House of Wolves by Shruti Deo
Playtime: 5 min
The one where: we dislike eating raw meat
This is a short fable about the pain of living with people (including yourself) who don’t understand something essential about your nature. (I’m not really marking spoilers here, if you worry you might be spoiled, go play the game, which is 5 minutes!)
The writing had some good lines:
and I liked the “Bite. Chew. Swallow.” sequences—evocative of the grim drudgery of dragging yourself through something unpleasant.
I found the game good at conveying the experience of feeling trapped and confused, thinking there’s something wrong with you when it’s your circumstances that are wrong. This is very much a sort of ugly duckling story where the cygnet and the cygnet’s family both think oh, you were just made wrong.
The game doesn’t explicitly state what it’s a metaphor for–based on the fact that the PC seems to not understand why the PC finds meat disgusting (and the dream where the PC has the transcent experience of eating cooked meat and realizing that, meat can be tasty, actually!) the best fit is something like a sex-repulsed asexual person being pressured into relationships despite finding the physical aspects disturbing, who hasn’t even realized yet that there might be ways to be in relationships that they would find not only not disgusting, but actively desirable.
I found the game pretty successful at conveying that specific pain. I thought the ending could have used some strengthening. As is, it feels a bit unearnedly optimistic. The two main options I see are:
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add some additional plot that provides tangible hope in the PC’s life circumstances (they’re going to go live somewhere else, etc.)
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lean further into the “no, the point is that nothing external has improved, but internally the PC has discovered an inexhaustible well of strength and resolve”—to be clear, I’m an absolute fan of this message!! I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, etc etc!!–but I think to pull it off we need a specific realization in the PC’s internal monologue, or a gangbusters self-motivational speech etc. to sell it, not just “the PC decided they were still determined”
| Front matter | ||
|---|---|---|
| Could better set the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS |
Creepy cover art! I’ll just note, neither as a positive nor a negative, interesting choice to put the information that the PC is a human and the others are wolves in the front matter and nowhere in the actual game.
Overall, a compelling allegory for a certain kind of bad!conformity experience, ending could be more moving