Catalan Summer
This was a drama about a family of wealthy industrialists, firmly set in 1920s Catalonia.
The narrative largely centers around the patriarch of the family, Josef Videl, as he struggles to decide what to do about his attraction to his daughter’s fiance, but each family member has their own little subplot–Josef’s wife can cheat on him, too; his son seems more interested in slumming with the proletariat his father employs than inheriting the family business; and his daughter has befriended a ghost. The multiple perspectives, and the fact that most of the action takes place in a lavishly described mansion, give the game a sort of dollhouse feel.
I know very little about 1920s Catalonia, so this was a fun setting to experience. The author does a good job of generating a sense of place and time through description and exposition, the latter of which is of varying quality. There’s a scene where you hang out with your industrialist buddies and bullshit about politics, which felt authentic, but there’s also a scene where you give a mini history lesson to a French friend, which feels fairly forced:
“Since the Catalans were forced to surrender to the Spaniards on September 11th 1714, more than two hundred years ago, this date has become our national holiday, as a reminder of a wound that is still open. Some fifty years ago, regionalist parties emerged on the political scene demanding more independence for our region. The Spanish government in Madrid didn’t really like it, but since 1914 we have been granted a new status, the mancommunitat, which has helped to ease tensions and modernize the region.”
The writing is uneven–I think English isn’t the author’s first language–but the plotting and the interactive elements are fairly well done. I rarely felt like an option I wanted to take wasn’t there, and the game does not assign extra intent to your choices, which leaves you more room to interpret them as you’d like. A few replays revealed that the vast majority of the choices are false choices, or change very little, but that fact was concealed well–I believed my choices mattered, even when they didn’t.
The endings, though, didn’t work as well. As Josef, you have varied options during the game to handle your attraction to your daughter’s fiance: utterly ignore him, run away together, or welcome him as a son-in-law and repress your attraction. That worked well for most of the game, but when you get to the end, your choices are to abandon your family for Charles, or call the wedding off, implying to your wife that you’re too in love with Charles to see him marry your daughter. Neither of those worked for me. I didn’t want to leave my family, but Charles clearly isn’t a good match for your daughter–he’s constantly trying to fuck you, even being so bold as to come to your room at night after spending the day courting your daughter. She loves him, but it seemed pretty apparent he’d be a terrible husband. There seemed to be no way to communicate that opinion to the game: your wife gets mad if you try to call the wedding off, and your only available explanation is that you love Charles. There’s a similar lack of nuance in your son’s potential endings: you can reject your working class friends and lover, or you can run away from home and destroy the family business by leaving it without an heir. I wish there had been more of a middle ground, especially since most of the game does a good job of providing one.
Overall, I had some complaints about the execution, but the game did a good job investing me in a story and setting I had little experience with.