There’s a single idea here, but it’s a good idea and it’s put to good use. We’re in a small choice-based puzzler set in a whimsical fantasy forest. Each location has one important denizen or feature, but there’s no overall logic to these elements apart from the fact that they happen to co-exist and also happen to form a no-fluff puzzle map. Our main quest consists in the collection of four basically random items. The only unifying setting element is that we collect several types of edible mushroom, including ones that make us larger and smaller – strong Alice in Wonderland vibes here. The puzzles themselves are very easy. A few other reviewers got stuck on talking to the mushrooms, but this did not happen to give me any trouble.
The single idea that animates the game is this: we take the second person pronoun ‘you’ that is so typical of interactive fiction, and we make that the main subject and object of the game. The goal is to find the real ‘you’, or a new ‘you’. All the other characters are defined by their own particular pronouns. Most importantly, the way ‘you’ is printed on the screen is how the protagonist’s current state is shown. Eat a mushroom that make you bigger, and the ‘you’ grows in font size. Take on another colour, and the font colour changes. And so on. It’s funny, it’s rather surprisingly convenient, and it’s central to both the puzzle resolutions and the story.
There’s not really more to the game than that. Since no characterisation has happened, it doesn’t matter to us, as players, that we, as the character, get an improved self. But as a sweet little game with an interesting use of typography, You was worth my time.
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
If you want a picture of the future, imagine people debating whether ‘bi lesbian’ is a TERF term – forever.
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST is a long choice-based game, clocking in at about 4 hours, certainly if you have to look up as many of its terms and cultural references as I did. In it, we follow the adventures of a socially awkward trans guy named ‘L’, who has worked up the courage to go to a kink club. That’s where he meets Val, who will turn out to be not just his initiator into the wonders of trans latex subspace, but also, and much more importantly, into the wonders of friendship and self acceptance. Although I had a hard time forgiving Val his remarks about the Dutch – perhaps he should educate himself and learn that the Netherlands is very much not a swamp because every single fucking swamp we had has had dikes built around it and then been pumped dry with those big fucking rows of windmills, what the fuck else did you think those were used for – he does end up being genuinely good news in L’s life. It’s a positive, upbeat story, and I appreciate the fact that it didn’t end in romance, which would have been more predictable but less realistic.
The writing is gorgeous. The visuals are good too, but it’s the writing that steals the show. There’s quotable sentences galore, like the protagonist calling himself “The world’s least fuckable woman-shaped man(?).” But more crucially, there are some really good scenes, and, unexpectedly, it’s the sex scenes that are the best. The first masturbation scene. The sex scene in latex. The lipstick scene, oh man, with the ensuing bathroom horrors. When the game is at its most visceral and bodily, it really shines. Kudos to ‘the blood’, who is apparently the writer of the piece.
Unfortunately, I did not like the basic text delivery mechanics at all. You get a few sentences. Then you have to press a button. You get a few more sentences. Then you press the button again. And so on. This is incredibly irritating. It significantly slows down the reading process, because instead of just reading on, you have to pause your reading to press the button, then relocate your eyes to the place where the new text appeared. Awful. I can’t think of any good reason to deliver text this way. If you have a static passage of text, why not just give me the entire passage at once? And I also couldn’t just press the button until all the text had appeared, because the text would disappear when I reached the end of the page. More than once did I miss text because I had too enthusiastically pressed my space bar in an attempt to just, you know, keep reading.
Even without this slowing down of the mechanical act of reading, the story progressed very slowly. It could easily have been half its current length, I think, and shortening it would have considerably strengthened its emotional impact. Many scenes seem to be there only to stress how horrible the protagonist’s initial situation is. But act 1 perfectly establishes the insecurities of L. Nothing much seemed added by the lingerie outing, or by all the long, long, long, did I already say ‘long’, passages set on Tumblr and Discord.
