OVER
Audrey Larson
This is a VERY LONG STORY. It’s good! And it’s interesting! But it’s very, very long.
The premise is that there’s a family of 19 people all going on vacation to an amusement park. You aren’t one of the 19; you instead choose which story to follow at different times, as the family splits up and regroups and is generally chaotic. Every so often you get to choose which option someone takes, but usually it’s a fake-out: one of them loops straight back to the other option. And then at the end of this VERY LONG story, you have to choose which person to follow to the end. And there’s no saving; if you want to see the other path, you have to replay the VERY LONG story.
And, you know, I went ahead and did it. It helped tremendously that since most of the choices weren’t real, I could just click a lot without paying attention or reading anything. Every so often, I’d try to remember which branch I read last time so I could do a different branch this time, but got it wrong more often than not, or apparently had been looped back to see the other branch anyway, or it was one of the fake-out non-choices.
I did find one huge scene with aunt/niece that I had missed the first time through, and it suddenly made a whole swath of the later-game story I had read the first time make a lot more sense. There were many references to that scene later, with no summary explaining what had happened if you had missed it. So I was left thinking, “Am I just not remembering this bit, or what?” But no, I had never seen it. There was even a bit I had seen in my first playthrough that mentioned, literally, “$LOU_FAVORITE_ICECREAM$”, which I thought was weird; maybe the game was trying to be meta or something? But no, you got to choose Lou’s favorite ice cream in the story I had missed, and I guess the author didn’t realize it had been skippable.
I have long been a stalwart champion of the UNDO command, and I have to say that this game is an obvious candidate for it. There’s just nothing gained from forcing a player to only see a single path through the game in their first playthrough. What possible benefit could there be? If someone chooses to not use UNDO, great, but if they are enjoying themselves enough to back up and check unexplored paths, why not just let them? Why not let them read what they want to read, when they want to read it, instead of forcing them to mindlessly click through swaths and swaths of text first on a separate playthrough? I can’t imagine what on earth is supposed to be compelling about mindlessly clicking, or, alternatively, what’s supposed to be compelling about reading an incomplete story. Anyway. End side tangent.
The story itself is wonderful. It absolutely catches the chaos of a large family vacation where everyone is there to have fun, but there’s a certain need for everyone to have the same fun, and that’s not the way people really are; everyone is going to actually like different things. But everyone loves each other, and everyone tries to accommodate everyone else, up until the point when they themselves are too stressed or too hot or too tired, and things start to fray around the edges. It would never in a million years have occurred to me to try to capture this frenetic chaos in a work of fiction, and I absolutely love that Audrey Larson not only tried, but succeeded so well at it.
At somewhere around the halfway point, there’s a bit of an inflection: we start to focus much more on just the aunt and niece’s stories, and the rest of the cast becomes more supporting characters instead of having their own highlights as much. And the niece’s story is nice and wholesome and charming, and clearly the second-class story, so when I had to choose between following one or the other at the end, I went with the aunt, and had to replay to get the niece.
Because the aunt’s story is clearly the focus of the game. The niece’s story is smaller and mostly concerns herself, while the aunt’s story involves the whole rest of the family and how she interacts with them. And so much of it is great (the conversation with her dad; the way she finds the lost kid) that it was kind of depressing that instead of a real story, we descend into fifty eight dreams, and then even ‘real life’ turns into a kind of magical realism instead.
Here’s Brad Bird, talking about a deleted scene from The Incredibles, where Helen has a nightmare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVyqCz8LPCg
His contention is that dream sequences are the easiest way to just say something without you having to figure out how it impacts the world you’re creating. He’s grown to see them as sort of ‘scotch tape’ scenes you write before you know how to actually say what you want to say, and was not sad to see that scene go when they figured out how to convey the same ideas in the real world of the movie instead of a fantasy dream sequence.
The end of ‘Life is Strange’ did the same thing, and I kind of hated it there, too, and contributed a lot to my completely disengaging with the game by the end. Here, it’s even worse: you get to the end, and have the aunt make some sort of metaphorical choice, which is fine and all, but you’re left not knowing what actually happened! And the whole dilemma she’s going through is just kind of whisked away without answering a single one of the myriad questions I had. And it very much feels like the shortcut Mr. Bird was glad to get away from, because it could have been so much more interesting to see how her choice interacted with the real world. Did her dad actually understand her? (My guess: yes, and the only reason it seemed like he didn’t was because that story had been filtered through the non-understanding lens of her mother.) What would her brother say? How would her niece support her? How would the swath of younger kids react?
And (with spoilers for the rest of this…): The central crux point of this story is that the aunt is gay, and none of her immediate family knows, and every single stranger in the story figures it out instantly. And the aunt feels trapped, having not said anything for so long, and feels like if everyone else can figure things out, surely her family could do the same. That’s an interesting dilemma! And I have my own opinions about it, and I wanted the game to have an opinion about it! To take a stand one way or the other (or both!), and argue through storytelling why either or both perspectives might be valid, and, most importantly, what the best way forward was. For me, I can tell you that if I had been in the family, I would not have somehow intuited that my sister was gay. It would not have ever crossed my mind, regardless of ‘the signs’. I’ve known my sisters for a very very long time, and ‘who they are’ is an amalgamation of their entire lives. And perhaps most importantly, I have always always intuitively been on the ‘ask’ side of the ‘ask/guess’ cultural divide: I’m never going to try to intuit things about people, because a) that seems rude, and b) what if I’m wrong? If they want me to know, they will tell me, and if they don’t want me to know, they will keep it to themselves. That’s their choice, and I’m happy to go with whichever they want. It would never ever in a million years occur to me to think that someone might want me to figure out something about them on my own, without their input. That feels like stalking or something.
And that means I’m really glad to have read this story! Because maybe there are people in my life that want me to intuit things about them! That seems like a really interesting and valuable piece of information to learn! And so, while I absolutely adore this game to pieces I am also somehow simultaneously really angry at it for devolving into metaphor at the very end, just at the point where things could have gotten the most interesting.
Did the author have anything to say? Oh, yes. A thousand times yes. And about something I hadn’t really thought of before, so that was an additional bonus.
Did I have anything to do? Weirdly, ‘choose which part of the story to miss, except it’s completely random and you won’t know what you’re missing until things are confusing later’.
Appreciate the comment on the prose being competent and for acknowledging that not every story resonates with everyone. Totally fair, and we all respect that.