If you’re a participant, your IF Comp doesn’t really feel started until your game has been reviewed at least once – or at least, that’s how it felt to me. We’re almost to the point where all games have been reviewed, and to hasten it further along, here is a review of
Let Me Play!
I’m an extremely mediocre piano player, and even that might be praising myself too highly. Let’s just say that although I’d love to play Mozart piano sonatas, I can’t. Except for one – the Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major K. 545, which Mozart wrote for beginners. Lovely of him to do that. It lets me play. It also happens to be the opening music of Let Me Play!, which I found appropriate in a personal and idiosyncratic way.
Let Me Play! is a game made by a team that included writers, programmers and illustrators, and it shows. The production values are very high. The game takes place in a virtual theatre where actors get on and off the stage. There’s not a lot of action or movement, but the visual choices certainly set a mood; and there are nice touches, such as the bodies of the actors visually disintegrating as we move deeper into the game.
When it comes to content, this is a strange duck. The entire game is about a fight between the player and the game; or, perhaps we should say, between the player and the characters, the player and the game, the player and the writers – the player and whoever it is that seems to be in charge of the experience of playing the game. Because it is our player (our fictional player, of course) who wants to be in charge. The player wants to play, and repeatedly whines: Let Me Play! They’re not here for non-interactive experiences, nor for choices that turn out to be ignored. What they want is control.
Let Me Play! does everything it can to push the problems inherent in this stance. The player gets into a fight with the characters because they want to control their own lives; the player gets into a fight with the game because it can’t give them the freedom the player desires; and then, brought to the authors to complain, it turns out that the authors within the game are also unable to give real freedom and control to the player, because their dialogue has already been written two years ago and can no longer be changed. We’re all trapped in the work of someone else! Oh no!
Sure. But who exactly is the target of this argument? I’m sure there are some people out there who believe that great games put them ‘in control of the story’, without recognising that the real experience of control over a story would be that of sitting in front of a blank sheet with the freedom to write any word that you want. (And that’s not the freedom that these people crave!) But this is a fairly naive stance towards games and interactive narrative, and I don’t think it is at all prevalent in the interactive fiction community. Most of us are more than willing to abandon ourselves to the authors – the real authors – and see where that will lead. Interactivity does not equal control. Choice does not equal authorship. And the protagonist is certainly not ourselves.
So I agree with the argument of Let Me Play!, but it is a bit too easy to agree with it. The delivery is on the slow side, with timed text and, especially near the end, much repetition. I had a memorable playing experience, especially because of the great production values (graphics, music, interface), but the message of the game did little to challenge me.