Ratings and Reviews by DemonApologist

I originally played this game in early August 2024, just prior to writing my first IF project. I was recently reminded of this work and decided to check out its IFDB page. I was both surprised and disappointed to learn that it somehow had no reviews yet. How dare they? Doesn’t SUDDEN DEATH deserve some reviews? Goodness. So, I decided to re-read it today and write up these comments.

SUDDEN DEATH is not a choice-based narrative. Instead, it is a tightly choreographed kinetic linear narrative, amplified by color and motion and sound and pop-up windows and expressive character portrait sprites. It is a rich 45-60 minutes of reading time, making the most of its audiovisual medium.

The story follows the dramatic downfall of a delightfully queer football team in 2040s Australia. In this future, the football league has a “Performance Enhancement Committee” who sets the rules for the authorized amount of doping. Though, “naturally,” the teams push the limits and do their best to get away with covering up excessive illicit juicing that gives themselves an edge over the other teams.

Saying that this is “about a football team” is accurate, but does not adequately capture the vibe of what this project focuses on. Sports is the vehicle through which the authors have crafted a meta-narrative about narrative-weaving itself. Sorry if that sounds a bit overly convoluted. What I really mean is, the characters—especially Mitch and the coach, Shiv—are concerned with their legacies and are in the process of manufacturing their own legendary histories. There’s a fascination with spectatorship—the fans and viewers of the games, the readers of news articles about the team, the filming of a documentary about the team, and so on. A central irony of the piece revolves around how the heroics (and villainy) on the field depends upon the simultaneous (1) widespread breaking of the PED rules by the teams and (2) belief by the fans that their team in particular is not the ones doing so and are naturally gifted football phenoms. Another core tenet is the tension between luck and agency; we see how the randomness of something like a coin flip or the off-kilter bounce of a football interacts with the psychology and choices of the characters in a push-and-pull that creates meaning.

There is a fascinating pastiche effect with a pileup of framing devices. As previously mentioned, the protagonist, Mitch, is narrating this tale while being interviewed for a documentary in the future. The reader sees contemporaneous news articles as well as the (frequently amusing) comments sections. There are text message chains, widgets analyzing the state of play during the football game, screenplay-style narration, and retro-style windows that pop up and can be exed out. The reader is occluded from directly seeing the moment of the downfall, and must build their own interpretation based on how everyone talks about it.

Despite taking place in the future, nostalgia is the primary aesthetic mode here. I mentioned the retro windows, but another element is the beautiful backdrops during the memory sections of the narrative. These are public domain/CCL images posterized to three shades, and layered with sunset-toned gradients that creates a particular atmosphere that is hard to describe but is nevertheless recognizably nostalgic, especially alongside the filtered-sounding music in certain moments. The mood during the football game itself is intense, where the choreography of sound and visuals is at its most rhythmic. The simulation of the rush that the players and fans are feeling at the game is quite effective.

SUDDEN DEATH is intense and nostalgic and dramatic, and yes, hot too. Mitch and Jordy is a disgustingly delightful ship. I stan these dysfunctional horny kings. (I do kind of love that the only thing that can apparently get me interested in sports is, “Well, what if they are not-just-subtextually super gay about it?”)

And did I mention how funny it is, too? I didn’t? Well, here’s a snippet:

Lucky: ‘Wait, PEDs? Doping? That’s what the Juice is?’
Jordan: ‘Don’t say “doping”, mate, it’s undignified.’
Lucky [the cutest sad face sprite you’ve ever seen in your life]: ‘So I’m not a generational talent? I’m not a football genius?’
Jordan: ‘Of course not. None of us are.’

Poor, sweet Lucky.

Anyway, I recommend this to people who (1) are not overly invested in reader agency as the primary “interactive” mode of interactive fiction and (2) have read and considered the content warnings. You’ll encounter profanity, drugs, and gay sex. Goodness gracious!

But if that sounds like a fun time, and anything in this review sounds intriguing, maybe check it out?

I struggled with deciding how to (or even whether to) review this game. It fascinates me enough that I wanted to stay with it, but I also feel underqualified for the task of discussing it. I mean, poetry, really? It’s not exactly my wheelhouse. At best, I hope that my clumsy analysis will, in its wrongness, spark some better insight from People Who Astound With Their Allusional Awareness™, so that I can eventually read more of that kind of review.