These also felt rather unrealistic. L was subscribing to Tumblr accounts that were both toxic and stupid… but why? He was on a completely dysfunctional Discord server… but why? Again and again, the game suggested that when there was ‘time to kill’, L had ‘no choice’ except checking Tumblr or Discord. Give me a break. Why didn’t he pick up a book, or do some Duolingo lessons, or take a walk in the park? Since he was clearly not getting anything positive from his online experiences, it felt absurd that he would keep searching them out. I get that the story is about him being liberated from the need to be online all the time, but that part of the narrative would work a lot better if there had been any obvious attraction to being online. Since ‘online’ in this game is an unrelentingly stupid place, its attraction remained entirely mysterious.
So, yeah, it felt like I was struggling (hit spacebar. hit spacebar. hit spacebar) through a text that wasn’t fully respecting my time (let’s add in another completely inane Discord discussion that we are required to read in full). And at the same time, I was being served these gorgeous scenes in extremely competent prose leading to a perfect ending. A mixed experience, to be sure, but enriching.
EDIT: To be less quippy about it, I haven’t played this game, but that sounds very much like my experience with social media when I was particularly depressed. Read it for the sake of being caught up just because it’ll feel wrong not to, rather than because you actually enjoy the process or any of the information you’re seeing. It takes very little effort (at least for me) to go on Discord compared to getting into a new book or a new game, let alone a new language.
(Which of course ends up being a trap, but that’s depression for you.)
Hi @Draconis , thanks for that. I completely understand that this is a trap one can be in! But I wasn’t feeling it in this game, even though we have near perfect access to the protagonist’s emotions and thought processes. In the space of a few days, he seeks out so many new and scary experiences that picking up the latest Ali Smith novel from the nearest Waterstones sounds extremely easy by comparison. So when I called his incessant checking of social media and chat servers ‘unrealistic’, I only meant ‘unrealistic for the protagonist of this particular game’. It never clicked for me that he would do this.
This is a relatively small choice-based puzzle game with many endings that can be collected as achievements. The setting is a lakeside in the dark, where Jake, the third person focal character, is about to illegally dump tonnes of toxic waste from a truck while the truck driver, Bill, is doing absolutely nothing. It’s no surprise that the toxic waste will mutate you into a mindless man-eater, nor that there is already a man-eater lurking about the premises; it’s strongly hinted that this is your predecessor. Tension is added through the danger of the sludge, the approaches of the mutant and some evil bird, and the faulty equipment you’re supposed to be working with, including a flash light that goes out every couple of turns. Perhaps it is possible to achieve a ‘happy’ ending, but I either died or mutated, ending up with 6 out of 16 achievements.
Several reviewers commented on the somewhat clunky interface, and I agree with those. It took me a while to get my bearings. The game never really explains that you’re walking around the truck, and I didn’t realise at first that the many trucks I came across in seemingly very different environments were all the same truck. Then there’s some links that rewrite the screen, some that generate a pop-up, some that give you a little menu of options… it takes some getting used to. Since there is no consistent place for, for instance, directional movement, moving around the map takes a lot longer than it would in a parser game or a choice game with a more structured lay-out. It would have helped if there had been some kind of side-bar with, say, inventory options and ‘wait’, and perhaps also the relevant direction commands. As it is, there’s a lot of unused space on the screen (unless one plays on a phone, I suppose).
Given that it’s a game that requires some replaying to really get a sense of the shape of, a more friendly – that is, a faster – interface would have been a help. As it is, I wasn’t too motivated to try and get to a good ending. But, you now, I got to walk the bottom of a lake as a sludge-created mutant, and that’s fine with me.
