I’m doing the Great Play Marathon! Here are my reviews from my stops along the way:
- The Bones of Rosalinda (Agnieszka Trzaska)
- The Little Match Girl 5 (Ryan Veeder)
- New Year’s Eve 2019 (Autumn Chen)
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The Bones of Rosalinda
Agnieszka Trzaska
So, taking a bit of a break from the Spring Thing games, I find myself playing… an old Spring Thing game! By an author whose game in this Spring Thing (The Universal Robot) I just played and enjoyed! With exactly the same interface! And a plucky protagonist going up against an unfairly powerful but rather dumb opponent! And a helpful cook NPC working for the villain!
Clearly, Agnieszka has found a winning formula (was ‘bones’ the first of that formula?) and is not shy about using it again. And good on her for that; I definitely enjoyed both. And the formula has clearly been refined over the years: the interface for combining items now takes one fewer click, as one example, and the look and feel of the new interface felt slicker. But everything is here and solid in this earlier iteration.
If the Universal Robot had a schtick, it was ‘multiple endings’. Here, the schtick is ‘your body parts are capable of independent actions’. Er… did I not mention the premise of the game? You’re a recently-animated skeleton, erroneously abandoned by your creator as a failure, and your task is to stop him from taking over the city. Along the way you meet a talking mouse, the aforementioned cook, and a petulant demon. And solve puzzles! Some of them are relatively standard ‘use X on Y’, but many of them make use of ‘send your arm off one direction or another’. Fun and satisfying to play.
Did the author have anything to say? Besides setting up a fun environment for puzzles, there was some actual human drama included as well, with characters overcoming fears and doing the Right Thing despite the risk and difficulty, and Working Together and Friendship, and, well, OK, it’s kind of standard, but it’s nice! It’s nice to have people struggling to do and then doing the right thing.
Did I have anything to do? Absolutely! The parser-like-world-model-except-in-twine is pretty robust, all things considered. I personally probably would have found the experience a bit smoother in a parser, but I understand wanting to make these games more accessible to a wider audience, and, fair enough!
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I like those focusing questions for the review. Often I find myself playing a game, and thinking “does it do well what it set out to do?” but really the important follow-up question is “was what it set out to do worth doing?”
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The Little Match Girl 5
Ryan Veeder
So. I have a lot of things to say about this game, and most if not all of them could be considered spoilers, so now I have to think about other things to say about the game that aren’t spoilers. Wish me luck.
I did not play this game in any sort of context whatsoever. I have played exactly one other Ryan Veeder game (Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder), which doesn’t match this one in tone or style or anything at all. (OK, there’s an intelligent mouse.) This is the tenth game written in the Little Match Girl universe. I have played none of them. Playing this game was, therefore, a terrible idea. I had a blast.
Part of it was that I knew I was jumping in the deep end, so I was more willing to give the game some leeway in being confusing. Who knows if this implied credit was ‘earned’ or not, but it turns out that giving a game leeway for being confusing is a good idea anyway, so I was ahead of the curve on that one. And the other part is that I think the genre mish-mash is part of the point? You don’t put Poseidon, a Power Rangers pastiche, vampires, an asteroid, and A Christmas Carol together in the same story without knowing that it looks like a mish-mash, whether or not you carefully introduced each individual genre and/or reference at a rate of one per game. You did this on purpose. So (switching ‘you’ to now mean ‘you the reader’) if you are up for a genre/reference patchwork quilt of puzzling, you will have a chance of enjoying this game. I certainly did.
Oh! One recommendation before delving into spoiler-land: there is a point in this game where you end up in a large interconnected map. It is too large to hold in your head. You may be tempted, as I was, to look at David Welbourn’s map from his walkthrough. If you want to solve this part of the game yourself (and if you’ve been able to solve things on your own thus far, you can, I attest, do so for this part too), DO NOT LOOK AT THAT MAP. I did, and it was a mistake. Two things: one, there are spoilers on the map that made me gravitate towards particular rooms with fancy exits instead of solving the puzzle that would take me there, and two, I then failed to get any of the map in my head, when doing so was critical to solving the puzzles on your own. It’s like using Google Maps and then not knowing any other way to get to your friend’s house.
