Thank you so much for the review! (And your testing feedback was in fact very helpful, especially in ensuring players don’t get overwhelmed!)
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3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS, by Kastel
(I beta tested this game)
3XXX is not a subtle game. From the moment you enter its hyperrepressed world, where tough-as-nails cops clean up the pieces after infantilized, sex-starved people literally combust when their lust inevitably boils over, it’s clear that the agenda here is to take an axe to the censors and bullies currently trying to enforce heteronormativity and sexual continence at the barrel of a gun. But while it absolutely telegraphs its concerns, it still very much retains the capacity to surprise: I congratulated myself on twigging to where the story was going early on, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when what I’d clocked as the final twist actually happened before the end of Act One. And that same dynamic played out twice more, because while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.
Indeed, what makes 3XXX more interesting than a latter-day Stiffy Makane game is that it doesn’t simply counterpose fascist repression against libertine indulgence. Sure, the cop protagonist inevitably crosses to the over side of the law, and the community of people trying to imagine a different future understand that a healthier relationship to sex is a key part of the puzzle. But this isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy – although they can see the ways the society in which they were brought up has harmed them, the scars linger, and it takes concerted effort to learn to speak without self-censorship, much less act on their desires. For that matter, those desires are by no means identikit; some characters are farther along in one aspect of their liberation than others, and the sensitively-drawn give and take of who’s teaching and who’s learning shifts from scene to scene.
As a game, 3XXX is assured enough to know where it’s headed. There are choices, but they’re mostly there to keep the player engaged and push you to think about what you’re reading instead of mindlessly lawnmowering on – this isn’t a game that needs branching though, no one is thinking “hey, what if I could keep working for the Nazis instead?” And there’s a lot to think about, as this is a provocation that resists supplying easy answers to the dilemmas it creates. This extends to the prose, which is direct enough on a sentence by sentence basis but preserves its ambiguity; there are jokes (funny ones!) but even the winks to the camera can’t always be taken at face value. It all adds up to a compelling experience that’s as personal as it is political, as outrageous as it is empathetic.
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you are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion, by KA Tan
(I beta-tested this game).
“Where do you get your ideas?” is surely the most vapid question you can ask a writer, but spare a thought for how much worse it must land when the writer in question is a poet. Poetry isn’t so much a what as a how, “ideas” are at best the jumping-off point that has as much to do with rhythm, an image, a sense of a word’s full freight, as anything else. So spare more than a thought for the protagonist of you are an ancient chinese poet…, child of a disgraced courtier who amuses himself with anonymously-circulated verse but is suddenly summoned to the Emperor’s court to take part in a poetry competition. You have a couple of hours to circulate amongst the great and the good, observing their foibles and possibly being recruited into their intrigues, but you’d better hope you catch a spark somewhere along the way because given the cut-throat nature of court politics, “sorry, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight” probably isn’t going to go over well.
I haven’t exhaustively plumbed the game’s many, many endings, but at least in the ones I’ve tried, the protagonist does manage to rise to the challenge. Admittedly, there’s quite a lot here to stimulate composition: after a prologue that efficiently sets the scene, you’re set loose to wander the garden, where you’ll meet cliques of other poets pursuing their particular passions, and maybe have an opportunity for a tete a tete with the princess and general bent on agendas of their own. They’re a colorful bunch – I was partial to the gang trying to escape the moral burden of choice by embracing extremist fruitarianism, but they’re all in thrall to some decadence or other, even the ones espousing moderation obviously taking things too far. There’s more than a hint of contemporary social comment to all this, which can likewise feel like it tips just over the line of plausibility on occasion, like the voyeurs whose activities are an analog analogue of prurient pursuits that more often play out digitally. But even these moments when the fourth wall strains, the game’s understated prose and its structural imperative to somehow make a poem of all of this helps bring the player along.
There are also a lot of decisions to make, because there isn’t enough time to go everywhere in the pavilion, and each vignette puts you on the spot. The others are keen enough to have noticed that the Emperor’s recruited you as an outside observer, here to render judgment on what you see, so they try to get out ahead of the game by pushing you to preview your reactions, issuing an approval or disapproval of their ideology and behavior. And while it’s not too difficult to map each faction to their real-world inspirations, the game does a good job of complicating the picture so that either response can be justified – the proponent of free speech correctly identifies the need to speak truth outside of systems of constraint, but he’s also a rich kid slumming for clout, and his crew seem more interested in getting sloshed and feeling self-righteous than actually trying to change things. Things get more complicated still when you’re pulled into a conference with one of the Emperor’s would-be successors (you get either the princess or the general, not both); these are not nice people, but they’re powerful ones, and compelling too, so I definitely felt put on the spot.
The prose is restrained throughout, zooming in on tell-tale details that communicate that the Emperor made a good choice when he tapped you as his eyes, and the writing appropriately reaches a climax when it’s time to recite. Your choices in the rest of the game unlock the choices available to you in the final composition – each of the five lines can be cycled through to emphasize a different take on what you’ve experienced in the different vignettes; it’s a happy medium between a pre-baked result and pure Mad Libs, and while it’s possible to make something awkward if you really try, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with a coherent and compelling poem. Appropriately enough, your words can have significant consequences indeed, or at least, they can for the empire as a whole, because in all the endings I’ve experienced, the protagonist simply returns home to an exile that now might be as much self-imposed as enforced from outside – having seen what it takes to write high-stakes poetry, perhaps you’ve decided from now on to get your ideas closer to home.
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And that is the lot! I have some broader thoughts to wrap up the Comp, but I don’t have enough gas in the tank to start in on those right now – so I’ll content myself with thanking the authors, the other reviewers, the organizers and volunteers who helped make the Comp happen. It’s been a tumultuous year in so many ways, but it’s reassuring that the Comp continues to provide so much to play, think, and write about!
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Thanks for all your fine reviewing and support behind the scenes, Mike!
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First, thank you very much for the review, and a bigger thank you for the transcript! Helpful for nailing down a few fixes for the post-comp version. I do have one well actually moment, however, which is X-Men comics in the late 80’s had a lot of the included “swears”. (“damn”, “hell”, “crap”, etc.)
I did a big re-read of every X-Men and X-Men-related comic from the beginning as I worked on this game (thank you, Marvel Unlimited) so I could pull accurate lingo. My favorite? Calling people sleazoids.
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Speaking as someone who’s working through the fourth season, I hope you give it another chance. I love it.
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Seconded.
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Thirded.
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