An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There by Mandy Benanav
Enchanted House – let’s face it, nobody is going to use the full title – is a link-based puzzle game set in a whimsically magical manor. Get invited by someone you don’t actually know… you’re host’s not there to greet you… need to solve puzzles to get through the mansion… hunt for objects… there’s a sense in which it’s all been done a hundred times before. But what Enchanted House lacks in bold premise, it makes up for in character, and especially, characters. This is not some abandoned house where we solve mechanical puzzles. Every room has an occupant, and they range from the strange (an octopus that does the dishes and loves opera) to the very strange (a librarian ghost who has been quarrelling with a room full of sentient furniture; a golem made of messy books and paperwork). The charm of the game lies in interacting with these beings. Solving the dispute involving the ghost is mechanically speaking a boring errand quest, but the writing and the absurdity of the situation made it actually quite enjoyable.
There are also nice touches throughout that show the care that has gone into the work. For instance, whenever you acquire an item, the game has a unique verb to describe that particular act of acquiring; and every room has its own phrase for checking one’s inventory. The book case was also good, and showed a good taste in fantasy literature.
The final flourish is perhaps the most important one, for now we learn that all these quests were not just random hoops we had to jump through, but rather exercises in befriending and taking care of the inhabitants of the house. I loved this idea.
It’s all fairly low-key and low-stakes, nothing earth-shattering. But not everything has to be. After some of the darker stuff I played, I didn’t mind a good plate of comfort food.
See, I had a lot of time to make this meme, because The Dragon of Silverton Mine uses timed text. Really, really slow timed text. And it uses it for displaying, near the end of the game, really rather long passages. The seemingly interminable waiting completely took me out of the piece. I started up a game of patience at one point, then decided to make this meme instead. So please, Vukasin Davic, for the love of God, go into your source code right now, delete all the timed text shenanigans, then upload the result to the competition website. Your average rating in the competition will rise measurably.
Up until that point, I was quite enjoying The Dragon of Silverton Mine. It’s a short choice-based puzzle game – a form that seems to be completely mature by now – which gives a fairly fresh spin on ye olde dungeon crawl. The puzzles are easy, and the number of combinations you could try is anyway quite small. But you have a nice sense of progress; there are some whimsical people and other creatures to meet; and all in all it’s just a nice and competently made little game. A worthy addition to the growing corpus of choice-based puzzlers.
I didn’t even really want popcorn. But the game told me that no camping experience is complete without popcorn, and so I made popcorn. Unfortunately, this led to a page with no links, leaving me unable to finish the game. Seems like no camping experience is complete with popcorn either. Huh huh huh. Okay, thanks for listening, I’ll see myself out.
Ahem.
Campire is a relaxed little piece about going camping. It starts with some hectic and fairly soul-crushing scenes at work, and then we’re… off to the shops to buy some food and gear we can take along when we go camp. Shades of Sam and Leo go to the Bodega, but with less acid. Then we pack everything. There’s a nice element of systematic boredom to the experience, which is perhaps indistinguishable from anticipation. Packing your car for a holiday is not really stimulating, and yet who can resent it? Would the holiday not feel slightly less real without this anticipatory stage?
At the campsite, one can take a hike, or go fishing, or… well, I advise you not to make popcorn, for reasons aforementioned. As I indicated, my game stopped here, but from other reviews I gather that I was near the end anyway. This is not a game where your relaxation is betrayed by a serial killer turning up in the middle of your holiday trip, or something else happening that will shatter your peace.
I like the game idea, and its basic philosophy of just leaning into the experience of a relaxed camping trip. To really make it work, though, the game needs more polish – there are some bugs now, but also for instance text that gets duplicated (when you are packing). And perhaps it should be a bit more granular? I took a hike, and while this doesn’t have to go full The Fire Tower level of detail, it would have made everything more real and more of an experience if I could have done and seen a few things along the trail. It was over so quickly.
Take a little more time. We’re not in a rush, you know. We’re here to relax.
