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.