Reviews by Jim Nelson

Like a David Lynch film in its most unsettling moments, September 3, 2023

Looking over my review of the last Charm Cochran game I played, You May Not Escape!, I now think I may have lowballed it: While I maintain that the maze navigation was a bit of a slog, as the months have passed I’ve found myself thinking back on the striking imagery found in the labyrinth. There’s the patronizing LED signs, for example, and the grim gravesite markers, not to mention the “off” dialogue between the player and the maze-keeper at the start.

So, I’m not surprised to have experienced a similar set of odd resonances and striking imagery in Red Door Yellow Door.

The game launches into the thick of things. You are teenager Emily, older sister to Claire, and joined on the living room floor with friends Jen and Tiffany. The sleepover centers on a game, something like Ouija but more invasive. After you’ve explained the “rules” to Claire, you rub her temples and send her into a lucid dream state. From there, the game places you in a liminal space between the reality of the suburban living room and the netherworld Claire explores at your behest.

From a narratological perspective, RDYD operates much like the superb Closure. In that game, the command parser acts as text messages between you and your friend. In RDYD, you are feeding instructions to sister Claire, who reports her dreamworld to you while bored Jen and Tiff look on and check their phones.

RDYD operates on a more symbolic and psychological level, though, approaching something like a David Lynch film in its most unsettling moments. Much like science fiction’s acts of defamiliarization, Lynch’s horrors often work by his characters mildly accepting something utterly unsettling to the viewer—or, his characters being devastated by an image otherwise plain and unremarkable to us.

RDYD has a number of these moments, including a character speaking in voices, moments of calm suddenly turning to terror, and—weirdest of all—activating a device in the dream world causing one of the real-world teenage onlookers to speak gibberish. The rules offered at the start are equally strange and Lynchian (“Avoid any room with clocks, because they can trap you”). And, of course, there’s the power dynamics of an older sister guiding her younger sibling down this rabbit hole. (There are moments when the other girls urge you to end the session. It was unsettling as I talked them out of it so I could keep playing.)

Part of me wishes the dreamworld was described in a voice more unique to Claire, but I admit, the matter-of-fact tone IF is so famous for (“A sturdy door is to the north, while the kitchen is to the east”) plays well against the heightened sense of terror that pops up at you. The hoary problem of dark rooms requiring a light source is here, but unlike Zork et al., bringing a light into those spaces is used to devastating effect.

I had to stick with this one; there were long stretches of exploration where I felt untethered from any sense of forward motion or purpose. I played through to two endings, one horrible (and a little sudden—I’m still unsure what happened), one mundane and happy, if unsatisfying. I’m certain there’s at least one more ending, but I ran out of time and need to move back to the Spring Thing list. Perhaps I’ll get back to finding that third path.

Truly torn, September 3, 2023

I have a pet theory that Americans who call themselves Anglophiles are kind of like people who say they love movies: We all love movies in some way. The question is the kind of movie that draws you in. Likewise, I think all Americans are Anglophiles in some capacity, it just depends on what element of British culture you’re attracted to. For some, it’s British popular music. For others, it’s the glamour and gossip of the royal family.

It’s the English village crime/mystery story which fascinates me. At one point or another, every British sleuth, from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot to Inspector Morse, finds themself facing an English village shopkeeper, or snooping through an English manor’s overgrown garden, or at the village pub buying a pint for the local wag. The folksy and cheery charms of the village mystery is uniquely English, even if the subject matter is morbid.

That’s why I looked forward to Dee Cooke’s latest. Previously I was wowwed by Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge for all those Anglophilic reasons described above: A decaying family home, a cast of local busybodies, and the submerged secrets stirred to the surface by a plucky young protagonist. The mystery had a lot of character and a lot of personal moments mixed in with the usual adventure game fare of snooping around and collecting details. There’s good reasons Houghtonbridge took third place in last year’s ParserComp and claimed a clutch of prizes in the recent IFDB Awards.

Marie Waits offers similar fare: You are Marie, a young woman from the (fictional?) town of Crossley, England. You’ve been captured by a group known as Farr North after your investigation draws a little too close to them and their operations. The game opens with you tied up at the bottom of a pit “in a small hut in the middle of Nowhere, Essex.” Your captors vow to return in two hours and thirty minutes to finish you off. Your goal is fairly obvious: Get the hell out of there.