The ideal player of Forbidden Lore is more patient and meticulous than I am. Let me give you an example. Early on, I was given to understand that there would be interesting books in the third bookcase. So I checked out the third bookcase and read the books that were in there. But I should have also tried the first, and second, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, and seventh bookcase. That’s not natural for me. I’m reading the texts on the screen and identify specific elements that jump out as the loci of interactivity… and that’s the wrong way to approach Forbidden Lore. Every single thing and phrase in the game should be treated as important.
If a ritual is mentioned, even if only in a list of other things and even though nothing in the game has suggested that you might need to perform this ritual, you need to try and perform the ritual. If there are two people in the room you can converse with, you should speak with them about every topic that comes up. That takes time, patience, and meticulosity – come on, this is an objectively better word than the supposedly ‘correct’ meticulousness – and I think it’s a totally legitimate kind of gameplay. I know there are people who like it. I’m just not really one of them, unless the game has drawn me in with some amazing premise, or amazing writing, or something else that makes me sit down and crack my knuckles. That’s not what Forbidden Lore does. Even finding out about the basic goals you should have is a matter of research. This game really does not want to hold your hand. I’m imagining Alex Crossley as someone who despises quest markers and automatic journals in AAA video games.
I still managed to do quite a bit in this game; for instance, I learned an ancient alphabet, summoned a demon, and amassed enough power to cast sick spells. (Although, to be honest, I had no inkling how to actually cast any spells.) But after a certain point, I lost confidence and patience, and started following the in-game hints.
On the one hand, I’m impressed by the wildness of the scenario: you start just reading some books, and things escalate really fast and really far. On the other hand, I wonder how one is supposed to solve the game without the hints. The shooting of fire seems underclued. And some of the central puzzle solutions are very fussy when it comes to their exact formulation:
I’m not saying that the story can’t be solved. Jason Dyer of Renga in Blue would probably be able to crack it; compared to some of the old adventures he has managed to solve, this one is positively helpful. And I also respect Alex Crossley’s wish to not hold the player’s hand and to instead just throw them into this jumble of researchable material. But I think that smoothing out some of the guess the command problems, and perhaps giving slightly more direction, might make the piece quite a bit more accessible.
The Lost Artist: Prologue by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
It’s not very auspicious when we’re told that an entry is just the prologue to a full work. That’s what IntroComp is for. IFComp is for works that are fully baked and ready to be judged.
In the event, though, The Lost Artist turns out to be such a surreal text, unburdened by all pedestrian concerns like plot and narrative, that it is perhaps of no particular importance whether we have here a mere prologue or the work entire. Every page is written in a breathless prose that defies sense. Here’s the very first scene:
You can try to make sense of this, of course, but my experience with the rest of the piece suggests that it’s not going to be a fruitful use of your time. “K had a nail gun; she didn’t believe in guns.” This sentence could be used to set up a future event or exchange where we find out in what sense K does not believe in guns, and why she nevertheless has one. But neither K, nor the guns, nor her belief in them, is ever returned to. One suspects that the author first wrote “K has a nail gun”, and then decided to add “; she didn’t believe in guns” just to get a little paradox on the page.
I do not (yet) share this view of the piece. It’s possible that I am merely being obtuse, but I do not (yet) have the impression that there is any narrative or meaning to be pieced together here. Of course I could quote Poe – whose Nevermore-quothing raven is on full display here – and argue that the lines ‘And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!’ are about artistic despair, and that The Lost Artist is using this symbol (also associated with Odin, the creator of the runes, language shaped into a form that changes the world) to discuss the despair of creativity in late-stage capitalism… but I would then be doing more work than the piece itself. Take this, text that is shown when you have the artist draw a cave entrance:
It’s not that this is bad prose, because it’s fine; it’s just that it’s random. The game could just as well have given us this:
Or this:
It would have made no difference, because The Lost Artist: Prologue is not in fact telling us anything.
