Rabbit's IFComp 2024 reviews

Big Fish (Binggang Zhuo)

Played on: 14th Sept? I think? Sorry, I forgot to write it down.
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 35 minutes (30mins for the good ending, a quick 5min reply for the true ending)

Content warning: This game features implied sexual abuse of children. I don’t think the current content warning on Big Fish does a good enough job, so I’m saying it up top. The review will touch on this theme.

I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy Big Fish at all. There are some really fun and bizarre ideas in this murder mystery which make me want to like Big Fish a lot more than I do, but they’ve been quashed by technical errors and (in my opinion) some badly misjudged character and scenario writing.

It’s difficult to know how seriously to take Big Fish. The premise, at first, is straightforward. Your uncle has been executed for the sexual assault and murder of a girl. His last communication with you pleads his innocence and implores you to visit the town of Big Fish to discover the truth. That’s all fair enough, but buried in this is the bewildering reveal that your uncle was executed by being fed to crocodiles. The game continues to shift between tones like this, acting like a po-faced small-town murder mystery, then bamboozling you with a bizarre crocodile-themed detail or misadventure. I think Big Fish is being intentionally surreal and off-kilter with this clash of tones; there is an endgame payoff for these odd details. For me, though, I think it’s made its core scenario too dark for this to work. A sexually-motivated killing of a child (or accusation of such) is a very unfunny concept which needs to be handled carefully, and in that light the death-by-crocodile thing reads as a tonal misstep rather than as a level-breaker.

Similarly, the player character is too off-putting. I enjoy a quirky troubled detective as much as anyone, but our character’s first glimmer of personality is when he imagines brushing his teeth as oral sex. This sets a tone that is difficult to overcome, and makes you mistrust the player character – it makes what might be innocent lines come off as a bit weird. There’s a line mid-game, when the player character looks under the murder victim’s bed and discovers “a few things that shouldn’t be here […] This led you to some despicable thoughts.” I flagged this as a good line suggesting the character has discovered something horrible and doesn’t want to dwell on it, but I’ve peeked at other reviews and some have read this line less charitably, as if the character is having sexual thoughts about the victim. I’m going to stay positive about that line, but this is the risk you run when the first thing you establish about your main guy is “he’s horny” and then you have him investigate a sexual assault of a minor.

Once you get to Big Fish, you’re prompted through an investigation. I will give the game its flowers here: the mystery itself at the core of the game is pretty good! It plays fair, and it’s quite tricky – I missed the key clues and had to brute-force at the point where I was asked to choose the real killer, but the explanation makes me satisfied that I could have figured out their identity if only I had paid more attention. You’re helped out by new text appearing in a different colour – for example, once you meet the conditions to progress to the next scene, some green text will appear to draw your attention to the new hyperlink. This is a great quality-of-life feature. And for all that I think those crocodile bits are misplaced and don’t mix well with the central premise, there are one or two related scenes which add intrigue. There is a good murder mystery game in here!

But there’s a more fundamental issue that cannot be left unsaid. The technical quality of the text is poor throughout, in ways that any kind of proofreading would surely have caught, and in ways that can’t just be attributed to translation issues (at least not as far as I understand). The point of view goes haywire, switching abruptly from second-person to first-person and back again. There are basic oversights with the Twine game logic, where you can visit the same room and pick up the same item over and over again. One character’s name changes mid-scene. It feels like this game has been written in a rush to the IFComp deadline and no time has been left for editing or testing.

I don’t know if that’s what happened, but if it is, it’s a cautionary tale. There is stuff to like about Big Fish, but it feels hurried and underbaked, so as it stands it’s less enjoyable than it should have been.

(Also, look, I know I’m going to annoy people if I harp on about AI cover art every time, but I gotta call it out here. If you’re going to do it, and I don’t think you should and I’m not interested in arguing that point but if you’re going to, you’ve got to have some curation, or some sense of what would accurately represent the literal or metaphorical events of the game. This one looks like the author has just typed “Big Fish” into the AI and downloaded whatever came out. Maybe they haven’t but it looks like they have. There is no big fish in Big Fish.)

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