According to Cooke’s notes, this game is part of a currently incomplete series that starts with 2020’s Pre-Marie. As such, the story line feels ragged when played standalone. It’s apparent there’s a lot of backstory here, but even upon completion of the game, I didn’t feel I truly understood the import of all that transpired. It pretty much is an escape game with a turn limit, which blunted the emotional impact of the final winning moment.

Alas, the English village charms I looked forward to didn’t materialize. The game is heavily restricted to escaping from said hut and reaching civilization by way of a dark forest. You bump into dead bodies along the way, but their relationship to Marie and her plight were less-characterized than one would hope. (One unlucky soul was apparently a rando in the wrong place at the wrong time.) The room descriptions are perfunctory and sparse, and the puzzles are solved in serial fashion. The most human moments come from a series of notes you find along the way.

The first play-through, I ran out of time. I believe most moves count as a minute, meaning I chewed up a lot of free time with my nervous tic of typing >X to look around when I’m fishing for ideas. My second attempt, I managed to finish with time to spare, although I was basically speed-running through the first two-thirds of the game. The timer obviously imparts a sense of urgency to the situation, but it wound up feeling forced. The use of time was much better managed in Houghtonbridge, where its passing was used for appointments with characters and events transpiring elsewhere in town.

I found myself playing guess-the-verb on a few occasions. Reliance on default messages and the like gives the game an unfinished feel, such as how the usable items in this location are described twice:

You are in a small, high-walled yard. To the north is one side of the standalone hut that comprises the wooden room, including its door. To the west is a rickety-looking shed, also with a door, painted green. The other two sides of the yard are blocked by high stone walls, with a high, solid gate in the southwest corner between the wall and the shed.
…
You can also see a green door, a wooden door and a gate here.

There’s a surprising number of keys, doors, and locks considering how small this game is. It left an aftertaste of adventure games from my youth, where blue keys opened blue doors, and so on.

I’m truly torn; this is a title I definitely wanted to like. I still think it could have been more than the sum of its parts if the emphases had been different. But the reliance on old-school puzzle mechanics, a constrained vision of story scope, and a lack of polish left me flat. Marie Waits feels rushed, much like the protagonist is in her escape, which is too bad.

A high-quality effort in spite of its limitations, September 3, 2023

The calling card of The Kuolema is how it’s authored in Google Forms, which is nutty and impressive in its own right. However, it’s no novelty act—this is a high-quality effort that doesn’t let up until the very last page (er, form). The Kuolema hearkens back to the great graphic adventures of the 1990s, but without changing CD-ROMs between acts. I needed two sittings to play through to the end, and found myself looking forward to getting back to the game in-between the sessions. It grabbed me.

You take the role of an agent dropped by helicopter onto the bridge of a science research ship in the stormy South China seas. The Kuolema, owned by a European corporation, is no longer answering radio hails and drifting into Chinese waters. You soon discover the ship is all-but-abandoned, and you’re locked out of the navigational controls.

It’s a tried-and-true setup: A lone adventurer in a compact map exploring their surroundings and piecing together the backstory via notes, memoranda, diaries, and so forth. The game offers a combination of solid, if workmanlike, prose, complemented by high-quality still graphics depicting rooms, found items, and other details. Together they create an atmosphere that is creepy and claustrophobic. Suspense drips out gradually, a steady accretion of developments that suggest all is not as it seems on this research ship.

Although the setup is a bit stock—echoes of Babel, or The Stanley Project, or numerous other adventures set in creepy abandoned laboratories, space stations, and so on—the pace of the game, the quality of the writing and stills, and the mild difficulty of the puzzles stoked my interest. There were a couple of unexpected plot twists along the way, which kept me on my toes. While the bulk of the game is exploration and solving puzzles, the endgame is more character-based, and asks the player to consider what they’ve seen and read since the beginning.

Google Forms is not an ideal authoring tool, but the author proves how much mileage can be had from it. That said, there’s a good deal of information that’s best tracked manually. You’ll want to have a notepad or a separate window open to keep notes. Fortunately, mapping is not an issue, as the game provides superbly-rendered maps to ease navigation.

