Ratings and Reviews by OverThinking

Cicatrix is not a game, but a poem written in Inform 7 code. I’m reminded of some of the work from Event One in The Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, especially Caduceus. However, I think Cicatrix achieves its goal more deftly, especially with the more varied ways it utilizes the Inform 7 syntax to tell its story.

There is a bar to entry here, as you have to understand how standard Inform 7 syntax works to really pick up on all the clever tricks and subtleties Amanda has worked into the prose. Especially in the final section, where everything really comes together, the “At the time when things change” rule may be difficult to parse if you aren’t used to staring at long stacks of if/otherwise nested statements. Once you puzzle it out, though, it makes for a serious gut punch.

The story it tells, about the things we carry with us, is I think to some degree a universal experience. Amanda has captured it beautifully and hauntingly.

Sophia has taken Bluebeard and made it genuinely tense again. I forgot, while reading it, that I knew how the story ended—had in fact written a version of it myself—so engrossed was I in the characters and their stifling dynamic. The well-known tropes of the Bluebeard story (the bodies, the key, the blood) are understated here, which allows the centering of a different aspect of the horror: the violence simmering under even the tender moments in an abusive relationship.

Santiago makes for one scary Bluebeard. Physically imposing, sexually aggressive, and socially controlling, he epitomizes just about everything that makes a man dangerous. His aloofness and preoccupation with the sea mixed with his possessiveness of Carmilla make him unpredictable and difficult to get a read on. This effect is only heightened after Carmilla finds the corpses of his previous wives, when she joins us in questioning the motive behind his every word and action. Does he know? Surely he must. Surely it must be written all over her face and he’s just biding his time, waiting for the most painful moment to strike. As the heat increased, I found myself holding my breath before clicking each link, even though I knew he would die and she would not. The story had me entirely invested.

For me, the story never quite reaches a boil. I loved every moment of it, but I ache for some catharsis. All of the physical violence happens offscreen, and our protagonist never quite manages to claim her own victory. I know this is true to the original story, though, and I recognize that Carmilla’s powerlessness is part of the horror (and very Gothic, for which Sophia and I share a love).

The prose is beautiful, as usual for Sophia. It elevated the story for me, and I found the overall experience to be a tense, enjoyable, heart-pounding ride.

(Full disclosure, I beta tested this)

This game is challenging. Not because it’s hard—in fact, what in other games might constitute puzzles are simple and well-clued enough that they really cease to be puzzles at all (but then, puzzles are far from the point of this experience)—but because of the core emotional truths it communicates.

The first half of this comes from the PC’s state after the accident itself, which is full of impressionistic fragments tumbling over each other unpunctuated, everything coming too fast and too bright in waves of sensory detail and memory that, at least at first, add up more to overwhelm than actionable information (this is praise). The second half is the meat of the story, as we see some of the scenes that led up to this moment, minutes or days or weeks before.

I won’t spoil what’s going on past that, other than to say that I found the main NPC detestable to the point where I sometimes had trouble sympathizing with the protagonist’s plight—I couldn’t really see much reason for them to have stayed for so long, having only the information presented in the game. This is at least partially due to my own experiences with people like that NPC (I would use his name, but we never learn it—which I think is a good choice), and my knee-jerk unwillingness to engage with them. However, I did love how tightly bound together their story was, with Chekhov’s guns being established backwards in time as the world of the present slowly expanded around us.

Overall, I think this game is worth your time, so long as you feel you can safely engage with the tough emotions and experiences at its core.