Ratings and Reviews by Karona

Why do I like Don’t Rock the Boat? For one thing, I like horror. For another, I have long wanted to experience IF about a women’s sports team, and because this work focuses on a women’s rowing team, it is the first I’ve found that scratches that particular itch. And while not essential to the story, I love that the author did something I had yet to see another author of choice fiction do and include credits, which I found to be quite moving.

The work is structured as nine storylets—parts of the story accessible from a hub that presents them as choices, each associated with a position on the boat. I haven’t put a lot of effort into determining what the optimal sequence of positions would be, but I will say that I was glad to have clicked on Nat’s position last, and I wished Carol’s position had been the first I clicked on and Sofia’s had been the fourth, which for me would have meant reading the nine perspectives in sequence. This raises a question people who love to analyze the craft will find significant: If reading the perspectives in the order presented by the author would have been a better experience for me, what did I gain from the interactivity? I think the answer lies in the words at the top of the nexus: “Select your position.” The story is written in third-person limited, but we are not limited to the same character throughout. Each choice gates the transition that takes us from a position looking just over the shoulder of one of the crew to looking over the shoulder of another. The presentation of the choices makes it less likely that we will complete the work without understanding how the members of the team and the parts of the narrative fit together.

With that out of the way, I have a confession to make: I don’t have a good analysis of the story and the themes of this work. I thought I had one, but when I read about the events while looking over the shoulder of Nat, whose position on the boat is last, my theory was shattered. And that makes me ecstatic. In my opinion the best horror leaves the audience with more questions than answers, and this work delivers wonderfully.

What I can say now is that I appreciated the author’s handling of the sport. Elliot Degrassi indicates that a significant part of her knowledge about rowing came from two of the persons listed in the credits. I’m not the person to ask if she got everything right, but I did get the impression that she had spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to be in the positions of people who do, and that helped to immerse me in the story.

I can also tell you that the work is not without its humorous moments. In particular I found this line to be hilarious: (Spoiler - click to show)“A part of her wondered if her UTI recovery might make for a good performance piece. Something about cranberry juice being the color of menstrual blood... She’d have to think on it after the race.”

In short the work is brilliant. Why not give it some more of the attention it deserves?

The Neon Case is set in late 21st century Hong Kong, and the future looks fabulous. With descriptions of flying cars, for example, the text invokes the future as seen from the past. (Is anyone else reminded of Blade Runner (1982)?). In less adept hands this might have plunged the story into silliness, but for me these elements hit in exactly the right way.

The protagonist, Mei Ling, and her partner, Kai Wong, have been called to investigate the “killing” of Luna, an android sex worker, at a club. In the first half of the game, the reader must inspect the crime scene, and because a picture is included, the reader also sees the mutilated android. One might wonder if this eroticizes violence. I’m inclined to say, “No,” because the fact that the victim is an android allows me to distance myself from the violence. This introduces a tension into a work driven by characters who see androids as the equals of human persons. As interesting as this is to contemplate, I won’t explore the topic any further here because as I explain below, the pictures present a far more serious problem for the story.

The investigation requires the reader to engage the club owner, the “killer”, and finally Luna herself. This last interaction distinguishes itself by allowing the player to talk to Luna, who in her “deceased” state can only communicate via a chat interface, and so a bit of “realism” is introduced to the game. In terms of interactions this is easily the weakest part of the work. Instead of clicking on the hint button immediately, I decided to try my hand at composing my own queries, and that went badly in unanticipated ways. At one point the chat hung, and figuring that I was not going to see a reply, sent another question, only to then see two replies. By the time I was ready to click on “hint”, the button was disabled because it was time to move on. Maybe it’s because I know from embarrassing experience how fraught designing a novel means of interaction can be, but whatever the reason, the clumsiness of the interaction didn’t diminish the story all that much for me.

So with all the strengths and my tolerance of the one major weakness I’ve mentioned so far, why the one-star review? That brings us back to the pictures. While there’s a lot I like about them—I loved the palette of the first few images we see, for example—there is one glaring problem that I cannot get past: Mei and Kai are coded as white while the “killer”, who is not in any way a sympathetic character, is coded as East Asian. This is made worse by the fact that real-world Hong Kong is a former colony of a European nation. There’s a lot I can look past in a work of interactive fiction, but the implication that colonizer = good, and colonized = bad, however unintentional, is not one of them.