I managed to set my progress back—twice—by pressing the browser “Back” button rather than use the back button provided within the forms. It wasn’t catastrophic, just slightly annoying (and required me to curb some browser muscle-memory while playing). Maintaining a full game state in Forms must have been crazy-hard to design, but it’s not perfect, and so some descriptions do not change to reflect changes to the game world. (Still, the fact that the game is thorough enough to maintain as much state as it does shows the amount of work the author put into it.)

From a story perspective, while there were some nice twists and turns, I found the ending to be telegraphed. There’s a side plot about evil corporations against a backdrop of world superpowers vying for technical superiority—it adds a little depth, sure, but unfortunately it’s all been done before. The ramifications of the research ship’s science is more novel, though, and reminded me of (Spoiler - click to show)Ice Nine from Cat's Cradle.

What can I say? I was enthralled. The Kuolema offers a ripping story about the best laid plans of men, and even ends with a blockbuster conclusion. It also asks for you to make a couple of thoughtful decisions along the way, which is refreshing too.

A lighthearted word-oriented game, September 3, 2023

A lighthearted word-oriented game where you, a captain of a starship and dressed in “wussy yellow,” find yourself in vaguely uncomfortable situations you must extricate yourself from by uttering an iconic sci-fi TV catchphrase.

Although it presents itself like a parser game, this effort really doesn’t have much in the way of parser mechanics. The solution for each situation is merely to type in the iconic catchphrase but replacing its first word with another that starts with the letter ‘B’.

Although I’m a diehard fan of the TV franchise the game’s opening claims it has no connection to, Beat Me Up Scotty isn’t my cup of raktajino. The humor is light; the pace is brisk; the sound effects are used sparingly, mostly as correct/wrong buzzers, much like a game show. Those elements keep it amusing, but it’s pretty lightweight otherwise. The solutions range from fairly obvious to at least one word I never heard of before (I only found it by checking a thesaurus). That’s a plus, I suppose.

In fact, the best hint I can offer anyone who plays this (and is more or less suggested by the in-game HINT command) is to have a thesaurus handy.

Just the ticket for those who yearn for the IF of yesteryear, January 7, 2023

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

As a TADS writer myself, I was happy and relieved to see another TADS game make it into IF Comp 2022. (There was only one in 2021, the atmospheric Ghosts Within.) On top of using the venerable authoring system, Aiken’s entry is also a sequel to his 1999 Inform-based Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina (which I’ve not played). Prom Dress is very much a throwback game, and the author’s notes indicates he meant it to be seen as such.

The premise is one of domestic plight: At the last minute, your seventeen year-old daughter needs a new prom outfit to replace the one damaged by her younger brother. As fate would have it, the shopping mall is all-but-closed due to a downtown parade. Dutifully you drive to the mall praying you will find something for your daughter to wear.

The premise is particular, but the setup is generically familiar to text adventure fans. The deserted shopping mall—a rat’s nest of passages and walkways—and it’s numerous locked storefronts reminds of any number of crawlers, whether they’re set in a dungeon, a haunted mansion, a space outpost, or a jungle island. The few shops remaining open are manned with the requisite NPC providing key information and hinting about their highly-specific unmet need. They’re sufficiently implemented, but none I encountered popped off the screen character-wise.

A few nice touches separate Prom Dress from standard maze-grinding fare. For one, guards on the bottom floor man a video surveillance system. This limits where you can explore without being caught. Another nicety is your daughter at home texting what her Ouija board is spelling out, giving you automatic in-game clues on where to focus your attention.

The map is enormous. Even after two hours of play, I was still finding new locations, and no, not all had been unlocked by solving earlier puzzles—I’d simply not explored every available exit from all rooms. More than once I felt utterly lost. (Fortunately, a link to a downloadable map was added to the game after the comp started. I highly recommend getting it, unless you’re the type of person who likes drawing maps while you play.). Fans of nonlinear adventure games will feast on this game.

One gripe: A number of paths are asymmetrical, that is, going east will take you to a location where you have go south to return to your previous location. The logic for this can be teased out from the descriptions (“East and around a corner, the mall continues…”), but these twists really mess with keyboard muscle memory when you’re hot to solve a puzzle.

