23 Minutes, by George Larkwright
My son was home from preschool for six straight days last week – a combination of the weekend, Easter holidays, and a bout of strep throat we both got – and as a result we wound up watching a bunch of kids’ movies (and doing Lego. So much Lego). On back to back nights we did Ratatouille and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and I was intrigued to discover that despite their wildly different plots, i.e. up and coming rat proving himself in the realm of haute cuisine vs. lovable mad scientist trying to save the world from a plague of giant raining food he accidentally unleashed, their emotional spines were completely identical: in both, a comedian plays a young man (well, rat) with a special gift (good taste/off-the-wall inventing) that places him at odds with the expectations of his society, and especially with his father, an emotionally-distant patriarch played by a respected actor of yesteryear slumming for a paycheck, until at a climactic moment the son proves his independence and worth, and his incommunicative father is finally able to express his love.
It’s maybe not surprising that people who write and make movies specifically have some unresolved feelings about feeling less supported by their primary male role model, but this is not peculiar to the field of children’s animation – as a society, we have daddy issues, look around (the first draft of this intro included more geopolitics and was a much bigger downer). So 23 Minutes, an extended Twine narrative-poem about the anxieties of being a new father that unfurls across a sleep-deprived walk to work, has a claim to a broader zeitgeist, even as its signifiers (Tesco, newly-creaking knees, Nigel Farage) anchor it to a particular older-British-Zoomer milieu.
It’s less these particulars and more the presentation that stand out at first impression, though. The commute is rendered as a long series of moments, with each click revealing a handful of new words and updating the blurred background photo to a view a few feet further down the London streets. While I often find excessive clicking an annoying way to navigate a game, 23 Minutes’ approach worked for me, since lingering on each cluster of words in turn feels like an appropriate way to read poetry, and the progression of the photos communicates a sense of motion (as well as a sense of danger: there’s one bit where a van hops onto the sidewalk and comes towards that camera that left me worried for both the protagonist and the author!)
Keeping the player feeling like they’re always moving also fits well with the protagonist’s lapidary thoughts – since for all that fatherhood is the central theme, his narrative stream jumps around quite a lot. Early grumbles at sleep deprivation and regret at snapping at his wife over a trivial household chore give way to frustration at the seeming meaninglessness of his work (he’s a teacher), then deepen into more anxious ruminations about whether he’s emotionally connecting with his new baby and finally digging into a major conflict with his own dad, with diversions into his musical preferences and how he met his wife along the way.
Having been a new father myself, I can testify to the way your sleep-deprived brain can flit from topic to topic at the slightest provocation, and the connections between these leaps are usually clear. And the writing is dense with memorable details, like this early bit where the somnambulant protagonist:
Wipe[s] the debris from my eye / crunchy / like the tips / of oven-baked broccoli
(The crunchy broccoli even gets a callback when he reflects on those cracking noises his knees have started to make)
The author also uses the trajectory of words on the screen to mirror the protagonist’s distraction-prone consciousness; the word yesterday on the right-hand side of the screen calls to mind apposite Beatles lyrics on the right.
With that said, 23 Minutes isn’t just trying to dig into the subjective experience of being an exhausted parent trying to keep their head together while they go through their day; it becomes clear that there’s a progression to the topics the protagonist’s brain keeps bringing up, with all of it ultimately being rooted in that pivotal conflict with his father. While he’s prey to a whole host of worries – that he’s too irresponsible yet to be a good dad, that he’s not able to answer his students’ questions about the really important things in life, that he’s too emotionally detached to bond with the baby, and that he’s being childish and churlish with his wife under the pressure of their new status quo – there’s a particular abscess at the root of all this: the dad, you see, has turned to Reform’s anti-immigrant politics as an emotional salve in the wake of a late-in-life layoff, and when he lashed out at the protagonist’s immigrant wife, the protagonist bumbled along trying to keep the peace rather than sticking up for her. The game makes of this incident a big reveal, building up to it and adverting to its significance even as it works through the protagonist’s subsidiary issues, making clear the connection between this primal emasculation and all his other concerns.
It’s a choice that admittedly lends some drama to proceedings, but one that I have to admit left me somewhat cold. One doesn’t need such a Freudian origin-story to explain why you’re not your best self with your spouse in the heat of the feed-the-baby-every-two-hours crucible, and I think pretty much everyone second-guesses themself about what kind of parent they’ll be. I found myself far more invested in the protagonist’s relationship with his wife and child, and was disappointed that the latter part of the game refracted them through the lens of his more stereotypical daddy issues. In fairness, 23 Minutes does soften this blow by toggling to a more upbeat mode for the ending, with hope represented by self-acceptance and a dedication to change for the better, rather than suggesting that everything would be fixed if the protagonist got in a screaming match with his dad. And there are a few other scenes with the dad, set before he gets sucked down into the black hole of right-wing politics, that prevent him from being a complete caricature.
Still, it’s a bit tidier than I wanted it to be. It’s notable that as the bad-dad plot comes to the fore, the writing feels prosier, more like narration. But the game works best, I think, at it’s most specific, when it’s using the tools of poetry to embed the player in the mind of a lost soul hyperfixating on tiny details in a blurry landscape while he tries to figure out this radical change in his life – I wouldn’t have minded 23 full minutes of that.