Instead, bite the bullet, and create your own map as you go. Specifically: you are sent ahead on a reconnaissance mission. At that point, start drawing. Use a large piece of paper. Be prepared to find your own interesting connections between the sections. They will become important. Things will feel urgent, and that urgency will push you to look at a walkthrough. Do not do it. Just relax, mess around like you’ve been doing the whole game, and figure it out. Thus ends the PSA.
OK, now for a more in-depth discussion of some of the particular bits of the game, and I’m going to need to put in a bajillion spoilers, so you have been warned. I don’t know if reading this will actually spoil your enjoyment of the game? I… kind of think it might. If you’ve been thinking about playing a Little Match Girl game and haven’t played any, it might be ideal to start at the beginning, but don’t let propriety rule your life; do what you like! Maybe play this, like I did; it certainly can work as a ridiculous introduction to the world. Maybe play an earlier one. Play whatever catches your fancy. The main thing here is that if the sheer weight of the pile of Little Match Girl games is keeping you from playing any of them, I think that’s a mistake. I made the terrible decision to jump in at episode 10, and I emerged unscathed. Just try one of them, and don’t worry too much about your plans for the future, nor of which would be ‘the best’. I’m sure there is a ‘best’ game to start with (probably the first-written one!), but I similarly know that the worst game to play first is ‘none of them because somehow they’re too intimidating en masse’. Just try one. Roll a die and play one at random! Pick the title you think is funniest! You’ll be fine.
So.
I was off-balance when playing a lot of this game, and for much of my playthrough, I didn’t know whether that feeling of Things Are Off And Weird was actually supposed to be part of the experience, or if I was feeling off because I hadn’t played enough of the previous episodes. Now that I’ve finished the game (but before I’ve played any others! So I could easily be wrong!) I think the feeling of being off-balance is intentional. It may be intuitively intentional instead of design-intentional? The game definitely has the feel of something written on instinct; of ‘oh, this would be cool’ ideas then meticulously implemented without much regard for deliberate ‘is this good game design check box yes no’ thinking.
Here’s one example: the tense of the game changes depending on what map you’re on. In the opening ‘hub’ area, it is in third person past tense:
>close door
He closed the pantry door.
Once you get to one of the ‘remote’ areas, it switches to a more standard second person present tense:
>close door
You close the narrow wooden door.
Why? When I first noticed this, I thought it would be explained in a later part of the game, or something. But no! It’s just a weird thing! A weird thing that must have been incredibly difficult to implement! Ryan had to write an entire alternate library just to pull this off! Unless he used something off the shelf, which, I dunno, maybe? If so, it’s not listed. I suppose he could have written it for another project and then used it here. But! My point is that it’s a lot of code for something that’s utterly inconsequential, and that I almost didn’t even notice.
I think it’s because you’re supposed to feel a little off-kilter when playing the game. The genres are switching; the tenses are switching. You need to be on your toes.
Here’s another bit: you end up in a small town at another point. All the streets run diagonally: NE/NW/SE/SW. Why? It was so much harder for me to visualize what’s going on when I had to tilt it by 45 degrees in my head! Reading the list of exits was more difficult, because ‘Third street continues northeast’ vs. ‘Third street continues northwest’ are completely different things, but they both looked ‘the same’ to me when reading the descriptions quickly, and I had to deliberately read N-O-R-T-H-E-A-S-T. There’s no reason for this! The town could have easily been oriented N/S/E/W! But laying it out on diagonals felt off-kilter. I hypothesize that, again, this is there to make the player slightly anxious, because that fits the vibe Ryan was going for.
Here’s another utterly bonkers bit: other characters respond to the narration of the game. Here, we’ve just moved to a new location:
Kongens Nytorv
All at once the air is hot and muggy. The effect is stifling.“And it stinks,” Hrieman notices.
Or, someone else doing the same thing:
Lounge
The walls and all the furnishings in here are pale pink.“It’s not a sexist thing, though,” Captain Lily Cassidy explains, stretched out on a couch.
This is not how IF descriptions are supposed to work! Hrieman should say something like “Hoo boy, it stinks here.” The Cassidy line should be something like, “Cassidy watches you look at the pink furnishings and raise your eyebrow. ‘It’s not a sexist thing!’ she protests.”
I honestly thought that maybe in these games, the narrator would turn out to be diagetic; that someone was actually intoning the words of the room descriptions (and everything else) into the world it was describing. But no! No mention is ever made of this.
