Epistemophilia by Mehmetcan Serinkaya
Sometimes, the Muse is a beguiling voice, urging the artist forward with glimpses of the beyond, sweetly spurring their vision, their voice. Other times, the Muse can be a real @^#$&. Hectoring, cajoling, threatening, everything short of physically abusing the artist to GET IT DONE. If you imagine the artist as a racehorse, and the Muse as the most entitled, self-absorbed, win-at-all-costs Jockey employing the whip as if it were the only motivational tool available… if you picture that, that is what I’m on about here. Now add the pressure of IFCOMP deadline to the mix, and you have a recipe for animal cruelty worthy of Cruella DeVille. Under such pressures, how can an artist possibly flourish, let alone the art itself?
This is an amnesiac-awakens-to-sci-fi-world scenario, a choice-select work rendered in Ink. I find the Ink platform’s typographical layout classy and appealing. It suggests a maturity of product, a refined implementation just in its elegant simplicity. Cruella DeMuse is having none of that. If I were to identify an overriding impression of the work, it would be an anti-Orson Wells situation. We are definitely selling a wine before its time here. The contrast between the polish promised by Ink and the actual product is quite jarring.
The most obvious manifestation of this is also its most confrontive: the work is rife, just chock-a-block with typos, bad spelling and bad grammar. This certainly COULD be the product of non-native text translation. If so, it is singularly unfortunate, as the pervasive nature of it ends up being the overriding impression of the work. (Sidebar: translation is an easily underestimated skill in literary works. Words do SO MUCH with allusion, metaphor, vernacular, cultural context. It is less a mechanical syllable-substitution exercise and more an art of its own, devoted to capturing the full intent of an artist in language not designed for such.) I have included an incomplete list for the author’s consideration, but will not belabor this further. Suffice to say, Cruella has NO patience for spell checkers. While inarguably the most impactful compromise of the work, it is not the only one.
The design of the work is ambitious. While many choice-select works are content to provision 1-3 options at each choice junction, E routinely provisions six or more! The branching narrative possibilities this suggests are astounding if not daunting. Inevitably, some of these branches are more rewarding than others. As an amnesiac exploring the space, there is no disconnect between protag and player. We are both experiencing the world cold. It’s not UNFAIR to punish both of us with surprise instant deaths. It is also not very FUN. If the difference between turning right and left is DEATH, with no information available to cue choices, it creates a capricious atmosphere. Yes, you can save scum (I would suggest you HAVE TO) and try again, but to what end? Saves are not narratively justified here, the deaths not really tied to the themes of the piece in any way. They are simply delaying tactics that pull us out of the narrative and into transactional player space. Experience enough of these, and the large decision space starts to feel like a threat. On the one hand hinting at a branching depth you have NO HOPE of fully experiencing while simultaneously undermining that depth with suspicion that deeper paths are going to be hard work to excavate.
But there is decidedly depth here! As you explore the sci-fi base, every choice that doesn’t kill you unveils more and more backstory (as these things do). There also is a shift though: while the density of choices rarely lets up, the paradigm shifts from branching to collection. Choke points become laundry lists to click through, assembling lore. The choice is mainly how MUCH lore to consume, which, as the artistic POINT of the work, doesn’t feel like a true choice at all. Worse, after establishing a paradigm of meaningful choices, at some point, ACTUAL choices are ceded to the plot. In my longest play through, the last few decisions of the protag were taken without my consent, and in one case actively against what I was angling for! The Muse really did a number on our artist here. Yes, instant death super late in the game would have INFURIATED, but taking away established player autonomy is not really any more rewarding.
And it was buggy too. At one point, I was cycling through a map - gathering details on multiple paths forward in hopes to make a decision. As I consumed each link, they dutifully disappeared from my dashboard. No worries, once I’ve seen them all surely… surely I would be trapped in a linkless cul-de-sac ending my session? Where I had not foreseen to save state?
So yes, the shrew of a Muse has a lot to answer for here. Which is a shame, because as an assemble-the-lore game, it is no less ambitious. At first blush, the familiar tropiness of it all rushes in on you. Are we at the mercy of inscrutable aliens? A rogue AI? Dehumanizing corporations or autocratic World Government? Are we bio-engineered? Cyber-enhanced? Socially devolved post-apocalypse primitives experiencing prior generations’ godlike super tech? We’ve seen all of those before, right? Know what we haven’t seen? ABSOLUTELY ALL OF THEM AT ONCE, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ONE. The raw, Muse-driven HUBRIS of that is breathtaking. And it’s pretty engagingly rendered! Yes, it is lore dump on lore dump. But it is paced pretty well, in convincing logs/reports and documents. Best of all, the details are WEIRD, so offhand, so suggested-not-told, even the most cliche of background feels fresh and intriguing. Nevermind compounding all of it on each other into a very rich stew! It is hard to know if the choice architecture ramps to an increasingly brisk pace, or if that is up to the player’s choices. In my case, it made for an insanely disconnected patchwork that takes longer than normal to stitch together, but does so at an accelerating pace that can’t help but sweep us along.
And it has a puckish sense of humor too. The humor is dry, wry, and often kind of cruel but enjoyably so. In perhaps my favorite moment, you are put into a stereotypical machine room of knobs, buttons, and switches searching for an exit. A parser implementation would have you pushing, turning and flipping EVERY DAMN THING until you lit on the magic combination to progress. Here, that effort is summarized in a sentence or two, bypassing all of it in the most hilariously dismissive way possible. It is a poke at the worst excesses of parser traditions, even as it seems blind to the choice-select excesses it is embracing!
So yes, a lot to love here, but maddeningly shortchanged by its implacably demanding Muse. Which is a real shame. The work is so dense, so deep, its surprises so singular it is hard to justify revisiting it later in a more polished ‘final version.’ Meaning that its charms are forever going to be tarnished (if not overwhelmed) by the overweening not-quite-ready feel of it. So many Sparks of Joy, for sure. Compromised by an Intrusively impactful technical rendering. I can’t help but imagine a much more fulfilling experience, had this work been given a few more months of polish.
Cruella DeMuse, I’m not going to pretend I don’t recognize you, but seriously, you gotta let the artist work. Step out for a coffee or something, yeah?
Incomplete Typo list for Author
yet loose like gravels. Unlike the gravels, the tiny pieces are round. They feel like seaside pebbles yet, you’re almost sure that the sea is millions miles away
surrondings
enogh juice
fomr
thing tat
entity that resided in, nodes (lotsa stray commas everywhere)
aparthy
precius
semi-unconcious
twp
stardarts
counclie
feauterd and bespeckled
tect
apetizers
structured reports was never easy
affraid
everybıdy
Played: 9/1/26
Playtime: 1.75hr, lots of aborted playthroughs, one long final one.
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy/Notable technical intrusions)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience (however compromised) seems complete.
Thanks again!