At the time I first played this game—as a beta tester late in the process—I knew nothing about the project, and vanishingly little about the author and his other works. I had no recognition that reading this involves wrapping oneself in Sylvia Plath references. When the game admonished me, “Jesus Christ, Sylvia, just pick a stencil,” I tried to “talk to Sylvia,” as though this were a character in the room with me. It never crossed my mind that a specific Sylvia was being called upon until the postgame guide discussed it. If I were pretty enough to attract himbo allegations, I would not be beating them. I think the only allusion I actively noticed was a reference to Isadora Duncan, but not for any high-minded literary reasons—rather, I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid/teen and became familiar with the Quagmire triplets, Isadora and Duncan.

Put more directly, my concern is this: should someone naïve to layers and layers of context in a work, still respond to that work? Ultimately, though, this isn’t anything important. It’s just an IFDB review. People can decide for themselves whether or not my experience with the game is interesting. Nothing here is definitive (nor should you expect it to be, really).

Now that I have overwrought all these self-critical caveats, the wolves will grudgingly allow me to post my thoughts.

On Authority

My first encounter with this game (during late beta testing) was a volatile one. The game’s instructions are relatively straightforward. You face an easel, and you must produce art. But the terms of that production are highly constricted—you may only select one of four stencils. The narrator mocks you for doing so. Subtly at first (“The turnip symbolizes loyalty and resilience. / *** How Fun ***”), then less so (“You are a lot of not much to look at. / *** Convalescence Is Hot ***”).

From the outset, I had a contentious relationship with the narrator, because I did not trust them and resented their authority. After complying to use a stencil for the first turn, I immediately wanted to escape, fiddling with the scenery, reading the help menu, and so forth. Really, of the “harmless cat / blameless turnip / unimpeachable boot / innocuous astronaut,” all four of these templates might as well have read “red flag / red flag / red flag / red flag.” I thought of No Exit, trapped in a sinister void with people who hate me. An abusive omnipresence. And I was determined to thwart them.

You know, in real life, I’m conflict-avoidant. Overly accommodating. I’d rather smooth things over, hide, that sort of thing. But something I’ve noticed about video games and interactive fiction, is that alone with the work and its world, a narrator that I don’t trust can bring out this rebellious and chaotic streak in me. Who knew?

I tried quitting, but the game blocked me from doing so. After using “forget” to maliciously wipe my little progress to spite the narrator, and other attempts to subvert the game’s basic instructions, I recalled my role as a beta tester and settled in to follow instructions and select the templates. I played along for a while, still with an undercurrent of resistance, seeing what would happen.

This next came to a head during series five, when the narrator escalates their control by restricting your output further, demanding a specific sequence of templates. I had to replay gallery five several times because I was determined not to comply, testing out different methods of rejecting the voice (such as: complying for the first five stencils, then snubbing them on the sixth, like I was trying to take power back by performing some malevolent edging against the narrator). Eventually, I decided that I could only proceed by following instructions, so I reluctantly did so.

Entering series six, I was in an intense and paranoid mindset. Now, the narrator is daring me to disobey. But I thought, well, if the terms of resistance are set and structured by the authority, how is it resistance at all? So I did not comply with the noncompliance either. How unruly of me. By this point, I was convinced that the point of the game was to figure out how to quit. Ultimately, I complied with the scripted disobedience enough to reach the end of the game, and fulfilled my destiny to quit and escape the narrator.

You may observe from this narration that I didn’t touch on much of the poetic content of the game. I did read them and I was paying attention, but my meta power struggle with the game and its narrator really dominated my experience. It’s really unlike anything else that I’ve played in that regard. Sure, there have been games where I disliked or distrusted the narrator, but I’m rarely convinced that the point of the game is to figure out how to stop playing it. That feels unusual.

I must have been the worst beta tester ever. Imagine receiving this back as the report of how someone played your game; that I fought with the narrator and tried to quit a bunch of times and refused to follow the instructions as much as possible. This was the first time I’ve beta tested an IF game. Goodness. You really can’t take me anywhere.

Later, I came back to play the official release, and then again postfestival to work on making sense of my thoughts for this review. On replay, my relationship to the work shifted significantly. It transformed from a heated power struggle into a kind of choreographed fencing match, wry stabs and parries between familiar combatants. The last time I played, series five felt like something vaguely BDSM-coded, like yes, I’m being stepped on, but I returned knowing that I would be stepped on, and allowed it to happen. For all the boots and astronauts and authority-play, I didn’t get Sylvia Plath so much as Eden Robinson, an Indigenous Canadian (Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations) author whose dystopian short story “Terminal Avenue” (2004) was often on my mind while playing this.

