Reviews by ccpost
IF Comp 2022
View this member's profile1-3 of 3
The future of digital archiving is here!...in a thoughtful slice-of-life story, December 7, 2022As someone whose day job deals with digital archiving/curation work, I was instantly intrigued by this game. The protagonist, Maria, works as an exhibition tech at a digital culture museum in the near future, and grapples with burgeoning romantic feelings for a curator, Sean, at the museum while they work together on an upcoming exhibition. Both aspects of the story are very well done, as scenes that feature detailed descriptions of Maria's work meticulously restoring aspects of historic games switch off with at times awkward and at times sweet interactions with Sean.
I found the mix of these narrative threads to be balanced well, achieving a realistic representation of someone who's engrossed in their work, who has a fulfilling (if complicated) family life, but runs up against romantic feelings for their coworker. More so than a description of the affair, the game centers around Maria confronting these feelings and struggling with what they mean and what to do about them.
Maria's internal monologue as she goes through these thought processes is well written if a bit detached. Maria reflects on her identity as a Mormon, which adds an interesting dimension to her character, but doesn't seem to overly determine anything about how she approaches her feelings for Sean. On my first play through, I was expecting something spicier, more akin to a romance game, but I actually found this headier self-assessment of what these feelings mean to Maria to be just as intriguing. There are enough books and games out there that deal with carnal passion -- let's actually enjoy sitting and thinking through even our remotest attractions!
The other major thread of the game, Maria's work as an exhibition tech at a digital museum, was equally engrossing to me and equally thought out and well written. I enjoyed the descriptions of Maria thinking through the decisions she was making and the highlighting of some of the intricate details that can be really important to recreations and restorations of historic works of software -- the way digital grass moves, for instance. I appreciated the introduction of some longer texts, some of Sean's writings, for instance, that deal with the theory of archiving digital culture in the near future.
The discussion of some other aspects of society and culture in the near future was the only part about the game that didn't work as well for me. I felt like Helps was trying to inject some social commentary about our current trajectory in regards to algorithmically-driven systems and corporate social media platforms, but this sort of fell flat for me. There are some efforts in the game to discuss some of the implications of these things, but it seems like the media landscape of the present time in the game isn't all that different from ours today. So I was left wondering what Helps' point was in making this commentary. I'm not sure if this is a complement or a criticism, but it felt like the game could have been set 5~ years from now rather than the 70+ years from now that was the intention.
This commentary on our media landscape is a really minor aspect of the game though, and doesn't really impact the otherwise stellar treatments of Maria's digital curation work and Maria's tentative affair. All in all, this is a lovely slice-of-life story tinged with just a bit of melancholy.
Haunting story with inventive gameplay, October 12, 2022This is a deeply affecting game that grabbed me from the beginning with an eerie atmosphere, and then continued to enthrall me with intriguing gameplay mechanics until the story reached a powerful conclusion. The game starts with a poetically stilted observation -- 'the sky over the garden is too bright' -- and slowly focuses and clarifies this thought into a moving realization about (Spoiler - click to show)a person, Miriam Lane, quietly suffering and struggling just out of the view of her family and friends.
The game starts with the player character questioning a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia or some other bout of forgetfulness. There's someone missing, something not quite right, and you're here to help him. From the start, the game is sparse and almost haunted -- the text is white on a black background and many scenes are accompanied by sketchy, high-contrast illustrations of the room or object that you're encountering. A soft, moody music is just enough to set the tone without becoming distracting. Given the unclear sense of the mission at first, and the eerie atmosphere, the game almost feels like a ghost hunt.
The game proceeds through a really interesting gameplay mechanic. The player character is equipped with certain observations/thoughts, and can apply these to different items or parts of the house to arrive at a heightened awareness of what's going on. (Spoiler - click to show)The unraveling of these insights in the bedroom is especially gripping: the player character sees small hints of a disturbed, unwell person, like half the bed being tidy and the other half being messy, a divot in that side of the mattress "as if something lay here in exactly the same position for a very long time." The more the player uncovers things that aren't quite right, the more the story clarifies and comes together, the answers being sought ambiguously between ethereal and corporeal.
