First Contact (dott. Piergiorgio)
Played on: 1st Sept (first version played before updates)
How I played it: online via IFComp website
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins for one playthrough
This was a real curveball to start IFComp 2024 with. Be warned, I’m not going to avoid spoilers for this review.
First Contact is part of a larger fantasy worldbuilding project by the author – I believe Creative Cooking from last year’s comp was another part. In this game, a young-ish elf attends her inauguration at a magical academy, and quickly befriends two fellow students, an angel and a demon. It’s a romance story with a dash of monster girl erotica and a heavy dusting of lore. It’s very linear, as the game admits in the introductory matter. I had assumed that there would be a choice between the angel and the demon, but the three settle on forming a polycule pretty quickly. That’s kind of refreshing, honestly.
There are two elephants in the room here. The first is that I found First Contact very difficult to read. I have to be honest about that, but I don’t like saying it, as I believe English is not the author’s first language and I’m not going to hold linguistic errors against them. (If any authors ever feel I’m being unfair to them because of translation issues, feel free to kick my ass until I try writing a game in a second language.) But there are a lot of long run-on sentences and obscure word choices, which cause issues with the pacing of the writing. Those issues are compounded by heavy use of in-universe terms and concepts, long character names and ancient titles, all of which add an extra step of interpretation. It becomes difficult to intuitively parse the literal meaning of each sentence, and I found myself getting bogged down in the prose.
I think First Contact doesn’t do itself any favours by front-loading a lot of the worldbuilding. In the opening scene, the player character has a choice of things about herself and her world to reflect on, and I think you need to read through all of them before you’re allowed to progress (either that or there’s only a few critical choices but I clicked on them last). By structuring the story that way, the reader is bombarded with unfamiliar names and terms very quickly. I don’t mind spending time on worldbuilding and exposition, but it feels like not all of the setting information provided here is directly relevant to the story, and I think some of it could be cut from this game. Luckily you don’t have to memorise what you’re told here; the critical information (there was a time of war, but now the different races of the world live in peace; some people are magically attuned and some kinds of magic are rarer than others) can be picked up contextually from the events of the story, which is the best way to incorporate worldbuilding in my opinion.
For all that I’m harping on the worldbuilding, I do like the setting a lot. I especially love that it’s playing with different types of fantasy races and monsters, which is something that not enough fantasy works take advantage of. One of the most appealing things about First Contact is how it plays with bodies – the characters aren’t just humans in different skins, they have physical forms with wings and tails, and those physical attributes are explored both within the culture of the world and within the story’s erotic moments as non-human bodies wrap around each other. It’s very cute, and it helps to sell both the world and the sex.
Okay, I think we’re ready for the second elephant. The content warning of First Contact (at time of writing) includes “depiction of breastfeeding”. That… doesn’t quite cover it. A substantial percentage of First Contact is dedicated to two scenes of mutual breastfeeding. In the first, the rector of the academy describes a historical event in which the breastmilk of all the races of the world was mixed and drank (for perfectly sound reasons), and then recreates the act with herself and her students. This is a pivotal moment in the story, as the consumption of each other’s milk strengthens the mystical bond between the three protagonists. The second is an erotically-charged act of mutual breastfeeding as the three further strengthen their bond. The act of breastfeeding is depicted as naturalised rather than as fetishised within the game’s setting. This has been established by prior worldbuilding, which intertwines maternity and mysticism closely.
All the breastfeeding took me by surprise! I don’t really have a problem with this, I don’t think. Maybe I have a history of being sex-negative in my IFComp reviews, and I’m trying to unlearn that (my hang-ups are not the author’s problem), and breastfeeding is a totally harmless fetish. George R. R. Martin was allowed to get away with it. (I hope Dott. Piergiorgio doesn’t mind me saying this is a fetish. I get the impression he sees the funny side of fetishes and sex in fantasy. I laughed at the joke where the main character reflects that “scientific research on Sanctuaries [i.e. the wombs of magically-attuned people] ranges between amusing diversion to cringing rambling in proportion with the age of the work’s author.”) On the other hand, I did get uncomfortable when it became apparent how much of this game was focused on breastfeeding, and I would have liked more of a heads-up. If on my first day of university my head of department had lactated into a jug and then passed it around instructing the class to fill it up and then drink from it, I think I would have dropped out and tried to pick up a trade instead.
There’s a lot about First Contact and its setting that I found engaging. This is a teaser for a larger 2026 project, and it has certainly caught my interest. A full-length project will give the worldbuilding and setting much more room to breathe, so I have good feelings about where this work is going.