Reviews by Tabitha

Note: quotes from the game are marked with a ">" because I can't be bothered to convert from markdown formatting to html!

I connected to this game’s protagonist, L, as soon as I started reading. Like him, I’m afab and trans. I’ve been through periods where my main social support was online communities. I have little experience with offline queer spaces. I am stricken with debilitating social anxiety. LLLLL’s first scene hits on all these things, capturing painful feelings that I have also had so sharply and perfectly that it had me tearing up. The self-loathing. The feeling that you don’t belong. That you aren’t right. That other people have a confidence you will never have. Longing for human connection but paralyzed by social anxiety. Feeling like I’m broken because I can’t just be chill like normal people.

>I can't sit down at the bar because I don't know how it works. I don't drink just because I didn't have friends back then and I was never introduced to it. Not even for a cool reason others have like religion or diet or personal growth. You're expected to just know what to do and how to order a drink and you can't ask how to do that in a place like this can you?

Feeling a step behind everyone else, lacking essential knowledge that everyone but you has. Having all this laid out, these exact feelings that seem so personal and shameful that they shouldn’t be spoken of, made me immediately invested in L and wherever this story would take him.

And one place where Act I takes him is the internet. While I’ve been lucky to never be in an online space as toxic as L’s Discord group, the personalities and the interactions certainly rang true based on people I’ve encountered and interactions I’ve seen play out online. The game’s antagonist, L’s online friend Gestirn, starts out as a chillingly familiar type. They’re possessive and controlling of L under the guise of caring about him. They act like they’re the arbiter of moral rightness and as if anyone who disagrees with them is committing a terrible infraction. They plaster the label “abusive” on other people while being incredibly abusive themself.

As soon as L meets a fellow trans man in person and strikes up a friendship with him, it becomes clear that there’s going to be a narrative arc of L forming offline connections and recognizing the toxicity of Gestirn and his online communities more generally. But sadly, the game started losing me with the way this arc was handled. I recognized Gestirn as a terrible friend (and person) pretty quickly; they have no positive qualities, and L talks to them not because he likes them as a person, but because he has no other friends. But it takes five acts (and about four hours, at my reading speed) for L to recognize Gestirn’s awfulness and drop them—if you get the good ending, anyway. The momentum of the game’s first half sputters out as the narrative becomes intent on hammering home the point that Gestirn is awful—something I recognized back in Act I. While I can understand why it would take L longer than me to recognize that (I’m 10 years older than him, have been through my share of shit that’s helped me be able to flag toxic people pretty quickly, and have a good support system in place), that wasn’t enough to justify the pages and pages of online arguments between Gestirn and other server members or all the one-on-one conversations between Gestirn and L after that.

The issues with Gestirn also go beyond pacing. By the end of the game they’ve devolved into a villainous caricature, ultimately advocating for eugenics before L finally cuts them loose. And they’re not just a terrible person—they’re also made out to be physically repulsive. Here’s a bit from when L gets on a voice call with them:

>A few moments later, they burp.
>.jesus christ not the burps not the fucking burps again
> …
>"I keep burping from a medical issue," they say, as if I'm not here. "I don't eat much which causes a gas build up. It's why I'm fat. My poverty diet. Nobody believes that's not my fault."

Soon after this conversation, L has a dream about Gestirn, which includes the following descriptions:

>Gestirn stands up, grunting as their leg fat wobbles to keep them upright.

>A mishmash of parts from human and animal alike all built into an organic perfect machine of rage. The way they're jumping and stamping, the fat jiggling up and down and rippling...
>God. They look fucking disgusting.

>And of course they haven't burped. They're too busy screaming to notice what's happening to themself. The gas is building up. It's expanding. Their stomach. Their cheeks.
>But they can't stop. It's too late. If I wanted to help, there's nothing I could do. And, really, I just don't fucking want to.
>Gestirn explodes.
>Their blood and guts, a slurry of fat and green, splatters both of us head-to-toe.

