One (More) Week in Dolcett - Scarlett Sky by Strict-Smile2087
Just an upfront content warning that this game is pretty graphic, and I’ll mention a bit of that at a high level in this review.
I am not a fan of action movies, nor violent movies, nor body horror movies, nor pornography, nor do I have a cannibalism fetish. I would even say, though I consume a lot of it, I struggle to connect to most romantic content. So you might think that One (More) Week in Dolcett is very much not the kind of work for me. But! I do find exploration of kink from a feminist lens to be very compelling. This, and pure lurid fascination, is what got me across the finish line reading this work.
When the list of works in IFComp first dropped, I’ll be honest, the One (More) Week in Dolcett blurb is the entry that captured my attention the most. I was intrigued. I started the game maybe 5 weeks ago, played through the tutorial, and then promptly stopped, because I needed to have a long think about whether or not I actually wanted to subject myself to this kind of content.
One of the cooler aspects of IF is the low barrier to entry to create dynamic, expressive works of art, especially in short forms. Events like IFComp, or just randomly exploring Itch, can expose you to diverse and sometimes very creative works of art. At best, you end up finding deeply engaging, well made art that makes you think “I can’t believe I just got that for free!” It feels like one of the last vestiges of what made the internet cool in the first place: people out there laboring, honing a craft, making brilliant things for the sake of it. But sometimes you end up encountering content that kind of…stains your brain. I’ll never forget a decade ago when a Twine game I randomly picked on itch that ended up in a scenario where you have sex with your [smart]house. I didn’t know that was a thing, I don’t remember the name of the game, but boy, the content stuck with me. Sometimes things get weird in even more damaging ways. I believe this is sometimes called an infohazard. Dolcett seemed like a real possible infohazard to me.
I try to enact sex positivity where I can. I don’t condemn sexual acts, kinks, or fetishes as long as its all done by enthusiastically consenting adults, and I understand the tricky balancing act of kinks that are, in their purest forms, nonconsensual, but exist within people nonetheless. As a [now retired] contortionist, I’ve worked some erm, strikingly kinky events. I think I’m open minded? But there is this strange, uneasy feeling that arises in me in contexts dealing with kink that I don’t know how to otherwise put into words…I know I feel it whenever I hear Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground, and I can suddenly recall the musty smell of the patent leather boots and discarded sex toys my boss once brought back from an estate sale (I also worked for an eBay re-seller for a time). Encountering artifacts of distant people’s fetishes is uncomfortable…in a surreal way. So after getting through the tutorial and finding out just how graphic this game was going to be, I had to ask myself: Did I really want to subject myself to that feeling for several hours? And for what outcome?
I think friction can build you into a stronger, more well rounded person. We regularly subject ourselves to this in education or exercise. So there was some motivation to confront something that might challenge me in order to, I don’t know, grow or something. Or maybe just prove to myself I can. Also, based on some threads here, it appears the work was made in earnest, and I wanted to give it a fair shot. Finally, I was too darn curious. So I came back to it.
While playing, I did find myself pretty queasy from the violence to start, but the game is pretty long and very repetitive with threatening scenarios (there is a very high oven mention count in this game). Eventually, I began to feel somewhat desensitized to the content. I would also usually skim the failure scenarios when I reached them, since they were often the more graphic portions, which probably helped a bit. Eventually, I found myself a bit bored due to the repetition of “oh no this person wants to cook and eat you” and “dang you kind of like that but you manage to get away anyway.”
One thing I liked about the game was the mechanics for choice. There’s a split around 3 main mechanics: the challenge of recall, in which you must remember previous information and supply the correct answer, the challenge of close reading, in which the current passage supplies hints based on semantic word proximity to the correct option, and something called “mind break”, in which you get walls of all caps text links conveying overwhelming arousal and a one single clear-eyed self preserving thought buried within that you must find before a timer runs out. I think these make great use of the medium. It embeds a puzzle right into the text without having to keep track of inventories, stats, or other derived rules. It was satisfying to conquer a recall or mind break, but I struggled with the close reading challenges. More often than not I felt like I couldn’t find the relevant words in the passage and was doing about as good as randomly guessing.
The low point of the game for me was when the game gives you 3 path options. I opted for the enchanted forest. In this portion of the game, the core mechanics I just described are set aside for a far less intuitive approach to finding the “right” link, and there are a lot more link options. I ended up brute forcing to find the right path most of the time, and it felt like it took forever. If I wasn’t dedicated to completing this so I could write a well informed review, I definitely would have DNF’d at that point.
