High School Reunion, by Sanj
There are a ton of stories about high school reunions, and basically none about college reunions, because of course there aren’t. The core premise of a movie or book built around a high school reunion is that it’s a crucible in which characters’ understanding of themselves is tested: returning to the place from which they set out, they measure themselves by the distance between who their peers remember them as, and who they seem to be now – and if they pass the test, they earn the right to be with that crush they never made a move on. There are obvious dials to twirl – an underestimated character who’s since achieved success but is insecure about it is perhaps the most classic archetype, but you can flip the script and center Homecoming royalty anxious about the way they’ve come down in the world, their glory days well behind them. And of course the plot almost always turns on deception, as no one ever shows up at a high school reunion being exactly who they are: in stories at least, they’re always fronting, pretending to be at least a bit more successful, a bit more charming, a bit smarter and hotter and all the rest.
The problem with trying to do this for a college reunion is that it’s silly. Sure, you still have a fair bit of growing up to do in your twenties, but seeing older characters go through similar contortions of anxiety about stuff that happened well after they had the right to vote can be more pathetic than relatable; by that point, more of your character is presumably set, you should have more of your life figured out, and trying to deceive the people who knew you then should be even less likely to succeed.
The trouble is, these critiques apply to the high school reunion story too, just in attenuated form. The best of them recognize that still being hung up on this stuff is dumb, that if there’s a chance to reconnect with people who once meant something to you, great, but remaining obsessed about the judgment of people you haven’t seen in years is a worse flaw than whatever peccadillo you’re ineptly covering up. The worst of them, though, are little better than revenge fantasies, functioning just as excuses to vindicate the underdog and give the cool kids their comeuppance.
We’ve taken a long time to get to the actual game here, both because at this point, a month into the Comp, the Mike Russo review process has gotten a little raggedy, but also because the above constitutes like 80% of my critique of the aptly-named High School Reunion: the generic title of this Texture game is a harbinger of how closely it hews to the classic tropes. You’re a loser desperately worried that your old classmates will recognize that you’re a loser, consumed by long-simmering resentment about the rich, popular kids, and nursing a decade-long crush you never made a – you know how this goes, I typed it all out in paragraph one.
The two notable things about the game are first, its unlovely edgelord streak. The narration loves to wallow in how pathetic the main character is. Like, here’s what happens if you try to meditate to calm yourself before walking into the reunion:
You start to internalize being no one and belonging to nothing. You decide to meditate, but meditating is stupid and you’re stupid. But being stupid is something and you’re supposed to be nothing which is also very stupid. This whole thing is stupid. You look around to make sure no one saw you being stupid, and thankfully no one was around.
If you keep meditating, you do it so hard that you die, which is typical of the hyperactive nastiness that characterizes the humor. To actually pluck up the nerve to meet your former peers, you need to violently ambush a finance-bro classmate (“you think you might remember a quiet asshole in high school that every girl liked simply because his name sounded rich, but you don’t remember much else”, which, hoo boy, there’s some stuff going on there), and pretend to be him; of course, this goes gangbusters but your old crush instantly recognizes the real you, and if you finally pluck up the courage to ask her to dance, suddenly all your problems are solved and the future looks bright, which at least swaps the nihilism for a saccharine woman-as-talisman-of-success ending.
Getting to that ending is tricky, however, due to the second notable thing, which is the game’s gauntlet structure. There are many possible endings besides the one mentioned above, but they’re all recognizably failed states – beyond meditating yourself to death, you can chicken out and never go to the party, you can run afoul of the finance-bro’s revenge, and you can turn into a vampire and eat everybody (see previous comment about the sense of humor). There’s some creativity on display here, even if I wasn’t a fan of the vibes, but since Texture makes it hard to know what you’re actually choosing to do when you make a verb/noun pair, and the outcomes on display here are often even more disconnected from what the player thinks they might be doing than usual, I found it very easy to stray from the one true path, especially since my goal upon starting out was “go to the reunion and talk to people like a normal human being,” which is not really supported. Without the easy undos of Inform or Twine, having to restart over and over to figure out what the author wanted me to do got annoying pretty quick.
For all that I’ve bagged on the high school reunion story-structure in this review, I think it can be done well – I’m as big a fan of Grosse Pointe Blank as anyone. But doing it well requires doing character work that humanizes the abstract tropes, and ideally putting some unique, engaging twist on proceedings. High School Reunion sadly doesn’t make the cut: it’s a bitter wallflower at prom making snide comments while the band plays uninspired oldies.