Perhaps I’m wrong. As I said, I may be merely obtuse and missing out on what’s going on; I certainly wouldn’t be the first critic making a fool of himself. Hell, it wouldn’t even be the first time I made a fool of myself while reviewing the IFComp! It’s also possible that a full version of the game would start gathering some of the (narrative, symbolic, linguistic) threads and weave them into a whole that is greater that the parts. But so far, I’m not seeing it.
To clarify, if there was any doubt as to my tone there, it wasn’t intended to be sarcastic or anything like that. I do sometimes say things in a flippant or slippery way, so I figure it’s worth confirming that.
My point I guess is that, while I sometimes enjoy the challenge of trying to understand a work that feels like it is being deliberately evasive to analysis, I personally wasn’t able to arrive at what I thought was a satisfying reading of the text. Reflecting on my memories of this piece now, I’m left still with a vague sense of unease that there must have been more coherence to it than I could make sense of, but enough time has passed that I’m more at peace with just leaving it behind.
I was being (perhaps naively) optimistic in imagining that a reader who is not me but has a much more extensive lit/poetry background would get more out of this piece, speculating that there were a bunch of references that went over my head. Based on the responses I’ve seen thus far, this hasn’t borne out.
I wasn’t taking you to be sarcastic! I noticed your sense that there was something more to be made of the piece, and that made me think extra hard… but I was not able to come up with anything remotely satisfying. Hardly a proof that nothing can be made of it, but there’s a lot of chaotically mashed together scenes, images, and ideas to make sense of.
Let’s talk about Dr. Jacob Balamer, the well-known sociologist whose seminal The Necessities of Function (1999) is the main, if unlikely, source of inspiration for this piece of interactive fiction. Balamer… okay, he’s fictional character, who appears in Welcome to the Universe both as the subject of a sort-of intellectual biography (it sounds like an obituary except that it’s written in the present tense, and in fact is probably written by the guy himself) and, we find out later on, as the fictional author of this very game that we are playing. A deliciously complicated set-up around which the whole piece is built.
The intellectual biography passages are convincingly written, convincing enough that I checked out whether Balamer might perhaps be real. They’re also very dry, in a style that is unfortunately not uncommon in academia. But they should be read well, and with an eye on finding out what Balamer’s famous theories actually are. Here’s some of the first things we learn:
This, my friends, is utterly banal. Life is and can be perceived, and it can be classified into ‘observable, repetitional patterns’? That’s trivial. Of course life can be classified into observable, repetitional [which is not actually a word, I think] patterns; this is merely to say that behaviour can be described. Nobody has ever disagreed with it. Nobody could.
As we move further through the game, Balamer’s ideas are going to remain as unimpressive as this. Things don’t, for instance, get better when he embarks on ‘lived experience’ case studies:
The claim that ‘humans will engage in predictable behavioral patterns’ is, again, a platitude that nobody can deny. Literally; in order to deny something you need to use language, and language is predicated on the idea that humans will engage in predictable behavioral patterns. (BTW, ‘tenant to’ should probably be ‘tenet of’, but I’m unsure whether this is done on purpose.)
Balamer also launches the theory of ‘connaturalism’:
That sounds kind of deep… until you realise that it’s made true already by the fact that we all share the universal experiences of being born, of breathing, of needing to pee; and that these attributes of human existence are universal. Again, big language hides an absolute paucity of ideas.
What makes all of this poignant is that Balamer wants to do good with his theories. He wants to help us “better understand ourselves and collectively manufacture a considerate, thoughtful society.” Of course his work, being meaningless, can’t actually do that, and he becomes sad and embittered.
Let us turn to the other – and bigger – part of the game, the part that we might be tempted to call ‘the game’. This is a weird kind of life simulator. We’re going from baby to toddler, to middle school kid, to high school kid, and so on, all the way to old age; and in each scene we’re supposed to make a choice. It feels like we’re building our character, or choosing how our life will unfold. However, the scenes are all so weirdly specific, and the choices so inappropriately big and momentous, that one cannot take the proceedings seriously. You’re in the supermarket, some small kid starts vomiting… and you have to choose whether or not you want to have kids later! You’re about to show off your skateboard skills… and your choice makes the difference between being the coolest dude in town and being so embarrassingly lame that people catch fire watching you and your entire school burns down. ‘Hyperbolic’ doesn’t begin to describe it.
