Penthesileia
Sophia Zhao
This was a fun little short story. The vast majority of it is non-interactive, and I was about to write that it all was, before suddenly remembering that, no, there were actually some choices to make here and there. Which feels like an odd thing to forget? Thinking back on it, I did feel like I was indeed making choices when they were presented, but they all felt kind of obvious, like there was no other ‘real’ choice I could make. Or maybe it was the huge ‘click to continue’:‘click on an option’ ratio, which was… probably not 100:1, but it felt like it. There was a lot of clicking in this game. Like, almost every sentence was click-gated. You could click as fast as you wanted, which was nice! No ‘slow text’ anywhere. But I read in someone else’s reviews this year that authors tend to click-gate text if they feel they need to add extra weight to the prose; that they’re worried that the text by itself wouldn’t have enough impact. If that’s true, it would make poor Sophia Zhao the most insecure Twine author on the planet. I don’t think that’s a super fair characterization; it was clearly a stylistic choice here; one that might work for some and not work as well for others. For me, it made the whole game feel non-interactive. And now I’m spending too much time talking about design; overall it wasn’t a huge deal.
So! The game does this thing where everyone in the story gets a name from Greek mythology/legends, so your name is ‘Penny’ which is short for the titular ‘Penthesileia’, and your husband is ‘Achilles’. Which made things a little weird in the beginning as you-the-player is trying to find out the setting: is this a re-telling of some Greek myth? It eventually transpires that no, the names are there to lend added weight to the story; to establish characterization without having to do too much heavy lifting. Achilles is complaining about Theseus being promoted instead of him; we recognize their statuses from the myth. Or, you know, not so much: I had no idea who Penthesileia was until I looked her up on Wikipedia after playing this game; ditto ‘Antiope’. But while I still don’t know the significance of Antiope in the game, looking up Penthesileia did indeed give me new insight into her character! And I suppose the other effect was that it made the whole game feel more Epic in scope, like world-shaking events were happening, notwithstanding that they were happening in a late-2000’s dystopia instead of Times Of Yore.
I see I’ve gotten sidetracked again. Neither of the above paragraphs were my primary reaction to the game. My primary reaction was to the core story, irrespective of the number of times I had to click my mouse and irrespective of the naming conventions. At its core, the game is about a shackled woman finally finding her voice. And it had, at that core, real power. The story writ large has been told before, but this was this retelling, with a personal take on it. And it’s a story that still needs to be told, probably in as many forms as it takes.
Did the author have anything to say? Absolutely: a distinctly voiced story of a woman learning to throw off her chains.
Did I have anything to do? Kind of, but there were so many ‘click to continue’ points that I literally forgot I had made any ‘real’ choices at all.