The Olive Tree, by Francesco Giovannangelo
The Aristotelian Unities aren’t held in especially high regard these days as a theoretical framework for drama – admittedly for good reason, heck, they don’t even have much to do with Aristotle – and of course they’re a poorer fit for IF, but there’s still something to the idea that there’s power in focus: if a story is restricted to a single place, a single significant action, and a single, compressed time period, it’s harder for your effort to be diffused. The Olive Tree does quite well on the first two criteria, as its view is restricted to one olive tree growing on Palestinian land and what happens when it gives fruit, but it’s much more expansive than the theory would prescribe, with story beginning in the Mandate era and concluding in the modern day. I’m no stickler for classical formulas, but I do think this massive sweep of history means this short, relatively simple game bites off more than it can chew.
Structurally, the game is arranged in a seasonal progression, with short narrative vignettes bookending repeated gameplay segments where you shepherd the tree’s growth. The story is sadly a predictable one drawn from plenty of real life examples: a Palestinian family plants and nurtures the tree over decades, passing the responsibility of tending to the grove through the generations, until Israeli settlers begin imposing checkpoints and other restrictions in an attempt to seize the land, with everything culminating in shocking but by no means surprising brutality. The narrative mostly plays out through dialogue, and we only experience short scenes that the tree witnesses, which means the player can wind up skipping through time at a dizzying rate, with only a few moves advancing the clock by a decade. That’s all well and good for modeling how a tree experiences time, I suppose, but this does mean there isn’t much room for characters to breathe; we get a few paragraphs with the patriarch as a young man, then a few more once he’s old helping his daughter learn how to tent to the trees, then a few more after she in turn grows older and becomes a parent. Necessarily, this means that the narrative and emotional dynamics can feel overly bottom-lined:
“Dad, has this been pruned already?”
“Of course, can’t you tell? When I planted this olive tree, the first one in the Garden, I was younger than you are now. And you don’t even understand what you’re looking at… You’d better learn, since you’re the only one left.”
“I’m only sixteen. I’ll learn.”
The ending does have punch, but that impact was blunted because I could see it coming more or less from the beginning, and the absence of texture meant the characters and other incidents of plot came across more as mechanisms to get to that ending, than endowed with substance or the patina of reality in their own right.
In an interesting choice, all these narrative elements are entirely non-interactive, running as glorified cutscenes at specified moments. And while “Unity of Gameplay” is of course not one of the classical unities – even accounting for the fact that they were invented in the 16th Century rather than antiquity, video games were uh still not that advanced – Olive Tree wobbles a bit when it comes to how well the story and themes cohere with what the player actually does. It’s a limited parser game where the commands available to you allow you to manage the tree’s resources – you can absorb water, grow leaves to absorb more light energy, bloom, and fruit. You have always-visible water and light counters (they run on a scale up to 100), and anything besides absorbing water costs it, so a typical gameplay loop involves typing WATER once or TWICE, then maybe LEAVES, then WATER again, to keep your counters out of the red, and make the perennially-decrementing GROWTH statistic from reaching zero – which ends the game in failure.
As a simulation, this gameplay system obviously is fairly abstract, though it does dramatize how challenging survival can be in this environment. But the difficulty is tuned rather harshly, as trying to grow too soon feels like it can put you on a no-win path, and even trying to use the EXAMINE command or otherwise engage with the story makes time pass, bringing you ever-closer to death. In fact I found my first couple of playthroughs rather frantic, with my attempts at spinning plates ending in consistent failure. On subsequent runs I realized that there’s an intended rhythm to prioritizing water vs. light and choosing when to push to generate flowers or olives, but it feels very mechanical (aren’t trees doing all of these things at once, rather than choosing which to prioritize in any given period?); meanwhile, multiple restarts made the story bits fade from repetition, and the juxtaposition of the slow-paced generational saga with my desperate mathematics further took me out of the game.
There are good ideas here, and some good writing too, but at the end of the day the Olive Tree lacks the coherence needed to be great: writing from an olive tree’s point of view across the better part of a century I think demands pacing as unhurried as its growth from seed to sapling to tree, characters as deep as its roots, writing as tart as its fruit, and gameplay as contemplative as the rustle of wind through its leaves. I admire the game’s earnestness and inventiveness, but can only wish it had more focus.