I found the characters of the world ultimately pretty flimsy. They are almost entirely characterized by their relationship to sexualized cannibalism. Almost every action each character takes out is guided by whether they want to kill and eat someone, want to be killed and eaten (or not), or whether or not they think someone else should or shouldn’t be killed and eaten. The rest of it rides on a few tropes: you’ve got your cartoonishly villainous dudes, indigenous woman, damsel in distress, underground rebel, etc etc. It was hard to know or care about anyone. For example, I wasn’t sure why, in the end, Scarlett (the protagonist you play as) was so determined to save a woman named Zoe, who kind of sucked. As Scarlett, we watch random women get killed over and over again throughout the game. Why do we care about one particular woman who we don’t know anything about, but in most interactions acts rude and ungrateful? Because she is a foreigner, I guess? It felt like it was actually only because the story said we needed to save her, not because I, as the player, felt any sense of moral obligation to a depiction of a real human being.
The world left me perplexed. My immediate thoughts on Dolcett were “how does this society sustain a population?” because literally every man you interact with is obsessed with killing and eating literally every woman. How do they manage to raise enough children for this, or keep their labor force healthy? The game does eventually try to answer this, explaining that women are specifically bred and raised en masse to feed all the hungry/horny men. But that brings me to another point: there are no children ever mentioned in the world, no elderly, no logistics around labor are explained, and I’m still confused how women manage to continue existing at all when gruesome death appears to be as easy as walking into a restaurant. And then some of the women still seem totally oblivious to this reality. I just don’t get it. Also–I think it would take many hours (like, most of a day, right?) to cook a whole human, it seems kind of labor intensive but people are doing it so often?! It’s so impractical! I have to settle on the fact that the game asks–or rather demands–that you see the world as a caricature and suspend a lot of disbelief. It’s better to just treat this as a work of pornography, in which it makes sense to start banging every pizza delivery guy who comes to the door.
However, this demand to see the world as a sexy cannibal fantasyland feels at odds with some of the more realistic and serious aspects of the story. And herein lies what I think is a core flaw with the game. It’s trying to play to a lot of audiences and themes, and the attempts don’t align. The attempt to play for an audience interested in arousal overshadows most everything else, given the frequent and extreme nature of that content. The attempt to tell an action-adventure story is fine, I suppose, though at times trite. Some parts of it actually read as comedic satire, especially whenever a man has dialogue (I actually liked it when it struck these notes!), but I can’t tell if it is intentional or a side effect of shallow writing, since the world is so pornographic already. Finally, there’s also an attempt to convey a very earnest lust versus love story that I think is meant to be the foundational emotional resonance of the game, and it completely missed me. I think this was in part because it was such a whacky fantasyland, and in part because the character development was lacking. I understand what lust is to Scarlett and how it affects her, but don’t understand what love means for her. Is this love she finds for herself? For other women? For her new romantic connection? Can true and deep love even exist in this cartoon sex world? How would we even know it when we see it, when nothing else feels real?
I actually think the exploration of tension in desire for something inherently damaging to oneself, and if a person can be truly empowered if they have a kink for any kind of subjugation is where the game shines the most. As I said up top in this review, it’s what I hoped the game would be. If this game wanted to play to my specific tastes, I’d rewrite it to examine that more deeply, and take it at an allegorical angle more generally. I’d scale back the graphic content, flesh out the Dolcett society a bit more (pun not intended), and get way more inquisitive and nuanced with its gender politics, using each character to reflect different stances people might actually take. Or maybe, if you wanted to get the other direction, amp up the farce way more. It has real comedic potential! But I realize my tastes are more attuned to artsy literature, and I am maybe not the audience the game intends to find. Even still, I think more work could be done here even for a different audience.
One (More) Week in Dolcett is an ambitious game trying to do a lot of things with a highly provocative premise, which I think is why my review is so long. There is a lot to process. In this way I find it engaging. I can’t say the game is not memorable, which, hey, is hard to do. The actual IF aspect is fine. I do not think it sticks the landing with what I perceive the thematic intentions to be, and the extremely graphic content would dissuade me from ever recommending it to anyone. It did leave me uncomfortable, but that was expected. I can’t say I’m glad to have played the game, but I suppose at the very least my world view has expanded a little bit.
