The Archivist and the Revolution (Autumn Chen)
Played on: 22nd October
How I played it: Played online with Firefox (16th October update played)
How long I spent: 1hr 15mins for one ending, plus 15 minutes looking at 5 other endings
Content warning: Transphobia is a major theme in this game and in this review. Also, this one’s going to be a little spoilery; it gives away details which I think you’re supposed to figure out yourself from context and exploration.
The Archivist and the Revolution is a game about surviving in a post-acopalyptic dystopia, balancing work with social needs while trying to scrape together money for rent, food and medication. It takes a little over an hour to run through, and it was written in Dendry, an engine which I know nothing about, but this game in particular behaves a little like a Choicescript game.
This is the third game I’ve played this year which explored transgender experiences in a post-acopalyptic setting, after Spring Thing’s The Light in the Forest and this comp’s One Final Pitbull Song (a game which I’ve since learned is not necessarily a horror game about being lowered into a big pit, so I’ve gotta get back to that game and see how wildly it branches – but anyway). There seems to be something about modern times that makes people want to write games about the trans community and love and finding each other in a crumbling and uncertain world which is systematically opposed to your very existence. I wonder why? Not worth reflecting on, I’m sure.
The Archivist and the Revolution is by far the bleakest of these three games. This is a world where the culture war has been lost. And it was a war – there are worldbuilding references to a transhumanist war in the past, plus a recent revolution by a faction of “laverneans,” a term which seems to be this world’s term for trans-feminine people (there’s also a reference to “ellioteans” which I think means trans-masculine people?). Now, the laverneans are in hiding, with dark references to “anti-nonbinary purges” being made every so often. The player character Emmeline is a lavernean. The Archivist is a game of social and mental survival as well as financial.
The Archivist gives us a dystopia which intends to reflect and explore modern social ills, especially transphobia. There are other social critiques of modern society and capitalist culture embedded throughout the game. One thing I loved about the last Autumn Chen game I played, A Paradox Between Worlds, was its brilliant spoofing of the weird behaviours and tribalisms of social media; this work continues in much blunter and more dramatic fashion here. There are a few passing references to inter-factional conflicts such as “shameful behaviour from the other non-binaries” which suggests that we’re still arguing the correct way to perform gender hundreds of years in the future. An in-game social media forum supplies a stream of upsetting news stories about police brutality and murders of sex workers, each with user comments praising the oppressors. There’s a running gag of “fake news” being the first comment on every news story, which I think is too on-the-nose to be effective – it feels a little Banksy-ish – but perhaps I’ve just been soured by years of unfunny satirists thinking that saying “fake news” is an automatic slam-dunk on Donald Trump. Having said this, I got a bitter chuckle over the social media option in the menu eventually being renamed “a form of self-harm”.
The setting has had a lot of care put into it and the social critique is pretty clear, but I think there are times when the worldbuilding and the analogy are at odds, and the waters get muddied. It took a while for me to figure out what “lavernean” actually meant in context – the game does a good job of integrating its neologisms into its dialogue seamlessly, but there’s a lot to be said for just having a character say “as you know…” as a way of explaining something more obviously to the reader. A lot of this setting information is mentioned in passing and only laid out in the Notes subsection of the Entertainment menu option, which I don’t think is the most intuitive place to find it. This should be more readily available to the player, especially since the notes also explain the relationships between certain characters, which I’d consider to be quite important for the player to know if they want to make choices that make sense for the player character!
This has been a lot of nitpicking so far over the way that worldbuilding and meaning is delivered, but the fundamental game itself works very well. The core game loop has you making a couple of choices for what to do each day, one day at a time. You’re trying to raise money for a large weekly rent payment, while also being able to soak up the unpredictable costs of food and medication (Emmeline appears to have chronic fatigue syndrome or something like it, which also explains why you can do so little each day). Your main source of income is an archival job, in which you can decode texts from the past and file them as scientific papers, government documents, or other categories. It’s worth doing a few of these just for the writing, as Emmeline compares artefacts from our present with her present. Some of the decoded messages are quietly heartbreaking diaries hoping for a better future that hasn’t arrived, some elucidate the backstory in interesting ways, and some offer interesting dimensions to conversations you can have in the rest of the game. This isn’t really a puzzle game but there’s also a nice “aha” moment in getting your head around how to file the archives correctly (explained in the walkthrough if you’re not in this for puzzle-solving).
