The daughter, by Giovanni Rubino
The daughter is a very mysterious game, and I’m not sure what to make of it. The concept - queer utopian sci-fi mystery about the apparent murder of the first child born in millennia - sounds excellent and gave me the impression that there could be some pretty high-concept stuff going on.
The writing is very opaque. This is partially because apparent spelling and grammar mistakes abound. Most of them aren’t bad enough to obscure the meaning of what’s going on, but occasionally I was left scratching my head, wondering “huh?” At the same time, something hard-to-understand is going on with the viewpoint character. Either their pronouns keep changing from one moment to the next, or we keep briefly switching over to different viewpoint characters. I couldn’t tell which. I got the gist of the story, but it’s safe to say that it was not easy to read, and many details probably eluded me.
The story is very short, cutting off in the middle of a scene with no warning and no acknowledgement of an ending. The links to proceed are just mysteriously missing.
On the surface, this feels like an unpolished and unfinished game, and maybe that’s exactly what it is. But I have to wonder if there’s something else going on here.
A word of caution. While I fully intend to rate this (and every other entry I judge) solely based on what is “on the page,” the following observations go beyond that to discuss a few broader points about The daughter, which I felt was necessary in my attempt to understand the work more clearly. If you also wish to judge this entry independently of any information from beyond the text itself, you may prefer not to continue reading this reaction until you’ve done so.
There were two things that I wanted to look into, outside the text as it is presented to us.
First, it occurred to me that the abrupt ending might be a bug - maybe more was written, but the option to proceed had unintentionally failed to display. Probing through the source files, I found that this is not the case. There is no inaccessible material in the game; what you see is what you get.
Second, I wondered whether the apparent writing errors might have been intentional, a possibility which other reviews have already raised. I followed the link provided to the author’s Twitter, and from there to his itchio page, where several other games are available. From this it became apparent that the author has written plenty in correct, fluent English.
The way I see it, these two observations raise more questions than they answer. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the work was assembled in extreme haste and submitted without being finished or proofread, maybe due to time constraints? But the technical errors are too consistent to be mere typos, which inclines me to think that the writing might be intended to simulate a far-future version of the English language that does not conform to our contemporary rules. This would not explain the abrupt ending, however. Maybe the truth includes all of the above. Or maybe everything is as it is intended to be - for what reason, I dare not speculate.
Anyway, I’d be very curious to hear others’ takes on what might be going on here, if indeed there are more players who share my intuition that some of the apparent problems might be intentional features of a work that I have yet to fully comprehend.