Closure by Sarah Wilson
There’s a tradition of parser games that turn the game’s voice into a character; games like Jon Ingold’s Fail-Safe, Tommy Herbert’s Bellclap and my own Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303. In Sarah Wilson’s Closure, the game’s voice is that of your best friend Kira, and the central conceit is that she’s texting you and you are texting her back. A good idea and implemented in a visually appealing way. Unlike many games of this tradition, Closure keeps the relation between player and narrator pretty straightforward: Kira tells you what she sees is more or less the same way that a ‘neutral’ viewpoint character would.
Ostensibly, the piece is about helping your friend steal a photo of her and her now ex-boyfriend TJ from said ex-boyfriend’s dorm room. In reality, the exploration of his room will trigger a series of revelations and insights that help Kira understand why TJ left her and thus find a much-needed sense of closure. It’s a sympathetic framework that stresses the difficulty of and need for mutual understanding, and it’s a good fit for the chosen medium.
When it comes to the details, things could have been stronger. We don’t get much of a sense of who Kira and TJ are as persons, or how they interacted. So Kira made fun of TJ’s metal albums and sneakers collection. Okay – but there are many ways to make fun of something, and many ways to react to that, ranging from the problematic all the way to good-natured joking that can actually strengthen a couple’s bonds. So how did they interact? We’re not sure. (Some of this would have been easier to show in flashback, but of course there’s no way to incorporate flashbacks into the texting conceit.)
The crowning revelation is that TJ got married to a girl he’s only hooked up with a few weeks ago. This massively unexpected and quite bizarre turn of events seemed to me somewhat out of place; it undercut the realism of the rest; or if it is supposed to be realistic, then at the very least Kira’s understanding of TJ must have been so warped that it makes it hard for us to take her past romance very seriously. I don’t fully understand why the story was taken so far beyond the (surely quite sufficient) revelation that TJ has a new girlfriend.
But overall an easy piece to like!