That’s also true for the prose, where I thought that the game occasionally went a bit overboard:
It’s all intentionally hyperbolic, yes, but my patience as a reader was being tested somewhat too much. But then, it’s easy to forgive a game that sends this kind of passage your way:
Fairly hilarious. Indeed, as the game progresses we get more of these strange interruptions, including a long and absurd questionnaire, which becomes only more funny if you refuse to take it. This finally leads to the revelation that Dr. Balamer himself is the game designer! Disappointed by his own theories, he made a game to really get into contact with people. Tempted perhaps by his own love for dichotomies:
he devised a game in which we continually have to choose between dichotomies, until, at the end, we are given an overview of all the dichotomous choices we’ve made – a picture of us, the unique individual. Or at least, that’s what he thought. But then, he tells us, after an update has been installed (I found it hilarious that the update bar progressed more and more slowly as it neared the end), he has found out that this is the wrong approach. You can’t catch people in dichotomies! And so in an almost touching way, Balamer gives us his final hard-won wisdom:
That’s it, folks. To fix things, you need to make an effort; don’t forget to listen to each other; and we can’t be contained by a list of binary truths. After all his failed approaches and supposed growth, Balamer’s understanding of life remains astoundingly, hilariously naive.
But Welcome to the Universe is not naive. It’s bold of Colton Olds to take us on so wild a journey, complete with a fictional narrator who has gone through two life-changing episodes that finally brought him to wisdom… and then show to us that the narrator remains as mired in banality as he always was. I won’t speculate whether this is all meant as an attack on sociology, or on the transformative power of games, or if there’s some other target in sight. It’s enough that it’s funny, and, in it’s own very very strange way, actually affecting. Dr. Balamer is one of the saddest characters to grace interactive fiction.
ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus
The dong (more accurately: đồng) has been the currency of Vietnam since 3 May 1978. The dong was also the currency of the predecessor states of North Vietnam and South Vietnam, having replaced the French Indochinese piastre. It’s more vulnerable to inflation than to physical violence, so there are worse things to be punched in than it. If only Rod McSchlong had gone to an authentic Vietnamese restaurant, rather than to a sushi bar, then he could have solved his problems in a much easier way.
Okay. Here we have a sequel to last year’s surprise hit about Dick McButts. It’s funny, but it’s also just more of the same – complete with ‘bad version’, although that only pops up when you make a rash choice near the end of the game – and it has fewer surprises. It made me laugh. There are good moments. But it didn’t catch me unawares. (How could it?)
I’ve never managed to solve Rematch, Andrew Pontious’s 2000 game in which you have exactly one turn to avoid being crushed by a car. Traffic has much the same idea, though it is a little more forgiving in terms of turn count: you have several turns to live, and dying doesn’t reset the progress you’ve made so far.
On the other hand, Rematch is supposed to be solvable, while Traffic is anything but. As other reviewers have already noted, this game seems to not have had any testers; or if it has, they must have been divinely inspired. Take the traffic box sequence. We’re given what seems to be a fairly clear puzzle, but it’s a red herring: yes, you can solve the equations implied by the panel, but they mathematically underdetermine the solution. The actual solution is to ask your mate for a screwdriver – there is no indication that he has one – in order to open up the panel to find the reset switch, even though no reset switch is mentioned and the game never indicated that the panel can be opened. How is a player supposed to come up with this? Or take the scene in the bus. You have to open the window, even though a window is not mentioned. (Cultural note: bus windows in the Netherlands don’t open. This might be different in other countries, sure, but then it’s extra important to mention a window and allow me to examine it, so that you can convey this information.)
