PYG]MALION*, by C.J.
From the scant information given in the Credits sections, I conclude that PYG]MALION* is written by a student at the University of Central Florida, as part of the Games and Interactive Media Program. I don’t know whether this means that there will also be a theoretical thesis accompanying the game at some point; but I do know that the game itself is both stylish and very clever.
In PYG]MALION*, we take on the role of a murdered god(ess) who has been temporarily reincarnated into a Hellenistic statue so (s)he can investigate h(is)(er) murder in the house of the president of the fourth dimension. While the game’s title is a deliberate reference to Short’s Galatea, its structure is very different. For this is a detective game; and indeed the Spring Thing description of PYG]MALION* specifically mentions the author’s love for the board game Cluedo. (I believed it was called Clue in the USA, but perhaps not.) So we move from room to room, examining suspects and objects, in order to form a hypothesis about who killed us.
The writing and graphics are mostly delicious, evoking a bizarre, transhuman world that is just real enough to take seriously. It is no mean feat to walk so far outside of the boundaries of genre and yet capture us, keep us in suspense, eager to know more; but C. J. manages it. There are some typos, a missing image, a bunch of Twine errors in some of the endings – but with just a little more polish, this will be a work of perfect craft.
Back to the detective aspect. As we continue our investigation of the mansion, it becomes more and more clear that we are not actually uncovering any evidence at all. All the questions we ask are brushed off; all the location are so strange that we do not even know what it would look like for something to be out of the ordinary. And yet the president of the fourth dimension stages a dramatic accusation scene, where, like a Hercule Poirot, we can, indeed must, accuse somebody of the murder. Not that it will benefit us. We are dead, our very temporary resurrection notwithstanding. So we accuse someone. And what happens?
What happens is what always happens when the weak – and none are weaker than the dead – attempt to bring the powerful to justice. Nothing. The great politician; the corporate boss; the glamorous artist; the sports hero; being accused by us is nothing but a temporary setback for them, if it can be called a setback at all. Whatever we do, the game ends with us dead and the powerful back in the mansion conversing with each other.
It’s a dark little tale that C. J. has given us; and a fascinating, genre-defying addition to the corpus of detective IF.