Dead Sea
There’s a long tradition of interactive fiction games that live somewhere in the only vaguely delineated lands between magical realism, symbolism, and whimsy. These are games where things are not as they usually are, and they clearly have some Meaning attached to them, some role to play in a Story with a capital S… but where the canons of interpretation are too weak to actually bring us from the idea of Meaning to Meaning itself.
It seems to me that Dead Sea falls squarely into this tradition. We have extremely strong Moby Dick references, but they are tied to a love story, and to something about soul migration, and to an allegory of death, and there’s a freeze ray and water melons and a light house with a sphinx who wants us to say that this is a very satisfactory story, and we get a moral choice about killing a whale… and this whole motley crew of signifiers is sitting there, begging us to make sense of them. But what sense is there to make? Why is the code to the elevator 666 in a game that seems to have nothing to do with the satanic? Why does a game that is so brief not spend its time on deepening a few of its ideas, rather than throwing more and more at us, giving none of them the time to congeal into something more solid?
The puzzle structure was fine. Forgiving, easy, but fine. Each level is structured in a different way, which keeps the experience fresh. The puzzles get us through the story and makes sure we see everything. The world is full of hints, ideas, poetic elements. But we need to get to Meaning. And as far as I can see, we don’t. A competent start, but I’d love to see more coherence – possibly, though not necessarily, starting by giving us a protagonist with more individuality and more at stake.