The Wayward Story by Cristmo Ibarra
The final sentence of the walkthrough for this game is: “I hope you find some meaning in it.” And that does seem to be a bit of a challenge. The Wayward Story is a sequence of seemingly unrelated vignettes, some of which are tied together by a door-that-needs-keys puzzle mechanic. When I played it, I started out in my apartment watching television. Having fallen asleep, I was at the house of an old friend to fix a television. Then, suddenly we are in a throne room which gives access to three dreamlike scenes – a dark ritual in a fantasy setting, a trek through the desert, an apocalyptic hellscape – which led to one more normal-life scene about a guy delivering a package, and then en ecstatic reunion with two people. There were some recurrent themes (social anxiety, the wish to be reunited with loved ones) , but no real cohesion. So, well, meaningful it felt not.
On the positive side, this really was a painless parser experience. The hints about what to do were so clear that I never got stuck even for a moment, which is essential to a story-centric experience like this.
On the negative side, I had a lot of trouble with the prose. Much of it was of a breathless, try-too-hard variety, where the author tries to cram a joke, some slang, a weird turn of phrase, a sudden reversal into every single sentence. Some scenes were hard to understand because of the sheer chaotic energy of the writing, as here:
I just can’t keep up with this. Less is more, I would say, and I’m tempted to think that the author can improve a lot simply by being a bit more relaxed about their craft. In this particular case, I spent altogether too much time trying to understand why anyone would think a five-year-old cannot open doors… was that supposed to be a meaningful detail showing that the protagonist knows nothing about kids? Or not? Or?
Anyway. Because the experience is so easy to breeze through, the game never annoyed me, and I certainly don’t resent the time spent with it. But I can’t say I got much out of it either.