The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate
Or maybe it is called How I Remember the Very Last Night I Spent in Ethelred Estate, as the game file itself seems to think. I don’t know. What we have here is gothic horror of the everything but the kitchen sink variety. We are a pregnant woman living in the House of Usher Ethelred Estate, whose continued existence depends on the women in the family sacrificing their firstborn children. Also we are marrying, there are evil guests around, our brother has died and is about to be interred (the funeral baked meats didn’t have time to cool down before they furnished the marriage tables), but he also rises from his grave, and we will give birth, and an angel appears to us in a vision, and the house collapses – I think all of it in the space of two or three hours. It’s bit hard to say because the prose is more evocative than precise. And the fact that the game is written in Texture doesn’t help with clarity either, as it is a system prone to interactions that have unpredictable and hard-to-parse effects.
I think all of this might have been more enjoyable if the prose had been more precise. There are frequent errors. Even when there are no errors, a typical passage goes like this:
It’s a passage that raises more questions than it answers – how does your brother know about your fling? – but that’s a stylistic and narrative choice. More problematic is that within context, the phrase “thankfully nothing else” seems entirely misplaced: she’s bearing a child, that’s the whole point of the passage! The final sentence is just weird. In one sense, ‘when all is said done’ is by definition the point at which you have no reason to talk more about it. But surely the sentence is not meant as a tautology. Yet I have no idea what else it is meant to convey.
The first sentence seems ungrammatical, and the double ‘but’ is awkward. But more awkward is the double ‘put together,’ surely in two different senses, neither of which I can quite divine.
Maybe it is grammatically possible to ‘fill’ an obligation, but when it’s a grave obligation we are talking about, I would certainly choose the verb ‘fulfill’. I kept staring at this wondering whether a pun was intended or not. But that’s the problem. If you write vague, evocative language, you have to write much more precisely then when you write clear, descriptive prose. That may sound paradoxical, but we can see why it’s the case. With evocative prose, the reader has no way to resolve any of the unintentional unclarities, and also cannot know which are intentional and which are not.
I think getting some proofreaders on board might have helped (and they would also have caught the game breaking bug that I and several others encountered).