One could argue that this is just a simple writing mistake on Ryan’s part. That he forgot who was saying something and who wasn’t, or that he was writing all this so fast that he didn’t bother going back and fixing these sorts of mistakes. Alternatively, one could argue that Ryan was using this narration/dialogue diegetic dissonance to tell jokes. Either one could be true! Or both! Or neither!
But again, the overall effect is to throw the reader off-balance again. And I find it very hard to believe that he was doing this accidentally, because of the bit that follows the Cassidy intro scene, which I started above:
Lounge
The walls and all the furnishings in here are pale pink.“It’s not a sexist thing, though,” Captain Lily Cassidy explains, stretched out on a couch. “Michael just wants us to relax effectively in here. Although if you want it to be sexist, I can’t stop you.”
“Hi,” you say.
“Hi yourself,” says Lily. She sits up and opens her eyes. “Michael also wants us to use codenames all the time, so you’re only allowed to call me Sister Knife.”
“Have we met?”
“I doubt it. But you’re Prince Linus, and you’re Hrieman the Talking Crow. I have the advantage of you! And a third thing Michael wants is for everybody to figure everything out on their own. So, I shouldn’t tell you my real name.”
“Is it Captain Lily Cassidy?”
“Yes! Well, so much for my advantage of you.”
This is just utterly bonkers. We know the name of this person we’ve never met because the room description told us her name. This is called out explicitly! I can’t think of any other interpretation of this scene.
And it’s hilarious! “Ryan is using this technique to tell jokes” is a pretty compelling hypothesis, all things considered. But I also like the not-mutually-exclusive hypothesis “Ryan is deliberately unsettling the player using a wide variety of techniques.” You don’t change tenses in the middle of the game without a lot of effort. You don’t write a scene like that without knowing what conventions you’re breaking, and what common sense you’re disregarding.
And let’s talk about the very premise of the game: you’re delivering five invitations. The PC knows what the invitation is to. The player does not. The PC knows who he is delivering invitations to. The player does not. One of them is for a mouse. When you finally hand it to the mouse, ONLY THEN are you told that the mouse’s invitation is 1/16 the size of the other invitations. You held this piece of paper the whole game! The PC knew this about it, and any ‘reasonable’ description of a pile of five invitations would absolutely mention that one of them was 1/16th the size of the others. But not here! PC/player dissonance is deliberately injected into the game for no other reason (I propose) than to make the player more anxious. To feel like there’s something they don’t understand.
Another thing that increases PC/player dissonance: you are constantly being told that Linus (who you play for most of the game) is incurious. You talk to a beaver a bit, and then are told “You have lost interest in this beaver.” There are other examples and I can’t find them in my transcript right now, so you’re going to have to trust me on this, I guess. But this is not the player’s mindset! The player is playing the game and of course they’re still interested in the beaver! The line is a good general design way to tell the player ‘nah, I didn’t implement anything else about the ’, but it also pushes to separate the player and the PC, and makes the player, again, a little more unsettled.
Or another example: you’re in a city in Atlantis. You meet merpeople everywhere who are swimming. You are, most definitely, walking. Are you in water? Did you cast a spell to let you walk/breathe in water? Is the city itself enchanted to allow this? Who knows! I feel like this is one example where ‘playing an earlier game’ might have explained this, because I got the sense that these characters have been in Atlantis before, and one of the other games could well have taken us here. But for me, it was just one more weird thing going on that made me slightly anxious. Were my invitations going to get wet? Was my ‘bag of nuts’ going to get soaked? Ryan is utterly uninterested in answering my questions. And is probably leaving me in the dark, again, to unsettle me.
I’m not sure everyone enjoys being unsettled? But for me, at least in this context, it worked perfectly. I already felt a little like I was transgressing by playing the tenth game in the series instead of the first, so I expected to not quite know what was going on. But the game itself just piles on this feeling even more, and it was kind of fun! I think part of it is that none of the unsettlement made solving puzzles any more difficult. So the upshot was that the story became two stories at once: the PC solving puzzles because that was his plan all along, and the player solving puzzles even though they have only the barest grasp of what’s going on. It feels powerful to solve puzzles and accomplish things even though you don’t understand everything! It’s like, “Yeah, buddy, I am Just That Good At Puzzles, and don’t forget it.” You’re not told who you have to deliver invitations to, but you figure it out and do it anyway! You have no idea why this little girl’s been asked to clean out a muck-filled pipe, but hey, you have a [spoiler]!
