Sonder Snippets by Sana
Sonder Snippets is a strange game, and one of its most mysterious aspects is the subtitle, “What Dadi Hears.” This is mysterious because Dadi is the character who speaks, who tells the story. Or is she? Typographically, the exact in-fiction status of the myths is left unclear; they are not bracketed by quotation marks, and so not clearly direct speech, even though it is natural to think of them as such. Dadi certainly tells a story. But perhaps not quite the story that we read? Or not quite in the way that we read it? Perhaps this is the story as Dadi hears it, not as she tells it to the child?
These questions are perhaps unanswerable, but they crop up because the theme of Sonder Snippets is failed communication. The myths ‘told’ by Dadi are surely supposed, like all myth, to be full of meaning, experience, even wisdom. But the child hardly listens to them; listens to them only, in fact, to spite the other children who won’t let her play; and even if she were to listen, she could not understand them. Do we understand them? Does Dadi herself understand them, or is she lost among half-forgotten snippets of story that come together in ways that only seem to make sense?
Perhaps the most confusing thing about Sonder Snippets is the status of the beginning. The blurb hints at this, asking whether you can get to the true beginning. Choices made in the beginning – if they can be called choices, given that there is no guidance as to their effect – have a lot of effect on that beginning itself. (In the more confusing versions, the child is not even introduced, making the frame story hard to understand.) And perhaps also beyond that. I suspect, at least, that choosing ‘free will’ at one of the early choice points allows you to select Dadi’s stories later on instead of being served a random one. But what’s going on? What’s the point or logic? And what does the blurb mean with a ‘true beginning’? I feel that there may be answers lurking in this game. But I did not find them.