surprise the player that the PC is miserable about the option your average person might think was “good” and happy about the option they’d think was “bad”. I can see how that might be eye-opening to someone who has never really given much thought to the way art and money interact before. But like a lot of people here, I’ve grappled with this at some length, so to me all the game does is present a character with an unusual-but-not-unheard-of hardline take on this thorny matter.

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