While one might not expect much commentary from a game of wander-collect-unlock-repeat, the twisty-promenades-all-alike layout does paint a compelling picture of brutalist American commercial architecture and its rapid decay due to rentier maintenance practices. This mall is the same setting as Aiken’s earlier effort, and references back to it highlight years of neglect and a crumbling infrastructure. Although not described in-game, I could "see" the mall's scuffled flooring and battered kick-plates, and smell yesterday’s Cinnabon in the air. It’s Thomas Cole’s Desolation in suburban miniature.

The map’s enormity is only matched by the inventory to be collected. A discarded shopping bag rapidly goes from a convenience to a necessity. The game is configured to permit only so much be held in-hand, leading to lots of automatic inventory juggling by TADS. One extreme example:

> get belt
(first putting the old-fashioned army helmet in the shopping bag
then putting the flashlight in the shopping bag then putting the gold
coin in the shopping bag)

Norms-bending is the norm here. Gaining access to the closed storefronts—that is, breaking and entering—is a major part of the game. General tomfoolery is performed, all under the guise of securing a prom dress. At one point, in order to advance, (Spoiler - click to show)I found myself waving a fresh pack of Marlboros under the nose of an NPC desperate to kick the habit—that one made me question myself. This is on top of the usual kleptomaniac shoplifting so central to most interactive fiction. (Did I mention the shopping bag?)

In counterpoint is a general levity. This is not a game that takes itself too seriously. The rent-a-cop guards are enraptured by a Law & Order marathon; the military recruiting office’s posters are a touch too jingoistic. It’s not hacker humor a la fnord and the number 42, but a subversive, smirking skepticism that pokes its head up now and then.

Most of my criticisms regard polish. The expansive map means many location descriptions are little more than prose enumerating all exits. It also means a surplus of unimportant decoration objects, with most returning stock replies to actions. Combined, this creates an unfinished feel in places. A few disambiguation problems made me stumble (such as rooms with multiple indistinguishable doors, or a golf ball / golf balls situation). And while it’s obvious the author was having fun with the regrettable puns so ubiquitous to mall shop names, some were stretched thin. (Which might make for another puzzle, but I did have to wonder: Would anyone call their store “The Finest in Taste”? Perhaps in a different part of the country than where I’m from.)

My largest gripe, though, is a bit of a spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)Once you’re in possession of the shopping mall’s skeleton key, you can enter any store’s front door without explicitly unlocking it. This led to numerous times I tried a location exit thinking it led to an unexplored area, and then being instantly nabbed by the security guards watching the security monitors downstairs. UNDO is available, but to "die" by simply traveling a direction was wearing.

My meager score when I broke away tells me I barely scratched the surface. My first two hours, I was almost drowning in options to pursue. It’s a highly nonlinear game. Puzzle difficulty gradually ramps up as you advance through the mall. The nostalgia of navigating the quasi-maze in solitude, and the micro-bursts of dopamine when solutions are discovered, is just the ticket for those who yearn for the IF of yesteryear. If you’re looking for thoughtful story arcs or expressive characters, this might not be your bag of oats—but that’s not what the game set out to achieve. What it does want to achieve—an expansive puzzle-fest set in a non-traditional location—it does quite well.

Genre-busting, January 7, 2023

Admiration Point is a genre-busting story, a Mormon slice-of-life “anti-romance” (author’s description) set in a near-future America and shot through with anti-corporate and neo-feminist themes. I could dig up more labels to slap on the side of the game, but I think the point is made: There’s a lot going on here.

AP is also a significantly longer work compared to the other choice-based games I’ve played to date. Prose passages approach the length of short chapters. The game has the ambitions and sensibilities of print fiction. The prose and dialogue is clean and flows well.

You play Maria, a futuristic Mormon digital archivist in a happy but unsatisfying marriage. While assembling virtual exhibits of the digital past (which are more-or-less our digital present), Maria grows attracted to coworker Sean, also a member of the church and also married with children.

My first play-through was a bust—I’m a sensible-shoes kinda guy, and my choices led to a rapid conclusion: Maria shrugs and tells herself to set aside her fantasies of Sean. Yawn.

My second play-through, I pushed the envelope and had Maria get aggressive about pursuing Sean. The story blossomed. Maria’s past, her self-doubt, and all her feelings for Sean surfaced. In-game creepiness options unlocked, such as trying on Sean’s coat when he’s out of the room, or modeling Sean as a full-sized 3D virtual avatar and staring longingly into his uncanny-valley eyes.