Which brings us to puzzle design. The entire first section of the game (where you play Linus) is almost uniformly terrific in this aspect. I was initially thrown a bit when I visited a ‘spoke’ world, and couldn’t solve any of the problems there. ‘Well, hmm,’ I thought, ‘maybe sometimes I have to bring something from a different spoke world to solve these puzzles?’ Yes. Yes, I did. In fact, I think you always have to do this. This leads to the classic puzzle-solving trajectory of confusion → exploration → understanding → mastery. In addition, there are many puzzles with multiple solutions (the muck-filled pipe; convincing Lobo you’re on the up-and-up; maybe more?), which also eases the player along that path.
The only minor exception: because there were two solutions to the pipe, when I started winnowing down puzzles I had yet to solve, I was carrying around a thing I hadn’t used, and assumed it would be used for one of the remaining puzzles. But no, it was the alternate pipe solution instead! Not terrible, but it was a little confusing. And I’ve just spent seventeen paragraphs telling you how great it was to be confused, but it was great to be confused while I could still progress through the game. Being confused about how to see more text is, I think, not quite the same thing, and doesn’t work as well ludo-narratively. (OK, you caught me, I just wanted to say ‘ludo-narrative’.)
The only bit about the puzzle design I didn’t like from this section of the game was one joke that instead of being funny, made me think I had found a bug: you free a turtle. You go where the turtle is headed. The turtle isn’t there. You search along the path the turtle would be taking. You don’t see it anywhere. I immediately thought, “Did I solve this puzzle in an unexpected way? Is this a bug? Did the turtle just disappear from the game?” I was momentarily gripped with terror, as it had been ages since I had saved, and I was well past the undo stack of my interpreter. I turned to the walkthrough: you just have to wait 30 turns (!) for the turtle to show up. Because turtles are slow! Ba-dum tish! For me, the joke would have landed and I wouldn’t have turned to the walkthrough if you could see the turtle making its slow way down the creek from the various places you can see the creek. A somewhat minor point, but kind of annoying. And more saliently, this was the point at which I first turned to the walkthrough, and as an IF author, you can’t get that moment back very easily. Once something breaks the trust between a player and the author, it’s almost impossible to regain.
And this brings me to my one and only serious complaint with the game: the design of the final section. Overall, the setup is lovely! You’re playing five characters, and can switch freely between them. Things that block most of the characters might not block the fifth. Dramatic things are going on! The solutions to all the puzzles are clever, but make sense!
But. As I mentioned in the non-spoiler section, the map is just ginormous. There’s 49 rooms! You literally can’t hold all that in your head, even though it’s somewhat chunked: there’s two basement sections, a first floor, a second floor, and a roof, each basically a 4x3 map, which is almost enough to keep in your head at once. But the problem is that there are multiple ways to get from one section to another, and this changes based on who you are and what’s going on with the plot at any given moment. So you can’t just think ‘I’m on the first floor and there’s one way up to the second floor from here’. You have to have a map. It’s just a requirement.
And for me, because I had already turned to the walkthrough, I thought, “OK, I’ll just use the map from there.” And as noted, that map has spoilers galore on it, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me when I started using it, that this would be the case, nor that it would be a problem. And the game had taught me up until this point that I didn’t need to draw a map, so I wasn’t in the habit of doing so, and I hadn’t been warned that this would change.
The second thing working against the player here is that unlike the first section of the game, where you can solve the puzzles in any order, the puzzles here are actually remarkably linear. And when there’s five characters to be and 49 rooms to explore, finding the solution can be more than a little challenging, and frustrating: once you’re stuck on one puzzle, there’s nothing else you can muck about while the first puzzle percolates in your mind; you’re just beating your head against the wall.
And the final thing working against the player is that the game does its best to instill a sense of urgency to the proceedings. You’re working against nefarious creatures! You get in fights! Danger lurks around every corner! And so whenever I got stuck, I kept thinking, “Ahhh, I need to solve this quickly!” And that’s just not how solving puzzles works. I needed time to noodle around and try things in one area while thinking about things in another area. And instead I turned to the walkthrough, and now I have regrets. And sure, that’s partly on me, but it’s partly on the game design.