The only way to progress is to follow the walkthrough. But by the time I got to the police car scene, the game was so confusing to me (I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing) that not even the walkthrough was helping me. I tried to type in the commands, but the scene ended before I could finish the supposed string of six things you have to tell the young man.
All games need beta testers. Puzzle games need them much, much more. There’s nothing more frustrating to players than being given puzzles that they can’t solve, not because they don’t try or fail to come up with good ideas, but because the puzzles are underclued, require confusing syntax, or are not as intuitive as the author thought.
Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value by Damon L. Wakes
Damon L. Wakes is the go-to author for light-hearted RPG satire. I fondly recall Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir, which was in part a send-up of cheating in game books; and I just reread some of the reviews of Quest for the Sword of Justice, which is close to Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value in spirit. They’re both made in RPG Maker. They’re both called ‘Quest’. They’re both committed to making fun of RPG tropes. That said, Damon’s latest is quite a bit better than its 2020 forebear.
One big difference is that play is a lot smoother: you’re not going to fool around not knowing what to do on your quest for the teacup. There’s even some great convenience features like perfectly placed autosave moments. But the main thing is that Teacup does more than make fun of other games: it manages to make almost every exchange funny in itself. I laughed out loud often enough that the children looked up from playing Minecraft to ask me what I was doing, and that’s saying something.
Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People by Felicity Banks
This is a wild ride. Wild enough that major story elements keep falling out; but you might be too busy looking at the sights to notice. Let’s start at the beginning. In classic Choice of Games style, you get to create your protagonist, complete with gender and sexual orientation. But – and I particularly enjoyed this – you can also choose between four national identities. Of course I chose to be Dutch, and was then pleasantly surprised by a series of well-chosen cultural details, even including having large windows looking out on the street. (If I can make one suggestion: Mondrian would always be called ‘Mondriaan’ in a Dutch art class.) By the time I had adopted a kitten and was being hauled away to Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People, I was wondering whether the Equilibrium-style pro-conformist society was about to send me to Hogwarts, to a Battle Royale style death camp, or to a Nazi style death camp. It all seemed equally possible.
Then came the punches. The scene where they are about to inject a small girl in her eye. And the murder by Nushi. Man, that cold-blooded murder scene landed like a gut punch. Clearly, I had arrived in totalitarian hell, where disobedience to the leader was punished by violence and death. I buckled in for some grim stuff.
And then… things changed? With no explanation? Here’s a quote not very much later in the game:
Whut? I had literally seen Nushi murder someone. Why on Earth is my character now acting as if she hasn’t? Why are they thinking that she is the best possible leader of the school? Why are we about to help out the fascists? Somehow, we’re corralled into choosing between two people who both want to rule, and since one of them has me locked in a box because I don’t feel right, and the other maybe does something nice for the younger kids, I’m ready to throw my weight behind the latter in some kind of fight. The fight itself seems to be extremely deadly – involving fire, acid, knives, who knows what – but also ends with nobody dead, I think, and the leader of my team suggesting that punishments for the rebels might be like, a week or so of detention. The storytelling whiplash I’m getting here is extreme. One scene Nushi is Rudolf Höss, and then with no character development in between she’s a strict but sensible middle school principal offering me a job.
In the meantime, I’m also developing a romance, learning magic, trying to decide my own future, helping other people unlock their magical potential, and changing society’s view of magic. The number of plot lines is high, and to be honest, all of them feel underdeveloped. This game has the room to develop maybe one or two of the plot lines, with one or two major characters, but it throws everything at us – and nothing, I’m afraid, really sticks.
That sounds harsh, so let me hasten to add: I enjoyed it. I really did! The writing is crisp, and although most passages were long, I never resented this, which is fairly rare. The choices are clear and interesting. There’s an amazing amount of energy and creativity. But, whoah, does it feel like I’m getting only about a quarter of the information while three quarters remains in the author’s head!
