Dear Anna by Bijan Stephen and Eden Rohatensky
I’ve been putting off Dear Anna because it is audio based and designed specifically to be played exclusively on headphones. I thought it would be neat to do this while walking my dog, which is when I do all my podcast listening. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite get that set up to work. So a Friday night when I couldn’t stand to look at a screen for a second longer but was too exhausted to go anywhere seemed like a fitting alternative.
I decided to play the game while working on a small art project where my computer was in arms reach, and this turned out to be the right call. The game is still very much a work in progress. All passages do have a written counterpart, and some of the recordings have not been completed, so there was still some required reading in a few spots, which was actually hard to do because without audio, it would skip right through and you had to spam the back button a lot to read the whole passage. Players are meant to use headphones with tap interfaces to proceed through the story, and gentle beep tones in the audio inform you as to which choice maps to 2 taps and which maps to 3 taps, though it took me awhile to realize this, and there is a strangely long amount of time to wait between the passage and the reading of the options that often I thought the passage has just forgotten that part. I did connect my airpods to try the tap to proceed feature out, but there were few opportunities to use it, because most often there was only 1 option. When I did try, it did not always seem to work quite right, so I ended up using my keyboard most of the time. When there was only 1 option, sometimes it auto-advanced, but not always, and the distinguishing context for why was not clear to me. The volume is not balanced in a few places. There are points at what seems like the end of the story to go to credits or read onwards, and the story just…keeps going? Except then you experience the same narrator but he seems to have led a completely different life, and Anna’s outcome is totally different. I get the sense this is meant to be layered into the earlier portion of the game. Given his references to the butterfly effect, I could see a potential structure in which your choices turned out to impact outcomes a lot more. As it was, it seemed slapped in at the end and I was just kind of confused.
As for the narrative content itself: I’m kind of in a weird spot given that I’ve played this game back to back with Demon Game for Sophie, another competition entry that is primarily audio based and about a man reflecting on his platonic but-maybe-wishing-for-more relationship with a problematic woman. It is hard not to compare, and this game did not emotionally resonate nearly as much as Demon Game, though I suppose the stakes were a bit lower in Dear Anna. I was never going to be clenching my jaw over animal sacrifices in Dear Anna.
But there are a few other reasons I think it didn’t fully land. To start, I didn’t particularly like the primary male voice actor. His reading reminded me more of This American Life or some other NPR show. He is supposed to be recounting memories of a person who was very important to him, and which he feels partially responsible for her death, but it reads removed in a scenario where I would expect more pain and turmoil. I did like some of the other voice actors, her Russian friend in particular made an impression, but Anna herself was my favorite. Another issue was that I didn’t get a clear picture of who Anna was, even though this is supposed to be entirely about her. I saw Mike Russo’s review call her out as a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, but frankly, I don’t think we got enough to even call her that? Was she quirky? I don’t think so? I felt like I saw some fragments of her through the stories people told, but her motivations and her full personality were never that clear to me. What drove her to a drug addiction, to rehab, and to relapse? I don’t really have a clue. Add in a confusing narrative structure, wherein there were maybe different versions of her, and I just don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other at the end.
Overall, the game in its current state is very buggy and appears narratively incomplete, at least when stepping back to see the big picture. But I think the core idea is novel and still seems worth pursuing to me. The UI interface was actually pretty slick, and with more polish, I could see myself using an app for something like this to “read” interactive fiction like Dear Anna while out for walks in the future.