So, the character who has become the game’s epitome of evil is described as disgusting in a way that’s explicitly tied to their fatness. This moment is so suddenly and unnecessarily cruel that it severed my emotional connection with the story. And we’ll get back to that moment in a minute, but first let me talk about Val, the trans man L meets who I mentioned above. During the prologue, we see L self-consciously daydreaming, longing for “My imagined Perfect Person to come along and save me from everything I continue to do to myself and can't help perpetuating.” Right after that, Val walks up and ends up inviting L to come to his apartment sometime. Cue L’s inner monologue:

>This is what I wanted. I wanted someone to walk up to me, be smitten by my mediocrity like a wet cat in an alleyway, and pull me into a world I've been enchanted by for years.

And… that’s kind of exactly what happens. The role Val plays in the story is being exactly the person L needs. He introduces L to latex kink (the world L is referring to in the above quote), helping and supporting him every step of the way. He’s always available when L wants to hang out. He (and a friend he introduces L to) gives L his first sexual experience, which is mind-blowingly amazing. When L is interested in going on a date with Val, Val is likewise interested. When L concludes they aren’t a romantic fit, Val agrees with no hard feelings. Val supports L through the online drama and is there with him at the story’s end, promising lasting friendship.

There’s nothing wrong with L getting this; it’s nice wish fulfillment, but the beginning of the story didn’t lead me to expect that kind of narrative. And more than that… well, let’s return to the dream. As Gestirn rages at L, Val walks up and kisses him. Val, who, in stark contrast with the repulsive Gestirn, is the perfect trans man—he’s fit, he passes, he’s conventionally attractive. And, as the dream strongly foreshadows, it’s his presence in L’s life that causes L to finally drop Gestirn:

>Now, with Valentine, and how he makes me feel, I’ve realised something.
>This isn’t a friendship. This is suffocation.

I have no issue with a narrative of “getting a real friend makes you realize how bad your old friends are.” But I do have a problem when said narrative perpetuates tired stereotypes around beauty and respectability that should have no place in queer media in 2024. I want to see love/lust interests with imperfect bodies. I want to see fat queer characters being happy and loved. I want queer media to reflect the real-life diversity of queer bodies without judgment.

The rest of the game does nothing to subvert the beautiful/ugly or good/evil dichotomies of Val and Gestirn, and in fact it adds another one, offline/online. Gestirn and several other people in L’s Discord server are steeped in online queer discourse, letting strangers with strong opinions dictate for them who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s morally good and who’s evil, which identity labels are harmless and which make you a TERF. The game calls out how reductive this all is, but in doing so it portrays online spaces as inherently toxic and offline communities as inherently healthy, showing the former doing L only harm and the latter doing him only good. I speak from experience when I say that in real life, things are not that simple.

When I started this game, I thought I was in for a nuanced story about being queer in 2024. When I finished it, I just felt kind of empty.

This is a well-written, well-made game with some unusual aspects. While it uses the default Twine Harlowe font and color scheme, there is some customization, including the use of text effects and a dynamically-updated family tree. The latter (which is complete with little illustrations!) is a touch that’s both just nice and also proved helpful to refer to during the game ((Spoiler - click to show)especially when things get more complicated than they first appear… Also, seeing Ben added to it at the end was really sweet). The game also employs hyperlinks well, making use of false choices, cycling links, and even the simple “click to proceed” to control the pacing, ensuring that the player never faces a wall of text.

Players will also soon discover that there are special links (usually highlighted with a text effect) sprinkled throughout that lead to NPC flashbacks. I have to admit that I didn’t initially realize these weren’t the memories of Jay, the PC; this is fully on me, as on a replay I noticed that the first one makes it clear by having the POV character addressed as “Jimmy” twice, but I somehow managed to overlook that on my first playthrough. Even putting that aside, because these sections feel set off from the main story, I think a graphical cue (change of background color and/or font?) would be nice in order to differentiate them. I also wished there was an undo/back button, because sometimes I wanted to look back at the last screen of text (whether to refer back to something or because I clicked too fast and accidentally missed a flashback link).

Now, talking about a different aspect of the flashbacks, at first I thought that they were simply giving me, the player, a look into the NPCs’ pasts, giving me knowledge about them that Jay didn’t have. I liked the way they humanized even the worst characters (looking at you, Uncle Jimmy…), adding depth to portrayals that could otherwise seem stereotypical or one-note. But where it gets weird is when it becomes clear that Jay is experiencing these flashes on some level, too. This gave what had initially felt like a very grounded and realistic game a surreal vibe, injecting some sort of magic into the world that never gets addressed or explained.