On Wolves

A question I return to when replaying this game is, who is my wolf? Not who is “the” wolf, as I gather there are many wolves, and Sylvia’s wolves, the author’s wolves, and my wolves might be almost completely unrecognizable to one another. The narrator speaks in the cadence of an abuser, picking at the reader’s progress, perceived faults, physical appearance, and so on. Despite that, it’s also a charismatic voice; perhaps that is why I kept reading and re-reading despite the negging and gaslighting. As much as I recoiled at times from the narrator’s comments about the player character’s weight from my own personal insecurities, there is part of me that laughs darkly at a line like, “Time is a fat circle.” Yes, very good, tell me another! How perverse.

To get a bit psychological, I guess, my wolf is not a specific person, but rather, an aspect of my inner voices. A malicious inner critic. I had been working on this realization while playing, but it really clicked for me when I considered Callie’s art at the beginning and in the postgame guide.

The art is tactile, using thread and layers of watercolor paper cutouts to create a sense of depth, inked and welcoming with unthreatening pastel tones. It contributes to the game’s veneer of approachability. So what do I notice here?

The title screen depicts a detailed, wide rectangular frame, surrounding a blank portrait space (except for the title). The templates, the framing devices for the work, are made a literal frame surrounding the white space, waiting for author and reader’s meaning to be imposed onto it. Or... something else. (I’ll get to that in a bit.)

There are also renderings of the four archetypes. The more I look at these, the more I am convinced that they function like in-universe tarot cards. Not in the sense that I mean to perform any divination with them, but rather, they contain within them a collage of associative symbols, much like how each actual tarot card depicts pieces of their myths—the Hierophant’s keys, or the Devil’s chains.

Take the astronaut, sealed away in their suit. They hold onto a sunflower for support, surrounded by a network of watching, writhing neurons. The cowboy boots tread across a flat Texan landscape, threatening a tornado even as they are threatened in turn by the talons of a raptor. The cat stretches in front of their handiwork, shredded blinds allowing light to filter onto a fruit-patterned tablecloth. The turnip grows beneath a clothesline, its roots driving a patchwork quilt (and hopefully not Sylvia Plath’s lampshade...) apart from dense soil, reaching an umbilicus out to connect with a cozy grub yet to emerge.

It feels like I am looking at tarot cards that, instead of being attuned to broader cultural archetypes, represent a deeply personal mythos that I have limited access to as a viewer/reader. In this sense, the art echoes the poetic vignettes, which feel similarly personal-yet-detached given my lack of deeper context.

But, getting back to my main point, the fifth template is what helped me understand the work a bit better. The wolf. A portrait is not the only thing with a frame. This is a mirror, isn’t it? The wolves are in the mirror. And the wolves in the mirror are, as the saying goes, closer than they appear. It’s what I see when the game forces me to look at myself. The frame itself is an ouroboros, the wolf consuming itself, uniting the narrator and reader. Perhaps it says something about artistic expression, this idea that you consume your own traumas and experiences and perspectives to produce art, or criticism, or what have you. And the audience consumes that consumption. And that consumed consumption leads to the next. So is the title screen not only framing a painting, but also, a mirror? Am I looking at a distortion of myself, the manifestation of all that lurks within?

My wolf is my inner critic, which is perhaps a bit narcissistic, but it’s not just, you know, my voice. It carries with it the imagined expectations of audiences, internalized social conditioning, and so forth. “We are the police,” the wolves say. “More of this, less of you.” Does it not feel uncomfortable, like I’m trapped in a void with myself, when I try to do my own writing? That I am menaced from within by a voice distilling the outside perspectives? What does it mean to still, even with templates as constrained as cat, turnip, boot, and astronaut, produce something meaningful? Isn’t there something self-exploitative about doing art, and despite that struggle, still returning to do more? Is that abusive? There are parts of me that can never be rendered because they cannot slip past my self-censorship and self-rejection, qualities earned from a lifetime of ill-fated validation seeking.

On Endings

I wrote a lot, but did I say enough? Did I say anything? I barely touched on the poetics, never describing the way that the game appropriates the structural elements of a parser game to put on its sinister art show. What about themes? Did I explore the motif of toxicity, the parasitic relationship between artist and audience, the black walnut tree and its allelopathy? Medical trauma, the carving out of oneself from the effects of disharmonious medications, the impossibility of consenting to be born, the subsequent unwitting entrapment within a doomed body? None of that? Certainly, I did Sylvia Plath no justice whatsoever.

