Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

I loved this one when I was younger. The first time I played it, years ago, I think I cried. But playing it again, it's much worse than I remember. It's odd how time can reverse your opinions.

The concept: Russian-American artist commits suicide. You learn about his life through the eyes of four different people visiting a posthumous exhibition of his paintings. Creative idea, unique and meta.

But the writing simply isn't good enough to produce the effect the author wanted to achieve. I found the character voices flat and one-dimensional. At times they degenerate into stereotypes. The college student was my least favorite. I remember even in my original playthrough, I was annoyed by her unjustified hatred of the artist, Russians, and men in general. She's a straw feminist, who despite being a humanities major (all the humanities majors I know are extremely passionate about their field of study) demonstrates no appreciation for art or her university education. I found her character shallow. "Boomer caricacture of SJW college student" shallow.

The other characters are similar. Of course the art critic is snooty and pretentious, of course the wife is a meek simple country woman. Even the paintings themselves don't grab me, maybe because the mediocre writing makes for mediocre mental images. And the metaphors are basic. The artist was going through Hell, so he painted Hell, look at these pictures of Orpheus and so on. The artist had a difficult relationship with religion, so here's a painting of a church covered in insects. His last painting, of a noose, was found on his easel after he hanged itself. Too on-the-nose for me.

The pictures suffer from simultaneously too much and too little description: often there's so much going on that the author can barely describe it all. The author is so caught up with character voice that the descriptions mix in with them and you never get a clear picture of the art you're looking at, even though the art is a central point of the game.

And the writing just isn't good enough. Some of the wording is awkward. Characters speak in voice until they don't, so the game can provide you with directions and tell you where the exits are. The painting descriptions have minor missteps, like:

> However, Domokov has done amazing and confusing tricks with perspective, similar to "Cornucopium".

That "done" doesn't sound right to me. It feels inelegant, and uncharacteristic of a learned seventy-three year old critic. There are more than a few places like this in the writing, where the language feels slightly off. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm nitpicking. But this is a very text-heavy piece, so the tiny issues stood out to me.

I wish the number of paintings was lessened, and the descriptions lengthened. With multiple paragraphs to describe a painting and the viewpoint character's reaction, the concept could work. But Finley tries to fit everything into a few sentences.

"Maudlin", as another review said, is the right word for it. In the hands of a better writer this could be a good story, but it's hamstrung by sentimentality and reliance on cliches.



Disclaimer: Since my past self was enamored with this game, clearly my less-than-complimentary opinions here are subjective. I tried to be fair, but in the end I can't change the fact that this game really didn't cut it for me on the replay. Each to their own, maybe you'd like this one, etc.

If you really hate this review, just pretend I was roleplaying as the snooty art critic or the idiot student or something.

The UI in this game is fantastic. The effort to recreate Discord's interface, right down to the typing indicators, is incredible. Also love how it switches around depending on which character you're typing as. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see Twine games do, recreating existing websites and playing with the medium in a way that makes full use of Twine's HTML capabilities and the potential of web fiction in general. Great stuff.

The plot, however, I have some quibbles with. The topic is dark, it's interesting, and it's treated with the gravity it deserves. But as a person who's been in a few close-knit Discord servers, I feel like what the story is missing is a real sense of community with more fleshed-out characters. Since the game is so short, we don't have time to get a sense of who any of the characters are. Name, age, gender, and some vague descriptors is pretty much it. None of them have the time to feel like real people. We don't get to see how the community works and what things were like before the revelations came out, which deadens the impact of it all. We're told that Cornelius is admired and respected more than we're shown that. We only see him (Spoiler - click to show)being a creep, and I guessed that he was a predator almost immediately. It wasn't a surprise at all. I think if there was more detail on the specifics of these people and more on what things were like before it all went down, more of a gradual reveal that there's something wrong with this guy, it would make the revelations and the decision to dissolve the group at the end much more impactful.

Also wish there was more choice involved, though I'm not sure how. I only played once, but there doesn't seem to be a broad range of choices. It's either (Spoiler - click to show)"tell everyone what Cornelius did" or "don't", and what sane person wouldn't pick the first option? I get that in real life there are various reasons people wouldn't want to, but as a reader choosing not to tell just strips you from being able to see the full narrative.

Also, and this may just be a pet peeve of mine, some of the character voices feel slightly off. The older characters especially. Their inclusion is odd in the first place because I rarely see mixed-age groups online and especially people older than 30 or 40, although this might just be a side effects of the communities I'm in. I can see it making sense here with the history of the group, though some more history and notes on how the younger members ended up joining might help. Anyway. A lot of the older characters' dialogue came across as old people talk for the sake of making them look old, i.e. dropping 'boy', and 'dear' all the time. Basically, the older characters rang the least true to me. But as I just said I have no idea how older people act in chatrooms, so who am I to talk?

It's still an interesting game, though. I liked how the flashbacks slowly revealed more of the story over time. And the escalation from (Spoiler - click to show)"Cornelius is acting off here" to "Cornelius is a straight-up predator", coupled with the drama of the car accident, unfolds well. I think if it was longer, and gave us more time to get attached to the characters, I'd feel the vibes more.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]

Disclaimer: the following review is heavily biased because I love AI and post-apocalyptic settings and especially when the two are combined, so from the outset the concept was hitting all the right notes. I mean, "post-apocalyptic AI overseeing the remnants of the world" is an idea that resonates with my soul. Plus it's based on a poem by Kit Riemer, who's one of my favorite IF authors. I fell in love immediately.

Also, the ending, as they say, ripped my heart in two.

(Spoiler - click to show)I can't believe the author had the guts to kill off the protagonist like that. I mean, what the hell? When the ending happened, I think I stared blankly at the screen for a while. Then I said to myself, "There has to be a way to avoid this." Then I replayed and discovered the game was entirely linear. None of your choices matter at all. There's no way to avoid failure.

The ending message is devastating. It really makes the game for me, knowing that no matter what you do, you can't avoid your fate. You're always going to be left dead and forgotten. At first I rankled knowing everything I'd done was meaningless, and then the more I thought about it the more I realized how perfectly tragic it was. You were doomed before the game even started. And the slow decline from setting out on your mission with purpose to falling behind and eventually dying unceremoniously is so well-paced.

It makes the greater setting, which is hinted at in just the right ways, even cooler. Throughout the game you're treated to glimpses of what might have caused the earth to become uninhabitable and where the humans went. It's tantalizing to have these sketches of the wider world you'll never know more about because you're going to die alone. And the whole story revolves around futility, so it fits.



Other stuff:

The writing's good. Not necessarily on the sentence-by-sentence level, but in the way all the lovely aphorisms are put together. The snippets of art. The odd dreams you have while in sleep mode. While not directly relevant to the plot, they resonate with the themes of death, solitude, and the search for purpose in a way I can't totally articulate.

I also couldn't avoid thinking about Kit Riemer's Consciousness Hologram and Universal Hologram. There's a scene in I think Universal Hologram where you're watching Youtube videos from thousands of years ago and the Internet, long-ascended to sentient AI status, is fruitlessly trying to explain them to you. But neither of you actually know what's going on. All this stuff has been shorn of its original meaning because so much has been destroyed, and no matter how hard you try you can't recreate it.

In short: Love how your entire existence here is for the sake of a long-gone species you can never fully understand, and love how it ends. Such a keen sense of loneliness and loss.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]