This next one is an entry whose bright, chirpy blurb carries some sinister undertones. But once I started on the story proper, the tone did a complete about-face.
Review of Civil Service
Civil Service is something like an interactive free verse poem, in which you, as a disembodied soul consigned to limbo, are sent to spend a phantasmagorical week in a government office trying to accomplish a divinely-appointed good deed. It’s a carefully-crafted experience, utterly devoted to its own unique style, that did not bring me a shred of pleasure—but maybe that’s part of the point.
At the center of the affair is the player character, the disembodied soul of a woman whose nebulous, circumlocutory narration is the player’s only point of contact with the world in which the story takes place. In life, this person was an insufferable jerk who (if I’ve interpreted her nebulous, circumlocutory narration correctly) contributed the death of her girlfriend by lying about having brought her asthma inhaler on a trip, and maybe even gave said girlfriend an asthma attack with a brutal review of her home cooking, borne not out of any problem with the cooking itself but solely out of the player character’s fear of commitment.
In death, this person is still an insufferable jerk: pretentious and judgy; describing people in a way that is simultaneously lyrical and dehumanizing; evincing no sense of curiosity or empathy. Mundane facets of daily life are described as rituals or voodoo; a group of people walking together are likened to a centipede. The soul whinges endlessly about the crappy office and the frumpily-dressed people who inhabit it, and revels in conveying what’s happening in the least-digestible ways she can think up. The three fates in charge of her redemption arc can afford only the most modest of expectations—right now, they’re just trying to impress upon her to please stop complaining so much about every damn thing.
It is perhaps brilliant that the soul’s literal detachment from the physical world mirrors her emotional detachment from her fellow human beings, and it is also to the credit of Civil Service that you can preside over what is perhaps a marginal improvement in the protagonist’s attitude, but neither of those are enough to make me enjoy this experience. This is not to say that it is bad. If you judge it by the metric of “does the writing skillfully convey the personality and interior life of its focal character,” then it’s quite good, really.
One technique the work employs, which I think is worth special mention, is that most of the choices do not really matter to the course of the story, but do matter to how you as the player experience your role in it. The story is most often advanced by clicking one of two-to-four different links, which often don’t correspond with any concrete action, but rather represent something more like attention—which part of this paragraph do you feel is most important, what do you want make the protagonist focus on for the next handful of lines? It’s an interesting technique and I think it adds a certain kind of depth to a story which is, more often than not, mostly about you experiencing rather than controlling the protagonist’s actions.
So while I can’t say Civil Service was my cup of tea, it did give me some things to think about, and it could very well be a gem for the kind of player who values a poetic mood piece with a generous helping of neuroticism.