Goodness.

At any rate, there is still time to do what is apparently the essential work of the reviewer, to say whether or not I recommend the game.

I do!

My reaction when I stumbled upon this game was, essentially, “What do you mean Tabitha wrote a game in Google freaking Maps?!” Then I clicked on it. Then I played it. Then I, for some reason, felt the need to write this 1900-word review about it. Goodness.

First, I would like to speak a bit on the gameplay. The game is structured as a scavenger hunt puzzle using a Google Maps interface. Attached to each location are a name, description, photograph, and corresponding marker on the satellite view of the town. Each location is also attached to a letter or number, and a clue to the next location. The object of the game is to follow the clues in order, spelling out a 15-character address which you can then enter into the search bar and reach the end.

I found the difficulty to be well-tuned. There weren’t so many locations that I felt overwhelmed, but not so few as to make the game trivially easy. Similarly, the clues were reasonable enough to solve, and though a few were tricky, the game has a built-in way to show you that you are off track. As much as I tried to convince myself that “ROFTE” was eventually going to spell out the name of a road (I don’t know, maybe there’s some family called the Roftenworths—who’s to say?) I had to admit that I was deluding myself when the next clue clearly pointed to a location that I had already visited! I went back through my notes and found the mistake and was able to get right back on track to finish it. Even if you are initially wrong, you don’t lose all the work that you’ve done since the mistake, as eventually it will link back up. As a result, this puzzle was engaging, and never felt tedious. I felt motivated to solve it, and I did in about 40 minutes!

Continuing this discussion of the gameplay, I think The Swormville Sweep makes great use of the features of the medium. I found that I didn’t need to do any external Google searches—all the information I needed was already available without leaving the page I was on. The game subtly teaches you to think like a researcher, and consider how to apply the types of information you have been presented with. For instance, some clues are best solved by taking a closer look at the photographs; others ask you to think about the relative locations of buildings on the map; others still ask you to consider if what you are seeing in the present matches with the description of what once was there, to realize that the building has been replaced with something else. Information that you might reflexively skim over (the date of someone’s birth, for instance) is suddenly the key to answering your questions. You get the idea, I hope?

There were some real frissons of satisfaction I experienced while playing. Notably, the bizarre masonry of the Leising House. When skimming over the thumbnail of the image, I was left with the impression that it was a photo of an unremarkable house that had been taken through a chain-link fence. However, when the game prompted me to take a closer look, I was surprised by how the image resolved into something totally different. I can imagine walking or driving past such a building and doing a double take because of how distinctive the masonry is. Or, take the revelation that one of these buildings housed the inventors of new musical instruments, the one highlighted by the game being, whimsically, the “Jazzboline.” And finally, getting the overall puzzle solution correct and typing it in is delightful.

I have some other things I wanted to talk about related to my experiences here. This work does not present with a strong sense of narrative purpose, which is interesting! The author-as-historian doesn’t get in your way. While you can glean some intent from the types of things ey focus on—architecture, for instance—there is a kind of detachment in the tone of the materials. A thought that haunted my playthrough was, essentially, why make a game about Swormville, New York? What am I meant to learn? And then I thought about it more and was like, okay, apart from just DM’ing the author to ask em—which is valid, if a bit of a cop-out—I am the person here who is playing a game about Swormville, now, in this moment. No one asked me to do this. I chose this. And the game is mechanically guiding me to think like a researcher. So what do I think about what I’m seeing in Swormville? I can form my own opinions—I don’t need to be told what to think, right? Still, as satisfying as it was to just solve the puzzle on my own, I felt the absence of someone to talk to about it, and I thought, well, I can just write what I think and post it on ifdb.org, and then a few people might see it before it sinks beneath “See the full list...” in the new reviews tab.

The starting point for the game includes an image of a plaque constructed in 1973, which reads, “Swormville was settled by people of Bavarian and French Canadian descent. The Rev. John N. Neumann, a secular priest, held services here as early as 1839. The town’s first Catholic church was built in 1849, serving 80 families in the so-called Parish of the Transit. The community was named after a prominent citizen and developer, Adam Schworm.” I find it noteworthy, I guess, that these 1973 narrators of the town’s history (apparently, the Clarence Chamber of Commerce?) have constructed a history that begins the moment a Christian church service occurred, as if that land sprang into existence unoccupied just then. Said more plainly, Indigenous absence looms large around this plaque.

