Eyewear Cleaner 2077: Demo by Naomi Norbez
I was a beta-tester for this game (the demo, not the full length game), but replayed it to experience the Spring Thing version. In Eyewear Cleaner 2077, Naomi Norbez takes us into the world of Cyberpunk 2077, but this time not as the epoch making hero, but as one of the innumerable labourers who toil away in the corporate dystopia. The demo version takes us through two days in the life of our eyewear cleaner. We get to know some details about the setting; we learn that our job will be taken over by robots in the future; we hang out in a bar or play some games; and perhaps most importantly, we come into contact with a wide variety of people who may either be in active rebellion against the system or who may be interested in rebelling. Many of our more substantial-seeming choices have to do with expressing interest or approval when these people reveal their plans and attitudes to us. I say ‘substantial-seeming’, since the demo stops before they actually become significant for the plot.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, and I particularly enjoyed the mindless Sky’s Rim sessions you can play at night. But how successful is the demo as a demo? Very fresh in my mind is Brian Rushton’s recent piece about writing a good Choice-of-Games game, in which he stresses the following question: Is my first chapter as interesting as the rest of the book? And he adds:
Several of the lowest-selling games have purposely slow first chapters with later ‘big reveals’ that make the story much more exciting. While this can pay off with reader involvement, there is no payoff if no one’s reading in the first place.
When I discussed this with a friend of mine, they pointed out that famous books tend to start much slower than games narrative-wise, and that habit can sometimes carry over. Having dozens of pages of Bilbo’s birthday and Frodo walking is great for Tolkien, but doesn’t do much for gamebook sales.
I feel that Eyewear Cleaner 2077 falls into the trap that Brian is warning of: a slow build-up, which means that the beginning of the game is less interesting than what will follow. I assume that the pressure will continue to ramp up; that the protagonist will get involved in some kind of rebellion; but at the moment I’m just cleaning eyewear and playing computer games. (And getting along with the police, if I make the right choices.) Perhaps there will be a big pay-off for this slow beginning later on (and I’ve been impressed with some of Bez’s work in the past, so there no doubt will be). But we’re not experiencing any of that here. So it’s easy for me to imagine that the fragment that we play will be part of a very interesting full game; but I’m not quite sold on the demo as demo.