4 Edith + 2 Niki (fishandbeer)
Played on: 15th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 20 minutes of poking around, all endings seen
4 Edith + 2 Niki is a bitesize dating sim made in Twine, which can be played to an ending in two minutes. You poke around in a building at the back of a psych ward meeting four people called Edit (not Edith, note – I’ll get back to that) and two people called Niki, and you choose one of them to date at the end. This is an expanded rerelease of another game, The 4 Edith, originally made in 2015 for Twiny Jam, a game jam which stipulated that each entry must be less than 300 words. (I played that one as well out of curiosity, but I won’t comment on the original The 4 Edith in this review except to contextualise 4 Edith + 2 Niki, since it’s not the game I’m supposed to be reviewing here.)
This is a very, very small game. Your interaction with each Edit and Niki is one paragraph of text and one date, which is the ending of the game. Not even that, in fact – the two Nikis, added in this update of the game, are not dateable, as explained to you by the sentence “The Niki are not yet/no longer available…” when it’s time for your date. (I’ve been through a bunch of different combinations of hypertext links, and I couldn’t change this, so the Niki dates are either unimplemented, blocked off by a bug, or very well hidden.) The paragraphs only give you the briefest rundown of physical features and interests for each dateable NPC. I’m not a dating sim guy at all, but I thought the joy of these games was getting to know the object(s) of your affections so you can treat them right, and 4 Edith + 2 Niki cannot offer that. I’d call it more of a hook-up sim, except that the outcome of most of the dates is a description of a long-term relationship, so I guess it’s not supposed to be a one-night stand. The game is just too small for its own good, really. As an entry into a minimalist game jam, that’s fair enough, but as an expanded IFComp game, I expected something more – more room to breathe, or more craft in the words that are there (two of my favourite previous IFComp entries, Out and My Gender is a Fish, are tiny but perfectly formed).
But the big problem is that 4 Edith + 2 Niki is just not well written, from a technical standpoint. Odd syntax and grammar abound in sentences like “A horrible young man appears and names him a coffee-mouthed boy.” It’s hard to tell what’s going on, and the game sometimes fails to give you enough context to work it out. The Edits are hard to tell apart – of course they are, they’re all named Edit – and you don’t get much help to work it out. The dates you can go on are listed by location, but not all the Edits actually tell you where they want to take you. More than half of that 20 minute playtime I listed above was me making a table of the Edits and the dates to figure out which was which, like a little logic puzzle. I don’t actually think “bitesize dating sim” is a bad idea for a game, but if you’re going to try it, you’ve just got to write more carefully than this, if only so the player knows what’s actually happening and who they’re trying to date.
The writing, unfortunately, disguises something really interesting that 4 Edith + 2 Niki is doing. There’s a thing going on where some of the Edits and Nikis change pronouns mid-paragraph. The problem with the writing being so confusing is that this reads like carelessness at first (not helped by some actual pronoun trouble where the game adopts first-person narration for one paragraph only), but I think it’s intentional. In the original The 4 Edith, all Ediths were referred to as she, and I think this update is going for a much less heteronormative, more genderfluid approach to its bachelors. This would also explain why “Edith” is rendered as “Edit” throughout this update – the author is, I think, switching the characters to a gender-neutral name. I do appreciate this, honestly. This kind of thing is near and dear to my heart. It’s just a shame that the pronoun switches add another quirk that’s hard to figure out at first.
The possible endings are varied, depicting cosy relationships or failing sex lives in brief. The one which says of your relationship with one Edit that you’re “dumbassing together” raises a smile, whereas the one that says of its Edit “she’s a little hysterical, but which woman isn’t” raises an eyebrow. These endings show that the tiny dating sim concept could work. It does work with these endings, really! I like the idea of focusing on the present and glossing over a full future in a few sentences. It’s just not quite earned by the rest of the game. And that thing about hysteria is kind of unpleasant.
I don’t know that there’s much more to say, really. The presentation is default Twine, and the setting is not deeply explored outside of a little bit of descriptive prose. I wondered if the psych ward setting might point to an engagement with mental health and the way that people struggling with mental health find each other, except that the player character goes home at the end of the day, so presumably they’re not a patient. Good thing, too, because some of the Edits seem to be healthcare workers, and I’m sure there must be some kind of ethical guidance about relationships between workers and patients in psych wards.
I’m sorry, I didn’t like this game – there’s far too little meat on these bones, and it’s so difficult to understand what’s going on that any possible connection to the characters is scuppered. But 4 Edith + 2 Niki is small enough that it’s not going to be a waste of time to play the game yourself and see if you get more out of it than I did.