I’m not writing this review to shame the author, whose work I would have happily given three or four stars if it had not included the pictures. And I’m not writing this to call the author out but to call the author up. One reason the pictures do not work at all is that they undercut the author’s best intentions. Good sci-fi is commentary on the present, and I believe Neon Case is no exception. When the player is presented with three alternatives of moral weight, the author seems to favor the alternative that requires the characters to treat the member of the arguably oppressed class as though she is the equal of other persons. I would love to see the author take on subject matter like this again while being attentive to all the components of the story and how they complement—or don’t complement—each other, perhaps with the help of one or more sensitivity readers.

Usually when someone says that a work is "so bad it's good", they mean that though the content is bad, there is pleasure to be derived from seeing just how bad it is. But when it comes to Reconciling Mother, which was ranked 25 out of 27 in IFComp 2007, if someone told me that it was so bad it was good, I would think they were praising it for good elements that have somehow emerged from a lack of good design decisions.

That said, it is hard to play Reconciling Mother for long without getting slapped in the face with indications that some of the work's charming elements were entirely unintentional. For example, despite the apparent randomness of the work's content, I have read that there is a way to win. Other reviewers have complained that the winning ending is underimplented, but I think this work might have worked best if the author had not created winning conditions. (I had this realization while playing another IF work, The Land of Breakfast and Lunch, which I recommend taking a look at if you, like me, are interested in more intentional attempts at evocative surreality.) After reading several reviews of Reconciling Mother, I searched high and low for a download link not to win but to experience some of the heaviness, whimsy, wonder, and weirdness it contains for myself.

I would not blame anyone who gave Reconciling Mother only one star, but the perception that there is something wonderful underlying the work, even if it is only an illusion, compels me to give it two.

(I have updated this review once since I first posted it.)

(I have revised this review once since I first posted it):

The Land of Breakfast and Lunch makes little of an attempt to offer puzzles and even less of an attempt to offer narrative. Because the author has placed the work squarely in the genre of surreal games, these aspects are not strikes against it. But they do make it difficult to detail the enjoyable features of the work without simply quoting the bits I like at length. Instead I will try to explain through generalizations and comparisons.

Generalizing, the work's diegetic content is richly described, and it includes delightful extradiegetic content (assuming it makes sense to say a fourth-wall-breaking work has extradiegetic content; for an arguable example, enter the command SCORE). The game contains many jokes, most of which are underwhelming, but few are terrible, and one made me laugh out loud. Despite the stated lack of a goal, the work at the very least encourages the player to walk along a path (the only path offered by the game) punctuated by various lands, including the eponymous Land of Breakfast and Lunch. Interwoven into the fabric of the game are various threads that evoke a sense of nostalgia, especially for those of us who grew up in the West during the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. Thus, there are parts of the game that feel meaningful, even if no meaning is imposed by the author.

As for comparisons, the works it reminds me the most of are Myst and Reconciling Mother. Like Myst The Land of Breakfast and Lunch provides an atmosphere that in its best moments fills me with a sense of wonder. Unlike Myst the game lacks a robust underlying structure. (I say more about this below.) Like Reconciling Mother it is an interactive fiction work with many elements that left me feeling amused, wistful, or intrigued. But unlike Reconciling Mother, the game is obviously written by someone who has extensive knowledge of the authoring system used to create it, and because its surreal aspects were deliberately included and fairly well implemented, it feels more like a finished project.

That said, I have found more than a few cracks in the work. Some I found during my first, quick playthrough. Most I found while doing a moderate amount of poking around. Many of the problems could be characterized as a lack of polish. If the only reward a work offers is the experience of interacting with it, then it is of paramount importance that every interaction with the player goes smoothly. Thus, if I want to return the "doll" of the jack-in-the-box to its box I should not encounter a guess-the-noun problem within a guess-the-verb problem (which is aggravated by the presence of a doll, a lid, and a box that are not components of the jack-in-the-box but initially appear in the same room!). What's more, I should not find myself yanked out of the immersive experience by stock responses. When I enter GIVE PENNY TO SALESPERSON, I should see a reply more appropriate and less misleading than, "You can only do that to something animate." If an author has to choose between implementing only fitting responses to likely player input and implementing rich smell descriptions, I want them to choose the fitting responses.

If blemishes like those described above had been removed, I probably would have given this work a 5. All the same, I have yet to play a better surreal work that is as evocative as this one. If you enjoy unusual experiences in interactive fiction, I recommend checking it out.