As you go into The Archivist, understanding that it is a dystopia and a reflection of modern economic and cultural woes, you will probably instinctively guess that the money isn’t going to be enough to keep up with the rent. And so it proves. The rent keeps going up, and random(?) events such as Emmeline’s illness flaring up will scupper your plans and budget. In this way, The Archivist nudges you towards engaging with two NPCs who Emmeline can try to ask for monetary help. These NPCs are quite well scripted and their conversations seemed very flexible – although Emmeline will sometimes make her own choices, you’re usually given valid and reasonable yes/no options to branches in the conversations. The conversations do try to steer you towards romance, which usually irritates me in a game but I think it’s justified here – the two potential love interests are both ex-partners of Emmeline who would like to pick up where they left off, so it’s not coming out of nowhere in-universe.
Eventually, the game will come to an end, probably once your luck with the rent runs out. (I think it’s possible to hang on for a long time with perfect play, but something in the walkthrough implies to me that an endpoint comes whether you like it or not.) There are nine possible endings, six of which I’ve seen – the other three will need me to replay the game with a strategy in mind, and I don’t think I’ll have the time to do that. The endings are all a little abrupt, which I think is because they have to stem from one or two pivotal scenes which will come at a time that the author can’t predict, based on how long you managed to beat the rent payments. But you’ll get different possible endings based on your choices throughout the game and what you made time to do, so your choices definitely matter throughout the game.
The first ending I got was Ending 1, which I think was a bad first ending to get. I’m still working through how I feel about it. On the one hand, I can see how it fits alongside the themes of the game. The most hopeful endings (of the ones I saw) are the ones where another person acts as a benefactor in some way, and the least hopeful have the player character alone at the end of the game, suggesting that there’s no bootstrapping your way out of a spiralling cost-of-living situation and that you need to be lucky enough that someone who is already lucky will help you. Ending 1 is the ultimate expression of that – it’s very much a Deus ex machina, or perhaps wish fulfilment. It also pays off something mildly risky the player can pursue throughout the game, as a gameplay reward for spending time doing that instead of something more obviously useful. On the other hand, the way it happens feels very sudden, it introduces new backstory information that I would expect to have been aware of earlier, and it seems to introduce a technology that has not been hinted at anywhere else in the game (unless I missed something? It’s a big game with a lot of optional content, so it’s quite likely I did). The ending feels like something of a swerve which cuts off a lot of other narrative threads, making it feel unsatisfying to me. I assumed it was a dream sequence until I saw the credits and the list of endings.
There seems to be some mild bugginess remaining in this release, but nothing game-breaking. I got one daily routine description which was just “0” but this is a useless bug report because I forgot to write down what day it was and what I did to cause it. Also, in an event where the character S- visited Emmeline’s flat, the game called it “the first time someone besides [Emmeline] has visited in over a year,” the game having forgotten about a visit from A- the previous day. But this is a complex game, and if those are the only two bugs I spotted, then it’s a pretty well put-together game.
Sorry, sorry, I know the review is too long, but I forgot to mention the styling. It’s good. The game looks really good. I love the background pictures. I’ve just been admiring the full pictures in the download folder. The muted colours and dithering get the spirit of each picture across without being so loud and detailed that the background fights for attention with the game text. Very cleverly done.
I feel like I did a lot of griping in this review. That’s not going to reflect the score I give it. The Archivist and the Revolution is very good – it gets its mood right, it’s written devastatingly well where it counts, and its setting and gameplay loop click with each other better than in most games. This is not the kind of game I tend to play outside of IFComp, to be honest – I need a little more optimism in my games – but there’s a lot of excellent work being done here.