As for “anti-romance,” the plot elements actually tick a lot of romance fiction boxes: A smart, independent female lead; the intriguing, handsome, and seemingly unattainable love interest; and plenty of moments of personal-space violations. It’s the kind of story where Maria worries that brushing lint off of Sean’s shirt might be construed as making a pass. The restraint of a faithful wife is substituted in for the romance novel’s ingenue. The tale is semisweet, and not exactly wholesome.

My problems with Admiration Point involve narrative focus and outcomes. An odd amount of time is spent detailing Maria’s work as an archivist—the prose gets boggy enumerating the challenges of building VR exhibits of mommy bloggers and other digital cultural artifacts of the 2000s to 2030s. An editing pen could have pared these passages down, and better connected them to the emotional core of the story. Meanwhile, Maria’s home life is strangely glossed over. Her child gets brief mentions; her husband is little more than someone to tell she has a headache tonight. It’s a gaping absence in a story about a woman contemplating an affair.

Maybe I didn’t make the right choices my second time through (I was hitting the gas pedal pretty hard, though), but Maria’s self-destructive choices never came home to roost. Both endings I reached halted abruptly. Punches were pulled. An old saw in creative writing workshops is, “Why is this story being told?” Even if the author insists on making this an anti-romance—fair enough—the puzzle pieces don’t assemble to a story of ripe consequences, leaving the hollow sense of missed opportunities.

Tall, dark, and delicious, January 7, 2023

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

I’m a sucker for hard-boiled gumshoes…but when the detective’s shoes are literally made of bubblegum, you have my attention.

Who Shot Gum E. Bear? is a clever parser-based send-up of detective noir. It’s set in Sugar City, an ice-cream tub of vice and sin. You play private eye Bubble Gumshoe investigating the bittersweet murder of your client, the titular Gum E. Bear. You’re to gather evidence, interview suspects, and ACCUSE when you’ve got your marshmallow peeps in a row.

The author takes the central gag to its logical extremes. Gum E. Bear lies dead in a pool of his own liquid center, his bullet wound caramelizing and his face dusted with nose candy. TASTE and SMELL are an important part of your detecting arsenal in this game, which the author uses to great advantage. As the title suggests, this is a Who Shot Roger Rabbit? set in Candyland rather than Toontown.

There’s plenty of polish, such as the status line (normally a dry display of location and move count) being utilized as a kind of rotating banner of hints and atmosphere. (You're occasionally reminded: “It’s always nighttime in Sugar City.”) The colorful and tasty assortment of secondary characters provides a good deal of comic relief, and are adequately implemented for parser- (not menu-) based interviews. The characters always play to theme, such as the candy cigarette-smoking mob boss:

> X DON TOBLERONE
Tall, dark, and delicious.

The prose is sharp and well-crafted, and the story flows smoothly. Humor is always subjective; you’ll know in the first few turns if this game is for you. The fun-sized half-hour listed play time seems about right, which is good—I doubt the central joke could have been sustained for much longer.

The flaw, in my view, is the solution. An eagle-eyed player can legitimately tease out the killer from the ample details provided, as long as she fully enmeshes herself in the internal logic of the game world. My first play-through was in a group setting, and when we finally discovered whodunnit, it landed on us like the punchline of a shaggy dog story, with groans all around. (Depending on your sense of humor, that might not be a flaw.)

Still, it’s a fun ride, an inventive and original take on a form that’s seen more than its share of satires and spoofs.

A random maze and an interesting premise, January 7, 2023

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

Best I can tell, You May Not Escape! is a parser-based IF built around a random map generator and a premise.

The random maps are the less-interesting of the two cornerstones. Notably, the author has asked that players not share their maps online as “getting lost and the entering the unknown is part of the point.” That leads to the second notable foundation of YMNE!: It’s premise.

You start in an outdoor maze of high plaster walls, too high to scale, which you must navigate while the weather grows worse and worse. A purported guide named John Everyman (not terribly subtle) acknowledges your obvious questions—Why am I here? What is this place?—while sidestepping to offer any real answers. Intriguingly, he suggests many others (“billions”) have or are traversing their own mazes while you walk yours.

Then the conversation lulls, your questions bruise Everyman’s feelings, and there’s nothing left to do but traverse the labyrinth.