Zooming out, Swormville is not far from present-day Tuscarora and Tonawanda reservations, nor from ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee nations (Seneca seems to be closest). The authors of the plaque were perhaps not so invested in revealing what sequence of politics, treaties, violence, and/or dispossession made possible this historical “starting point” for the town. I was reminded of historian Jean M. O’Brien’s book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, where she observes, “Southern New England is the ideal place to locate this study because it was there that people made the boldest claims to ‘firsting,’ a central thematic of this book that in essence asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice” (p. xii). And I’m like... wow. There it is, right there on a plaque. Firsting. A formulation of public-civic memory that obscures any Indigenous presence here. To be clear, my point is not to pick on Swormville in particular. I have never been to the northeast U.S. and am unfamiliar with the region. I’m so unfamiliar that I didn’t initially think to ask myself if the Buffalo area even counts as “Southern New England.” Apparently, it doesn’t. But I think O’Brien’s point applies well here, regardless. As I said, the game primes you to think like a researcher as you solve its puzzle, so in that vein, this is one of the things that I personally would be drawn to interrogate: how the town’s self-mythologizing wraps into U.S. colonial mythos more broadly. How does Swormville’s version of this compare to other places in the U.S., like where I live?

...I realize that I’ve kind of derailed this review. I mean, literally what is happening that I felt obligated to include a works (or really... work) cited section in an IFDB review? It’s not that serious.

But if you’ll stay with me as I huff some more academia fumes, I couldn’t help but think about the town as a kind of architectural palimpsest. If you’re a person not so succumbed to academic jargon as I apparently still am, you might reasonably wonder, what the actual f*ck is a “palimpsest”? To explain it in a way that will fall short for people who already know what it means better than I do, it’s a parchment (or paper) that has been reused or written over many times, leaving behind traces of all the ways it has been used. Apparently, these types of records are of particular interest to historians/archivists intrigued by the way that a single object like this represents historical trends or values in a material way.

Anyway, I bring this up because of how the game draws your attention to buildings that have been destroyed, relocated, and repurposed. When I clicked on the photo of the Swormville Fire Company location, and saw the engraved firehouse sign sitting above a window declaring “Holistic Bodywork Spa & Massage” in gaslight gatekeep girlboss calligraphy, I couldn’t help but think of the idea of the palimpsest and how this town—and perhaps most towns—contain these unsettling moments of anachronism.

I feel such a strange set of emotions when trying to wrap my head around Swormville, a town I have no personal attachment to. There’s something beautiful in this reuse of a historical building. Instead of wastefully being torn down or destroyed, it has a new life and a new purpose. At the same time, I feel... I don’t know, something sinister and empty about the modernity of it? (And not to pick on the local business here! According to the Google reviews, Holistic Bodywork Spa & Massage has a 4.1 out of 5 stars, so I’m sure it’s very lovely. Way cooler than if it were in some boilerplate building, at any rate!) But I still can’t help but feel that creeping cultural emptiness—like the urge to stripmallify is trying to take over this town and make it less specific from the inside out. Among the whimsy of the town, under an overcast sky in the photos, is this slight quality of feeling run-down, like we’re one or two lighthouses away from finding ourselves on a modern Lovecraftian horror set. And I guess there’s something emotionally engaging about that? It’s kind of melancholy, to both embrace and yet fear such changes? It’s something that I don’t notice in my day-to-day life, because I’ve mostly only lived in cities with much younger buildings. (I’m sure the effect is even more extreme elsewhere in the world, of course, where some buildings have hundreds if not thousands of years of history). But personally, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to observe the palimpsest effect of buildings being reused. Or at least, I haven’t noticed those opportunities when they presented themselves. Maybe I should!

So. Where does this ultimately leave me with this game, and this review? Well, the last thing I was thinking about was how this game could in theory be played as a scavenger hunt in real life, with a knowledgeable local tour guide. It’s only a few blocks, so you could spend a day doing this! But, I mean, the odds of me ever finding myself in Swormville, New York are vanishingly remote, so the adaptation of that experience to a virtual one is a great choice to make the experience of engaging with this town accessible to many more people than might otherwise be possible.

I think there are many ways to take this game: as a fun puzzle, an interesting use of the medium, an invitation to ask historical questions, or consider how it feels to wander through this particular place, or otherwise bring your own experiences and perspectives to bear upon it. I hope you can forgive me for doing so in a way that is potentially time-wasting for you to have read, if you indeed did so to arrive, finally, at the end of this review.

Work Cited:

O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.