You Cannot Speak (Ted Tarnovski)
Played on: 28th September
How I played it: Through the IFComp ballot via Firefox
How long I spent: Just under 10 minutes
This is quite a tricky one to review, and I’ll just frontload the problem: You Cannot Speak isn’t done. You may have some premonition of this when you see that the blurb describes the game as a “prologue”, or when you load the game and see the title “youcannotspeakv2”. You’re playing along, and you finally meet a couple of NPCs, and then the game tells you the prologue’s done and Claudia will return in Chapter One, and that’s it. This is a shame, as the writing isn’t bad and a few elements of the setup promise something a little more socio-politically charged than what we get here, but there’s just not enough here to go on.
So we have our protagonist Claudia, who wakes from a sleep paralysis dream to find she’s become mute. We discover it’s her first day as an officer at a new Mars colony, and the substance of the game is poking around her room, which is claustrophobic (like the Star Wars hotel) with a fake window that’s actually a screen (like the Star Wars hotel) and a fire exit (unlike the Star Wars hotel). In so doing, we learn that the colony is going to kinda suck. We can also learn more about Claudia herself in a series of reflections. You Cannot Speak warns you that “sometimes a story is more intriguing without all that exposition” and it’s true that the exposition increases the length of the game by a good 25%, but since the game is about 300 lines total with the exposition, that doesn’t mean much. (That includes the text for the choices you select, which doesn’t disappear as it usually does in Ink games, though that’s fine by me as it makes the transcript I’ve copy-pasted into a .txt file easier to follow.)
It’s difficult to assess this piece’s successes when most of the piece isn’t done yet, but there are neat little flashes of descriptive writing and setting information which spark the imagination. One glimmer of where this could be going is in your sci-fi wristband TORUS, which cheerfully tells you that TORUS “has been shown in studies to reduce the problems posed by mental illness on space colonies!” Not the illnesses themselves, mind – the problems caused by them. Victor Gijsbers’ review also points out the shower scene and the history that it invokes – it may or may not prove to be an appropriate inclusion, as Victor says, but it does at least establish the baseline fact that the colony is going to be hell on Earth Mars. The gimmick that the protagonist can’t speak could also go a few different ways – it might be in service of a story about disability and illness and isolation, or it could render the protagonist completely passive while things happen around her. Or both!
But now I’ve reached the point where I’m just imagining the flaws that the next chapter of You Cannot Speak might have, so it’s already time to wrap up. I’m not going to say that You Cannot Speak shouldn’t have been submitted to IFComp, but I don’t think it stands alone as an entry well enough. The prologue lacks a resolution or a character arc, and I don’t think the author’s blurb sets expectations well enough (for a start, it predicts 30 minutes of playtime, priming the player to expect something more substantial than the 5-10 minutes it actually takes), so playing through it is fundamentally unsatisfying. Still, I think it’s a promising prologue, and I would be interested if the full game appeared in a future competition.
(by the way, Silksong update: I have beaten the Bilewater runback and gauntlet, for which Team Cherry will not see the light of heaven.)