WATT
Co-written by: Ces, and humikun
This game did not give a great first impression. There was a misspelling on the instructions page; there was a weird grammar issue with a double period after a quote (‘“Hello.”.’) Then you make several choices that are instantly negated with a mocking, ‘Ha ha you thought you had a choice?’ Yes, game, I did. You are a choice-based game. Then there’s an old-timey poem that starts, “O’Hero”. What, exactly, is being omitted by the apostrophe?
None of these things are particularly egregious, but it indicated to me that the game hadn’t been beta-tested, or at least not beta-tested very well? At that point, I kind of settled into a, “OK, let’s not sweat the details of this game,” mode, and it worked better, as I didn’t see any more typos for the rest of my experience. Maybe the introduction was written last, and that’s the only place there were problems! Maybe I just stopped noticing them! But at the cost of me disengaging a bit, so there you go.
The rest of the game was… well. It’s overtly metaphorical and odd, and some of the oddness was at least interesting. You meet a girl living in a vase, for example, which is at least a visually interesting scenario. But the metaphor was either opaque to me or just obvious? I guess? I dunno; imagery is not really my jam, and I was already in ‘let’s not sweat the details’ mode, so it mostly kind of lost me.
From there, we go though a few kind of on-the-nose metaphorical scenes about different stages and aspects of your life, followed, weirdly, by you at the end of your life remembering back to earlier scenes… that we had never seen. There’s a whole thing with your mom; there’s a whole thing with your family, and we literally played through this part of our protagonist’s life and neither showed up at all. What?
I feel like this game could work with someone who was primed to bring a lot to the game from their own experience, who could think about their expectations and assumptions and how either were confirmed or subverted by the game. But for me, it mostly kind of sat there being mysterious without being compelling.
There were some nice turns of phrases! And I was compelled to replay the ending (spamming ‘undo’ about 50 times) after the final choice to see both paths, and they were at least both different from each other, if (again) both overly vague and metaphorical. But it never hooked me in. This is almost certainly mostly a ‘me’ issue, as I’m not big on metaphor, so it was kind of doomed from the start. Sorry, game! The prose was competent and occasionally engaging, and the stuff with the fonts was cute.
Did the author have anything to say? Probably? Though if so, they managed to hide it from me.
Did I have anything to do? No, not really. My guess is that there were maybe 4 choices in the entire game that it kept track of at all, but even those were opaque: there was never any sense of what might happen in one branch vs another, nor any sense of what kind of protagonist you were creating by making a particular choice—the only characterization (if any) was after-the-fact. The final meaningful choice in the game is a good example: there are two stories hiding behind the two choices, and zero way to predict what they might look like, even vaguely, before you’ve seen them. It’s possible to do this well, but I felt like my influence on the plot was as a random number generator, and not as a person making meaningful decisions.