U.S. Route 160 by Sangita Nuli
U.S. Route 160 is a short, dark Twine game. The protagonist is a lesbian woman fleeing from wedding a man she was never truly attracted to but felt compelled to love because of the expectations of her deeply conservative home town. We follow her through a series of troubled scenes, many delivered in short staccato text, divided roughly equally between flashbacks explaining the situation and adventures on the road. The disconnected prose and narrative evoke the chaotic and exhausted state of mind of the young woman. At the end, our choices determine whether her fate is death, return or escape.
The game is competent enough, but it seems to have been based on the premise that because conservative anti-gay bigotry is very bad (which it is) and can have devastating consequences for those who are subjected to it (which it can), it was therefore necessary to pull out all the stops and make everything in the game as horrible as it could be. There’s death and blood and gore, and the protagonist’s mother was awful, and the man she was going to marry was a loveless bible-thumper, and if she returns to the town her female lover turns out to be dead, and when she sees a bird it will be run over, and the weather is horrible, and … well, the list goes on. The same principle has been applied to the prose. Which is written. In short. Disconnected fragments. Over and over. Again. To show us. Just how bad things are.
I think these techniques actually generate a disconnect between the reader and the issues that are at the centre of the piece. It would have been much more interesting to read a piece about this marriage day where we are allowed to understand why the protagonist almost marries a man she clearly does not love. It would have been more informative – to those of us lucky enough not to live in the society depicted here – to see the simple, every-day ways in which anti-gay messages (and anti-woman messages, anti-independence messages, and so on) are constantly reinforced so as to weave an inescapable social net. I think a small example of unthinking everyday cruelty could have been more horrifying than the protagonist dying on the highway with a shard of glass through her belly.
Perhaps Nuli is deeply invested in the horror genre, in which case my criticism will seem irrelevant. But if the investment is in artistically exploring specific societal ills, my hope is that future works will be less gory and more based in lived reality.