Metallic Red
Riaz Moola
It’s been a while since I had time to play anything in the comp, and today I had some free time so decided to treat myself to a session of one of the games that caught my eye a little while ago. I’m so, so glad I did—this is a truly exceptional piece and a real standout of the comp to me. You had me at The Chard Sphere.
First and foremost, the writing in this is really, really excellent. I’m an academic researcher in Creative Writing, so I spend a lot of time reading and writing fiction and thinking about what makes it work. There’s some really masterful prose here and I was delighted to come across it. A couple of examples that really caught my eye, out of many:
No matter how many times you run the callibration the gravity is way too high. The ball plummets to the table almost instantly and refuses to bounce, the bottom of it slightly compressed from the high force.
The room smells damp, like a river bed. On one side of the room oyster mushrooms burst out of hanging columns of substrate. An automated maintenance crab creeps along one of the beds, harvesting radishes and placing them in a wicker basket on its top surface.
The style is wonderfully descriptive while retaining the sort of clarity that kept me from zoning out and skimming. I think that the computer tabs are of particular note; it takes real skill and confidence to switch between registers like that, and I found all of the voices believable and compelling. There’s also some brilliant moments of humour in there too.
The worldbuilding is excellent also—unique but restrained, never bashing you over the head with too much extraneous detail. It takes confidence to trust a reader to piece things together for themselves rather than spoon-feeding them context and this was pulled off brilliantly here, I think. In a way it reminded me a lot of Tom McHenry’s ‘Tonight Dies the Moon’? That sort of science fiction that lingers on the minutiae of everyday life.
There was just enough interactivity to keep me engaged, and the writing was so good (have I mentioned this?) that I didn’t mind that the story seemed basically linear. I wanted to keep reading because I was invested in the world and the protagonist. I loved how their motivations and background were kept partially obscured from the player, which made the final conversation far more compelling when it happened.
I loved making the salad dressing. The sudden inclusion of that little cooking minigame was such an unexpected delight. If I have any critique, I might have liked to see a few more little scenes where the player is actively engaged in something like that. But that’s a very small criticism.
The layout and styling is very clear and readable pretty much throughout; I found the white background in the dream sequences a bit hard on the eyes, but that’s a minor quibble.
I could go on and on about this one. I adored it, I really did.