Skipping or postponing Andrew Schultz’s Fourbyfourian Quarryin’, as I played Fivebyfivia Delenda Est to prepare for it and upon completion thought “Right, that’s enough of that sort of puzzle for a minute.” No shade! Just not in the right headspace.
That takes us to Fine Felines, by Felicity Banks.
Spoilery Review
The Choice of Games house style (which Felicity Banks mostly embraces in her ChoiceScript work, even work which isn’t hosted by Choice of Games) is well-known for embracing player-defined PCs. One can have any gender, all love interests are presumptively pansexual so the player can have any romantic experience they want, and most games give you a list of names to choose from of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. This fits with the general CoG approach of emphasizing the player’s freedom to decide what sort of story they’re playing.
This approach breaks down, however, when it comes to disability, because it is impossible - not merely inadvisable, but impossible - to erase the ways a disability will affect a PC’s relationship to the world. Most CoG games are genre excercises and thus assume the player will be involved in a fair amount of physical activity. Providing options for a PC with a disability would require a lot of extra writing, so it usually isn’t done. You can try to emulate a disability by dumping a stat hard, I guess, but that lacks specificity. Choice of Games, by default, assumes that all protagonists are fully able-bodied. This is probably bad!
Fine Felines is very welcome, then, as a Choicescript game that sits down and says, “The PC has fibromyalgia. Whatever else is true about the avatar you’re making for yourself, they have fibromyalgia. Whatever else this story is about, it is also about living with fibromyalgia.” That is, it takes the straightforward approach of simply writing a disabled main character, and allowing that to affect the plot as much as it needs to.
Representation aside, this isn’t only a game about living with fibromyalgia. First it’s a game about KITTIES!
This is a game about starting a cat breeding business, and Banks has illustrated it with photographs of beautiful cats (all cats are beautiful). Banks takes care to note that “This is NOT a guide to becoming a cat breeder”, but the depictions of cat-breeding logistics and challenges feel credible. The cats have distinct personalities, all lovable, and are very convincingly drawn as cats: often moody, neurotic, and demanding, but also capable of intense affection.
The prose itself is okay. I like details such as:
“Bukit Hill used to be a one-Starbucks town but no one went to Starbucks because they knew it’d put the local coffee shop out of business. So now it’s a no-Starbucks town, and people seem to like it.”
which not only establishes the setting effectively but also establishes the tone of ‘people will generally be nice to one another.’
I liked keeping my cats and my kittens, but I have to call out a bug. I had only three kittens, but I was given the opportunity (at least in the text) to sell more than that! This was confusing, and especially destabilising because I had been trained to take my kittens very seriously as individuals. The game’s apparent lack of attention to how many kittens I actually have undermined both its logistical and emotional focii.
Oh well! All the cats were lovely, and the decisions were engaging. I liked it.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory
(which was a happy accident). With the exception of Aurel’s name, I chose all the character names with their meaning in mind. You’re the second or third person who has brought up the nature of the familiar/person bond being a bit strange, which I thought was interesting as it was not my intent. It’s closer to what you mentioned with family/lovers etc. I would love to explore more aspects of the lore in a sequel though-- out of curiosity, would you mind telling me which ending you got? (There is one that kind of gives more information on the pairing in my opinion.)
. And yes, there’s a convention in modern parser IF of crediting testers, in the response to either an ABOUT or CREDITS command.
