The Moon wed Saturn by Pseudavid
Note: I was an alpha-tester for this game.
The Moon wed Saturn is an experimental piece that plays with non-chronological narration. Of course, that’s by itself is innovative, but Pseudavid uses the possibilities of electronic fiction rather nicely in making the three moments of time across which the story takes place happen in three different columns on the screen. Thus, we always see where each of the three threads of the story has been left hanging. Switches from one to another thread are generally motivated by causal connections: we go back to the past to understand what just happened, or we move to the future to see the results of something play out. I found this an interesting technique, and one that should definitely be explore more by authors of interactive fiction.
The story of The Moon wed Saturn is relatively minimal. It tells us about the love of the nightly caretaker of an abandoned building site and the possibly unattainable girl who comes to visit her. The main theme being explored are those of satisfaction and safety. Are you willing to settle for just a little bit of future, or will you embrace a more dangerous but possibly also more satisfying life? The protagonist is inclined to the former, but her desire for the girl is slowly pulling him towards the latter. I did find that the story remained rather abstract and the characters rather distant from me – I wasn’t really drawn in to it. So although The Moon wed Saturn is definitely more than an abstract formal experiment, it’s the formal aspects that had the biggest interest for me.