Ohhh, man! I was starting to get into that kind of logic but then I told myself I was overthinking it and the answer wouldn’t be that complicated and I must be overlooking something simpler. Thanks!
3 Likes
The Absence of Miriam Lane
Wow. There’s so much here. I’m not sure where to start. You’re hired by a man to find his wife, who has disappeared, and he can’t remember her, nor can anyone else. I think the blurb says it best:
Sometimes people give pieces of themselves away.
Sometimes they give too much and who they are wears thin.
They become an absence. A hole in the world.
And a terrible Light shines through.
This is by Abigail Corfman (The Open Sorcery games, 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds, A Murder in Fairyland). As you’d expect, it’s very good. And very intense.
The mechanics remind me a bit of Erstwhile: you’re finding items and thoughts and doing things with them. Though it’s more developed and focused here. There are three phases: first you’re poking around their house looking for places where a “terrible Light” is affecting things, to determine if this is, in fact, what happened here. Then you find her absence and you have to strengthen her presence by bringing her personal objects that bring her joy (but not the ones that may have once brought joy but now are chains weighing her down and making her smaller). This part was pretty amazing and definitely required some thought.
one really useful thing in the walkthrough that didn't occur to me
is that you can show items to her husband and he’ll comment.
And then finally you have to talk to her back out of it: tell the story of how she was pushed into becoming nothing. This is a sequence of lines with cycling links and you have to choose the correct words to fill in.
There are at least a few endings depending on how well you do at bringing her back (or you can push her into nothingness entirely, I think?).
Yeah. Very well written, well presented and illustrated (photos posterized to just black and white, I think?). The implementation often required more clicks than theoretically necessary, but it would be quite a bit of work and possibly coding to get much better than this in Twine. Hmm. But a lot of work has gone into this…and there were a few places that felt like they could have been smoothed out easily… I don’t know. Most people are bad at interface design, even (especially?) the ones who think they’re good at it. It wasn’t a big deal. Just…more clicking than you’d really like sometimes.
There’s a little puzzle/game where you have to find the characteristics of different flowers to be able to pick them or whatever. That was very well done and interesting.
It was a little confusing that you had different abilities in the different phases: in the first phase you occasionally get given items, but you can’t just pick up anything that you want, and there are some obvious “Just let me solve this puzzle with this item!” moments. The second phase is all about picking up and using objects, so you will get to do that. But you don’t know that beforehand, which was a little frustrating. You don’t know to just trust that in the first phase the game will give you any object you need to manipulate, and otherwise you don’t need to worry about it yet.
Anyway. This is a terrific game: go play it.
8 Likes
I had to go back and keep playing it after the meetup until I got to an ending, then I played it again several times until I got to the optimal ending. It’s a powerful game and highly recommended.
2 Likes