Reviews by Passerine

I’m still in the middle of playing this game, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be done.

In this story, our focus character Aisling slogs through an endlessly looping tunnel. The setup evokes Exit 8, but with solo-Danganronpa levels of psychic torment. Point is, it’s a trap that Aisling was destined for, and proactively sought out, but does not deserve.

Something interesting is happening with perspective here. We observe the narrator as they observe Aisling’s struggle, which is also content Aisling is creating for their audience, based on someone else’s content they watched once and have been searching for. Later we learn the narrator created this experience for Aisling, without their consent or understanding. Does content have a value, or a cost? Is it good or bad to be watched? Is there a risk in consuming all this content—content like the video Aisling was looking for, which doomed them; content like the video Aisling is making right now? The arrows point in all directions.

I’ve made four loops and each time I ended up somewhere different. Every time I restart the game I notice something new—sometimes because something is slightly different based on my choices, and sometimes because nothing is. A couple times I clicked through the dialogue too fast—did something change that time? But I can't go back. Despite that this story has a straightforward script with occasional binary choices, the gameplay mirrors the setting. I’m lost in the maze. (This is a good maze.)

Nothing feels concrete, but as I look carefully, the details get clearer. I find references to a past audience being spectators to someone else’s public trauma. A ghostly figure appears: did they shed layers of themselves until they became transparent? Can we really learn from watching someone else’s struggle, or is it just gratuitous and damaging? Can I get to the bottom of this after a few more loops? Maybe there’s a path that will let me achieve the satisfaction of a True End or a 100% completed decision tree. Or maybe the paths will keep changing so I can never find what I’m looking for.

I will play at least four more times to find out.

Blossom, NY is interactive nonfiction—a researched history of a real community, presented like a brief guided tour. This is cool to see! I often wonder why there isn’t more interactive nonfiction storytelling. It would be interesting to see more experiments like this.

Structure-wise, this tour isn’t linear, because the game jumps around via hypertext, as if you’re encouraging your meandering tour guide to expound on whatever topic you’re particularly interested in. (I appreciated the game making sure we were situated by explaining how this would work ahead of time.) At first this nonlinear presentation made it harder for me to understand things, with historical facts revealed out of order, and even some future reflections from a couple years after the tour took place. But as the same highlighted topics kept appearing in different passages, I began to see more clearly the matrix of connections between present, past, and more distant past. I wonder if this repetitive presentation might actually help with learning.

Overall, this mini tour didn’t feel to me like storytelling as much as a history lesson for educational purposes. As a picky reader with a wandering mind, I felt myself grasping for a deeper present-day story layered over the history: Why was the narrator there? Who are they, and how did they discover what they know about this hamlet? When the narrator said something like “Last time I saw [this house] was before they put [the vinyl siding] on,” I wanted to hear the rest of that story. This is probably my IF habit kicking in, but I wonder if a little personal storytelling—whether true or fictional—would’ve made my visit more captivating. Then again, maybe here the point is to educate more than to captivate. And that it certainly did.