I don’t know if there’s a good way to solve this? Maybe the ‘Hans Christian Anderson’ character could pop up just before you’re sent in to scout out the mansion and say “Hey, now’s a good time to draw a map! And I’m going to claim that things are urgent, but you and I both know nothing bad’s actually going to happen, so just take your time and figure things out!” Maybe the puzzles could be re-jiggered so that you weren’t always working on exactly one puzzle at a time. (Alternatively: it’s possible that this is already true, but didn’t feel true to me when I was playing! In that case, the goal would be ‘figure out how to convey to the player that they can work on multiple things at once’.) Maybe it’d be possible to turn to my old friend, ‘working non-solutions’, where when the player tries something that doesn’t work, you tell them that it was a good idea, explain why it didn’t work, and hint at what does. (This happens some! But maybe it could be ramped up more.) I dunno. They say that when testing, always listen to your testers’ reports about problems, but generally ignore their proposed solutions. So I’ll just end with a general plaintive, “This bit didn’t work great for me, and I wish it had.” The setup was amazing, and the idea of five people all working together to solve the problems that come up was brilliant. The cinematics of the story were on point, and every eventual puzzle solution felt clever and fair and dramatic. I just wished I had been able to participate more.
Which brings us to my final thoughts about the story of this game as a whole, and if you’ve been reading the above spoilers without having actually played the game (which is fair!) but you think you might play the game anyway, this is where I’m going to suggest that you actually bow out and come back later, because I’m going to spoil what the invitations were for, and the game really really wants you to find that out on your own. And I agree that revelation is better made by the game instead of in this faltering review. So.
So, when part 2 of the game starts and you invade the mansion to rescue yourself, I had assumed that this was what the invitations were for. And then the game ends with Ebenezabeth and Linus getting married. And like three hours after I finished the game, I suddenly realized, ‘Wait, that’s what the invitations were for! The wedding!’ And I dunno, maybe the invitations were something like “You are hereby formally invited to the wedding of yourself (from the future/past) and Linus, taking place on <date, time>. P.S. If you could rescue the bride in time for the ceremony that would be great.” But suddenly the game took on a very different mood: Linus is inviting other versions of his fiancee to her own wedding. That’s kind of profound! At the ceremony itself, those versions are ‘hiding’, just because it seems a little weird to attend your own wedding, but the metaphor here is amazingly rich and not a little thought-provoking. Because while it’s not literally true, older and younger versions of ourselves do participate in our life’s events! Your younger self has opinions about what you’re doing now! Your older self has opinions about what you’re doing now! And both of them know you pretty intimately, but neither are the full you, here, and in this moment. And it’s heartening and freeing and kind of delightful to imagine both younger-you and future-you watching what you’re doing now with grace and pride. Or to remember when you made mistakes in the past that things were hard and you learned important lessons. To equip your future self with the lessons you’re learning now, to help transform them into a new version of yourself that you can’t even quite imagine.
And Linus inviting all the different versions of Ebenezabeth to her own wedding is in a sense a very romantic and understanding gesture on his part. I will admit that I was startled to find the two of them getting married, because he had shown zero affection for any of them the entire game. There was a bit of an emotional connection to Power-Ranger-Ebenezabeth, whose dad had just passed, but there, his response was to solve a puzzle to get her on her feet again, instead of sitting with her and being, I dunno, partner-like, and listening and offering support and encouragement. They were colleagues, not partners.
But with the reframing of the game I think it… kind of works? Maybe this is where playing the other games would have helped. Maybe this is just the Kind Of Person Linus Is, and the two of them show affection for each other in a different way than I was expecting, so I didn’t see it as I played the game. And maybe he’s nervous about delivering the invitations or something; lord knows I was nervous in the weeks before my own wedding. And, I dunno, maybe he was expecting future-him to be the one to actually comfort future-Ebenezabeth. He’s not literally marrying the versions of her that he’s inviting, after all. But he wants them there. He wants to share this moment with every version of the amazing woman he’s marrying. That’s love and dedication.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I absolutely loved the manuscript fragment that old-Ebenezabeth gave him, that just told a bit of a story of their history, framed so he knew she understood. The scene itself might have been from a previous game, I’m guessing? But in that scene, Linus is tempted to go help Ebenezabeth. And successfully resists, because he trusts her! That’s an utterly amazing scene. Our literature is filled to the brim with stories of dashing young men rushing in to save their loved one. Even when it’s a mistake and they both get captured or something, it’s universally seen as a display of True Love. But no! Trusting your love to do her part while you go do what you have to do is, in fact, a better display of love than rushing in to help her do her job and abandoning yours! If you love someone, trust them! They got this!