The gameplay distinguishes this work from a typical Twine game. While clicking on links is the main mode of interaction, these links move the player around the space and enable them to interact with the environment. As such, the game plays more like a point-and-click adventure than an unfolding hypertext story. There are a couple other parts of the game that introduce other compelling innovations, too, like a flower plot in the garden, where the player can combine different attributes (color, amount of sun, shape of leaves and stems) to find different types of flowers. The concluding sequence, when the player (Spoiler - click to show)tells Miriam Lane her story to fully bring her back from absence, makes excellent use of cycling choices links. The gameplay, on the whole, integrates really closely with the theme of the game: the player needs to look carefully, read critically, and, above all, become attuned to small details to successfully find what they're looking for.
My only qualm with the game is that sometimes the next step or stage in the search can be a bit too unclear. (Spoiler - click to show)In the second part of the game, when the player is giving Miriam Lane objects to revive her, there is some negative feedback for incorrect objects that's helpful; but in the first part of the game, the player could apply thoughts to pretty much everything in the house without any penalty or without much guidance. Searching through the flower plots, while a really cool feature, can also become aimless, as there's not a great way to know if you've recovered everything there is to find from the garden.
Despite a few places that can snag the player a bit, the game provides a relatively tight, well-constructed experience that moves from an eerie ghost hunt to something far more real and far more troubling.
Ingenious take on post-apocalyptic fiction, October 10, 2022There's a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction out there across all mediums -- comics, books, movies, games, etc. -- and there's a lot of retread across many of these stories. Rather than social structures totally collapsing or totally transforming, The Archivist and the Revolution crafts a post-apocalyptic world that perpetuates many of the familiar inequities and challenges even as those social structures crumble into ruins. The other ingenious aspect of how this work approaches the post-apocalypse is that the story is told through a limited perspective, one person's experience of struggling to keep a job and pay bills in an irradiated world bereft of non-human animals.
The player character's job puts them in an especially interesting position between the past and present, allowing the game to explore the impact of a dramatic break from a previous cultural history. The player character is an archivist (pushed into contingent contract labor) who decodes and classifies fragments of documents that had been coded into DNA -- this preservation strategy engineered precisely in fear of an apocalyptic catastrophe. Through this work, the player learns bits and pieces of the events leading up to the world's current ravaged state, as well as wonderfully decontextualized bits of history and present pop culture, like a fragment from a Wikipedia entry for the Food Network show "The Best Thing I Ever Ate."
This is a great world building trick as the game can slowly reveal the contours of the universe and not dump everything on the player all at once. And this is a richly detailed world with an intriguing, complicated history. I feel that I only got a glimpse of the full story of this world from a single playthrough, and know that I would glean a lot more on multiple playthroughs. But this is also a brilliant meditation on how the past constructs the present and forecasts the future: through the workaday acts of cleaning up and classifying documents for later retrieval, the activist, though marginalized and precarious, fulfills a critical social role of putting together a patchwork of the past so that we can understand the present.
Ostensibly, this is a resource management game, though one that's very difficult to "succeed" at in a conventional sense. The player character has mounting expenses and gets paid very little for their contract work. The other options are reaching out to people from your past with whom you have very complicated relationships. In addition to money and expenses, you must also manage your energy and psychological well-being; these aspects are not quantified but certain actions can be closed off if lacking in energy or motivation. The game creates an experience of precarity as most choices are difficult and compromised -- there's no easy path forward.
The player character's personal story and identity are developed as the game proceeds, and the player learns how this personal story is deeply imbricated with the cultural history of the Cataclysm and the Revolution. (Spoiler - click to show)The player character is a trans woman and we learn that the Revolution was catalyzed by oppression of trans folks -- transgender and transhuman. Without spoiling the main plot points, the story deals very powerfully with living as a trans person in an oppressive society.
This personal story of the player character is one aspect of the game that I wish had been developed a bit more. While we learn some of the key details about the player character's past, it's not always enough to understand the significance of taking certain actions over others with regards to the two people from the character's past. The end of the game also came somewhat abruptly, after I made a major choice regarding one of those other characters, the game ended and succinctly summarized the implications of that decision. That said, this was a game made for IF Comp, so perhaps a fuller, longer narrative was curtailed to better fit the expectations of the competition. I would gladly play a longer version of this game, or another game set in this world.
1-3 of 3