Walking the maze is minimalism itself. Locations are described in fleeting, often incomplete, sentences. Occasionally the stingy maze generator manages to cough up a park bench to sit on, or a closed-circuit camera spying on you, but most locations don’t even offer those variations.

At this point, YMNE started to look to me to be little more than an exercise in Inform coding–until I encountered the LED ticker-tape-style wall displays. Each offers a different message, sometimes taunting, sometimes misleading, sometimes patronizing. The messages serve to frustrate and confuse in an already frustrating and confusing game. (The ticker machines do serve one handy purpose: They tell you when you’re walking in circles, or have returned to a previously-visited location.)

Game play develops into the monotony of a foot soldier’s patrol as you wander in search of an exit. With each scrap of new information found, one will naturally try to piece together What It All Means. Some of the details hint at modern controversies, such dead-naming. Others offer empty sentiments for your predicament. Others still are accusatory and self-righteous. The game is patently designed to wear down the player (at one point, giving up is a formal option). It’s a bleak ride.

So: What does it all mean? Just as the author asked not to share maps online, I’m reluctant to share my full interpretation. I do think YMNE! is a reaction to social media and toxic culture online, although the abuse could be sourced from any number of dysfunctional situations. One of the ticker messages is political speech transcribed, the “thoughts and prayers” mantra rattled off after every tragedy:

"The phrase 'thoughts and prayers' is grating in part because it has become a victim of semantic satiation, a phenomenon that occurs when a word or words is repeated so often that it loses its meaning. Thoughts and prayers has become a little bit like saying 'bless you' after someone sneezes…"

That said, I do wish the game had been a bit more ambitious. I would gladly have given up a freshly-minted maze with each quarter dropped for a richer world and more immersion. I think that could have been achieved without losing the stark economy of the prose and setting, which is game’s calling card. More tongue-in-cheek, I was tempted to shave off a point for the use of an exclamation point in the title, but I won't do that.

Bottom-line, I found myself chewing on this game after I finished playing it. A little more oomph would have left me chewing on YMNE! much longer, though.

A raw and searing experience, January 7, 2023

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

This browser-based game uses a 1980s color scheme and pixelated typeface, with a rather small window for text beneath a static image of a house or hut embedded in a snowbank. Game navigation is simplicity itself: Up/down keys move the cursor, and Z selects a choice or continues reading. No authoring system is listed, so I assume this is a home-brew effort. I found no bugs and the game played smoothly for me every iteration through it.

The game’s epigram is a quote from Japanese poet Shumpo Soki (“My sword leans against the sky. / With its polished blade I’ll behead / The Buddha and all of his saints”) before its opening proper:

"You are a man being sexually penetrated in a hut in the alps. … You are being entered, no doubt about that. You could use more lube."

Soon thoughts turn to the man penetrating you:

"Time for reflection: You don’t have the capacity to kill."

This casual swinging between mood, tension, and tone persists throughout the game. The choices offered tend to fall between the static and the dynamic, negotiation versus lashing out, security versus risk-taking.

The author lists Death by Lightning as experimental, “a repository for writing my thoughts; made unconsciously.” The prose flows into unforeseen territory like water seeking its own level. It’s intensely personal, an invitation into a consciousness, yet the reader is kept at arm’s length at all moments, as though instinctively self-protective. This is a raw and searching text, but not a confessional one.

That self-protectiveness is what keeps the narrator a touch too distant and unindividuated. Sometimes the abstractions do beg the player to stick with them. (“What sort of closeness do you have with the command of your insurgency?” is perhaps the one line in the game I have to question outright.) The ambiguity works against the game to some degree, but it is an artistic effect, and it’s used to its fullest here.

None of the prose is throwaway, though. The author managed to form several concrete scenes in my mind, impressive when limited to an interface all of five lines, 18 characters wide, presenting one sentence at a time. With each brief passage displayed in solitude, and having to press a key to see the next, the effect is of reading a long poem through a sleeve revealing only one line at a time. That focus shapes into a deliberative effect, and that’s impressive too.

Returning to Soki’s poem, it should be noted it’s a jisei, a Japanese death poem penned to convey an “‘ah, now I see’ moment.” Marilynne Robinson offers an analysis of Soki’s death bed declaration relevant to Death by Lightning:

"His meaning is not that he has rejected his belief but that he will move beyond the forms in which it has been known to him in life."