It seems a little anticlimactic to end this review with my standard two questions, but I can’t think of a better way, so here we go: Did the author have something to say? Yes. A thousand times, yes: they rattled me, unsettled me, took me on a whirlwind tour of a rich, crazy, imaginative world, and surprised me at the end with a message about what love means, and about sharing experiences with other versions of yourself. And did I have something to do? Yup! I was in the weeds next to Linus and, uh, the other PCs, solving puzzles and guiding everyone through harrowing and rewarding scenes, and feeling clever whilst doing so.
Just a great game, overall, on any number of fronts. But make your own map at the end. Trust me.
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Oh, right: here’s my LMG5 transcript!
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New Year’s Eve, 2019
Autumn Chen
It turns out this is a sequel to a game due east of here on the Marathon map: “Pageant”. I only figured this out because I had read the other reviews of Pageant, and then this game references those events!
The premise: you’re stuck in a social situation with social anxiety. My first time through the game, I was like, "OK, let’s do what we can here,’ and generally behaved in a socially-competent manner, reconnected with an old flame (I declared), and went on a lovely/awkward walk with her, where we decided to make a go of it. Success!
Then I decided to try again, and maybe connect with a different person instead, and was stymied at every turn. And the whole thing turned out kind of nightmarish: everyone is vaguely ‘oh, yeah, it’s you’ to you; you still go on the walk, but alone, you can spend as long as you want out there angsting to yourself, and then when you finally get bored and come back it’s still only 10:00 and you have more party to suffer through! Sheesh. And maybe the person I connected with in my first playthrough has perhaps connected to someone else instead? Intolerable!
This got me wondering what ‘the point’ of the content of the second playthrough was. Like, it’s not a super interesting story? The premise is ‘ack, a party’, and the story that playthrough gives you is ‘ack, a party’. Everything plays out exactly as you might expect; nothing interesting happens; you’re still exactly the same mess at the end of the game as you were at the beginning. When considered in contrast to my first playthrough, it adds… at least a little bit? The triumphs of that playthrough are in theory a little sweeter knowing that there was a very real chance of failure. But… I’m not sure it actually worked out that way for me. Since there was no change; no direction, it provides exactly the same contrast to my first successful playthrough as the beginning of the game contrasts to the end of that successful playthrough. Like, you start at A, and then move to B! Yay! B is better than A! And look, if you had made other choices, you would have… also been at A! Which, uh, good, I guess? B is still better than A. So, :thumbs:.
I’ve been thinking about contrasting endings more recently since I’ve been working on my own game’s alternate endings. I originally wrote a ‘good one’, and then a bunch of ‘other ones’ where I tried to be honest about why someone would pick those endings, and be true to them, etc. etc., but in retrospect, they weren’t all that satisfying. As one reviewer said, it’s kind of a cheat to have a ‘real ending’ and then a bunch of fake-out endings, if the ‘real ending’ is fairly obvious. I finally worked out something to do with the alternates, and we’ll see how well they land, but here (to bring me back to the ostensible topic of this review), I wonder what could have been done to make the ‘mope around and be a social hobgoblin’ ending more satisfying, even if it was satisfyingly negative in some way. Or if doing that would actually be better! Or maybe it already is satisfying for people who are not me! There’s a lot of options.
But I guess I wanted something–anything–to happen to our protagonist, to give the story a reason to exist. And it’s great that there’s an ending where something pretty good happens! My first game I played from Autumn was her ‘The Archivist and the Revolution’ (written the same year, it seems), which had a somewhat similarly-downtrodden protagonist, but several different endings, all interesting, and that all moved the protagonist from her previous state to a new one.
Overall, that was probably way too many words to say ‘the non-optimal ending was a little static’. I enjoyed the game overall, both in the characterization and arc of the protagonist, and for the insights into Chinese-American culture. And for the nascent romance! Woo!
Did the author have anything to say? Interestingly, I feel like the author had something to share more than something to say, which could explain the static feeling I got from the work. “This is what it’s like to be a person like this,” it offers. Sometimes the things we share with other people don’t have interesting and compelling character arcs! That’s fair!
Did I have something to do? Nothing difficult, per se, but yes. Navigating the party and the interactions was more compelling to me when I was trying to fight the protagonist’s instincts and have her actually chat with people, and much worse when I let her give in to her anxieties. Which I suppose is also an insight, of sorts.
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