I liked the exploration of the complicated family dynamics, but I think the game packed in one or two too many sensational reveals about Jay’s family history; it got a little over-the-top, and the more extreme ones weren’t really explained, which left me more confused than anything else. I also wasn’t sure what the purpose of the ambulance flashback was; I didn't feel it added much to the story. And one of the two possible endings felt more satisfying to me ((Spoiler - click to show)the Venice one, due to the emotional beat of Jay meeting Ben’s grandmother and being immediately accepted, after all he went through with his family).

But while I didn’t feel like all of the elements fully cohered, I was engaged and invested in the story and enjoyed both my playthroughs, and what I saw as the central theme resonated with me: while we can’t choose our families, and we’ll always be stuck with their trauma and mess to some extent because it’s where we came from, we CAN choose the other important people in our life, and it’s possible to find love and acceptance elsewhere even if our families can’t or won’t provide it.

I liked this one a lot! Normally I get a little antsy when an IF game starts with several long screens of non-interactive text in a row, as I start wondering when I’ll be able to participate in the story, but I was drawn into this one right away once I learned the identity of the protagonist: a starving mother taking a desperate, foolish risk for the sake of her family. Way more interesting than a confident, sword-bearing hero! When “what do you do”-type choices start appearing, while they don’t always necessarily matter plot-wise, I liked how much they focused on characterizing the PC, Madelaine. For instance, the first one comes after you’ve entered the monster-infested cave and the opening seals up after you. You can stoically continue on, or have a moment of panic and bang on the blockage with your fists. I chose the latter, which only resulted in bloodied hands, but I liked getting to roleplay Madelaine as getting freaked out in that moment. Games where the PC is a specific character that I get to inhabit are usually my favorite mode of choice-based IF (and the one I largely write), so that alone had me hooked.

As the story went on, the plot got me, too. This game has a familiar fantasy backdrop but puts its own spin on magic and magical creatures, and I enjoyed accompanying Madelaine as she finds out there’s much more to the world of the Saltcast than she ever knew, and gets pulled into their struggles while still sticking to her own goal. I chose to play her as compassionate, willing to give these creature the benefit of the doubt and choosing kindness as much as she could, and the fact that I could have taken contrasting, more ruthless and self-serving options made my choices feel more meaningful. And playing Madelaine this way meant that the mission she ends up on with the Saltcast became personal, rather than just a means to an end. Even as the stakes grew beyond just Madelaine and her family, the story always stayed very grounded in Madelaine’s role in the events and her concerns, which I appreciated.

(Spoiler - click to show)When, in an excellent twist, Madelaine becomes fully (literally) absorbed in the larger-scale goings-on, I loved the author’s choice to do a time-skip and a perspective shift. Part 3 has the player embodying Madelaine’s daughter, 10 years after the end of Part 2, as, in a parallel to the game’s opening, she enters the cave for her own family-motivated reasons—discovering her mother’s fate. This lets us see the effect Madelaine’s actions had on her family (and beyond), and allows for a resolution to her story that wouldn’t have been as satisfying if we’d stayed in her perspective.

I do have a few things to nitpick as far as presentation. I think a slightly more dressed-up UI would be nice, something with stronger fantasy vibes—a more distinctive font, a curated color for the links, styling of the sidebar, etc. And while I liked the artwork—I think the one of Grissol was my favorite, and the changing representation of the lantern in the sidebar was a nice touch—it could be integrated a bit more smoothly; it usually loaded slower than the text, and its placement in the middle of the page felt a bit awkward. (I also encountered a broken image toward the beginning, the one of a spellbeast.) So some adjustments to the UI and the handling of the images could make the whole appearance tie together better.

There are also some immersion-breaking moments, like when a link reads "Go back", referring to the player returning to the previous page after a digression--I don't want to be suddenly reminded that I'm essentially navigating a website (this is more fully explained in the Intfiction.org version of this review here). But I only mention these things because they’re fairly small changes that I think would make an already great game even better!