WATT (Joan)
Played on: 10th September
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot in Firefox
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins for two endings
Sometimes a bad ending destroys the goodwill a work of art has earned. It can be perfect for 95% of its runtime, but a truly terrible plot twist or unwelcome swerve right at the end will be all that anyone talks about. WATT was, for me, a rare example of the inverse; I found myself quite annoyed with it for much of its runtime, but the final 15 minutes or so stuck the landing and clarified the design decisions of much of what had come before, leaving me much more positive about the game as a whole.
In this choice-based game we’re playing as Watt (mercifully the game gets its “who’s on first” jokes out of the way early), a young man who finds himself in a surreal town, tasked with finding seven keys to enter a lighthouse. The game’s structure guides you to each key in turn, so this is more of a linear adventure than a branching narrative, apart from a final choice which decides the ending. WATT gets mileage out of Twine with some heavy text-styling and experimentation with different link types and modes of interaction.
Okay, I’m about to make some criticisms which I worry are going to come off as deeply petty and mean-spirited, engaging with a lot of nitpicks rather than any fundamental structural issues. I apologise to the writers in advance – I may just have been crabby when I played this (it’s been a tough work week).
It’s like this: throughout the early game, there are writing and stylistic flourishes which feel very trite. The earliest example of this is an opening sequence that lets you build a character backstory, only to discard it with big red text that says something like “YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A CHOICE” (I forgot to get the exact wording at the time, and I’m, uh, currently not in Sweden to load the game up to check). The sudden switch to the red text suggests that this is meant to be a shocking and impactful moment, when in fact choices that don’t matter have been a standard part of the interactive fiction playbook for a long time. There are other small reveals which are not as intriguing as they are presented; I’m sorry to say I rolled my eyes when WATT told me we were in the town of Ecnanep. The early line “Great. Not only are you lost, but now you’re some kind of chosen one” is similarly inauspicious, priming us to expect a lot of deeply annoying Whedonesque dialogue. (I’ll excuse this one, actually, for reasons I’ll get to later.)
I similarly take lots of little issues with the text styling and the use of links in places. WATT is an extremely playful game which must have been a lot of fun to make. There are tons of fragments of coloured text, stretched text, text which trickles in one letter at a time, and so on. However, not all of these effects are well chosen and could have been used more sparingly. There are a few instances of bright white text which are not readable against the cream backdrop. The text “dripping” has to be revealed one letter at a time at one point, and although I understand how the text reflects the physical action here, the effect is countered by the annoyance of, well, having to click one letter at a time. And there’s a sequence where the player is expected to click rapidly on a link about 50-100 times which really got to me – I play text games to give my clicking finger a rest! Individual things-that-annoy-me can be shrugged off – I wouldn’t even think of mentioning them if there were just one or two instances – but unfortunately this is a death of a thousand cuts, and I ended up really wound up by the halfway point of WATT.
What kept me going is that every so often, there are moments which are very well chosen, and very strong. The sparing use of illustrations is very tasteful and adds a bit of punch to the more surreal scenes. I love the design of the first two encounters, a giant pair of hands at the back of a schoolroom and a girl whose body is stuffed inside a vase. These feel inspired by yokai and other Japanese horror imagery, and they’re great choices for the more horror-ish moments of WATT. And even though I was just picking on the protagonist’s snarky early moments, some of the jokes here do land – the bit where the vase-girl needs to explain one of the more sensitive topics in sex ed to Watt is pretty funny.
The variety in different segments is also very clever. I thought the sequence inspired by a Chinese opera was a wonderful idea, but by far the strongest part is right at the end, on the way to the seventh key – this stretch is far more low-key than what came before, with no surreal twists or strange monsters, so here the writing expands to fill up the creative space, fleshing out a handful of tableaux, aching with regret and despair. You might call it melodramatic in another context, but here it’s so markedly different from what came before that, counter-intuitively, it feels natural and cathartic.
It’s this segment, along with the endgame directly afterwards, that puts a bow on WATT’s allegory for aging and regret, and whether it’s too late to change what we’ve done. Perhaps explaining the allegory is a spoiler, but it will be obvious to most players from the moment Watt is described as crawling, then walking, then running in the opening sequence. For my part, I was far slower on the uptake, only catching on when the game as good as said so. The realisation helped to clarify a few of the things that had bothered me earlier on. Oh, that’s why Watt is so annoying early on – he’s a teenager and he’s got a lot of emotions going on! The endings (of which there are at least two, branching from the final choice) cap it off with either the dissatisfaction of trying to undo a life wasted, or the acceptance of what has been. I think I was a little too spaced out at that point to comment on the themes so I’ll leave that to reviewers who are better at literary analysis, but I felt it tied up quite nicely.
WATT is an interesting one to me. I might have called it quits early on, but having played through to the finish, I now understand the early segments as the vegetables you have to eat before you get to the endgame dessert. I still think the game could do with some judicious editing, but I feel it was worth the effort. And now, to help prove my opening point about endings changing audience responses to a work, I need to bookend this hopefully-readable review with a truly indefensible closing statement. I think you should be alLOWED TO FEED POISON TO DOGS