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Can a UI Hate You?, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Dreams are certainly useful settings in IF. When used effectively, they can explain and justify any of the inherent limitations of the medium or even lean into the limitations as features. The role dreams play in human experience also immediately gives entree to a deluge of symbology, psychology, metaphor and abstraction.
LatM starts in a dream, invoking the other kind of dream, y’know aspiration. It also highlights to you the double entendre' of Market - to promote and a target customer base. It notably does NOT mention ‘place to buy stuff’ which is the easiest of the three to get lost at. So much wordplay in so little time! It won me over instantly.
And then I crashed into the user interface. Now, first impressions are not awful, its an uncommon but pleasant color palette. Any hopes of the palette being part of the story quickly vanished and that’s fine. It briefly got me hoping for more, but whatever. But not ‘whatever.’ The interface refused to be dismissed and instead stepped to me like I had insulted its mother. It was a 4-bar implementation which I’ll call ‘current command’ ‘inventory’ ‘game control’ and ‘log.’ My biggest gripe was that the log and current command bars frequently repeated the same text. Adjacently on different color backgrounds. This is where the color palette first became a problem.
The inventory bar was also problematic, in that it took a lot of real estate between item lists and interaction options, and ended up crowding the display. I think there’s an esthetic reason inventory is classically a command and not just a list printed on the screen after every turn. A quick fix here would have been a standard dropdown - let the player engage the list when they want, not have it thrust on them. Same for game controls which similarly never left your peripheral vision.
The command bar had another issue in what it offered as a next action. Too many times once you look at an object, the command bar gives you no option NOT to interact with it. This was frustrating early when the only way to make progress was a mindless act of destruction I was disinclined but forced to do. It was really bad when I encountered an object that felt game endy, but I had no option but to manipulate it once clicked on. I could (and did) use UNDO, but that is a big hammer. There is a significant narrative difference between “you drop the X and continue on your way” and “REWIND REALITY.”
“Well reviewer, you’ve certainly bellyached about this UI long enough. You can’t possibly have more to say about it,” you might reasonably say right now. I would have to condescendingly shake my head and reply “Oh no, dear reader, no no no.” Most distractingly, the colored bars constantly resize themselves based on input, output and new options. So not only are the bars distinctively and contrastingly colored. Not only is significant real estate taken by infrequently needed information. Not only is text distractingly repeated and options limited. The bars themselves jump around like hyperactive frogs with every click of the mouse. This constant motion demands you unceasingly monitor the entire cockpit. This was so distracting I can’t even, and I never got over it the entire game. I am a shallow, petty person and I don’t love myself right now, but you see what its done to me??? I can’t be free even after four paragraphs!
You might have detected, this user interface ultimately prevented me engaging the story in any meaningful way. For its part, the story is a relatively sparse journey (perhaps a dream?) with a few object-fetch puzzles, capped off with a story-ending choice. I took three paths to two endings and none of it allowed me to shake off the user interface. The theme of musician struggling with the collision between reality and aspirations is one I could engage. The wordplay on display out of the gate was fun. To my shame if it was present elsewhere in gameplay I was too distracted to appreciate it. In the end Technical Intrusiveness of the UI is what dominated my experience.
I do want to know more about Betty the Drummer though.
Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 20min, 2 different endings, another duplicate ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive UI
Would Play Again? I can’t do that to myself
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I referenced this game in a review of Lost Coastlines. Crosslink!