Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

This game will appeal to people who want a specific kind of linear visual novel. It has no puzzles and no choices that affect the narrative. Actually, no choices at all, as far as I can tell.

So it's closer to a linear short story than you might expect from interactive fiction, but it makes good use of the "interactive" part: there's graphics, music and sound, and each line of text is carefully paced to maintain interest. Screen transitions and sound are managed effectively to enhance the mood, e.g. the background goes dark when a character retreats into her own inner thoughts, so you get a black screen with nothing but one hard-hitting line of text that makes you sit back and say, "Dang." Happened a few times.

The overall effect is cinematic, and the third act switches up the format entirely, in a way that works very well in context.

Also, the graphics are cool. The two main characters, Chun and Nica, have fun sprite art with dynamic expressions that change based on what's happening in the story. Plus, and this is key, the photo backgrounds seem to feature the real places the main characters are traveling to.

Someone on the Itch.io page said they were "blown away by how enamoured the game is with reality". The photo backgrounds are one great example. This story is firmly rooted in the real world. It isn't shy to discuss politics or our current reality; in the opening, Nica, who's trans, says "The new US president hates people like me". Meanwhile, Chun (Spoiler - click to show)is originally from Hong Kong, but her family moved to the UK because she participated in the 2019 protests against the Chinese government and they were afraid for her safety.

The characters bring up books that actually exist (e.g. Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney), movies that actually exist (e.g. Nica and Chun watch Letters from the Big Man (2011) together, a scene that taught me about a film I'd never heard of), and people who actually exist (e.g. lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall). It was immersive. I felt I was there with the characters, walking through London with them, watching them navigate their relationship together.

London is of interest to me, being the "capital of a decaying empire" and all, as the game says. Regretfully, I think Britain has pizzazz and can't make myself get over it. But the relationship is what really takes center stage here. This is less a story about London and more a story about the main characters as a couple.

The relationship was very well done. I find a lot of fictional relationships too perfect for my tastes. I'm more familiar with the part of a relationship where you're constantly second-guessing yourself, wondering if you actually like the other person or not, wondering if you're doing the right thing, than the idealized final stage where you're supposed to love and trust each other. Even with someone you've known for a long time, there's always a degree of uncertainty over how much fun you're having together, and it's something you have to constantly be aware of and ready to respond to if the answer is "not much". At least, that's how I feel.

This story got at that experience. The things Chun and Nica do are things I've done, and they felt intimately familiar. Not just the part where they're watching movies or traveling together, but the constant anxiety layered on top of that, worrying about how much intimacy the other person wants and whether that move was one step too far, did you ruin things, are you really having fun, do you really want this relationship, what kind of relationship do you want in general, and what will your life look like if you can't handle one? Will you be alone forever?

The effect is simultaneously cozy and ridiculously stressful. I had a small box of mints nearby and ended up eating about half of them.

If I had to offer any criticism, it would be that the ending sequence (Spoiler - click to show)felt almost too harsh compared to the two's behavior when they make up afterwards. This is Your Mileage May Vary territory, but I was wondering how the relationship could ever recover at that point, and was surprised when Nica was willing to forgive Chun after what Nica had said to her earlier. This can be chalked up to personal idiosyncrasy, though, since everyone has their own personal standards for relationship issues.

In general, really liked this one. One part I especially enjoyed was towards the end, when (Spoiler - click to show)Chun and Nica can't make themselves talk face-to-face, so they go into a virtual VRChat world together and communicate through VRChat, while sitting silently in the same room. It reminded me of the way my friends and I would talk during breaks in high school, typing rapidly to each other on Skype chat while we were all sitting in the same room and completely silent in real life. Or how we'd sometimes burn time by just pulling up the laptop and scrolling through Reddit together. A lot of people disdain the online and privilege real-world interaction, but to me it seems they're just different ways to interact with people. Chun and Nica wouldn't have met if it wasn't for the Internet connecting them across thousands of miles. The real world isn't always inherently superior.

That said, everyone needs to live in the real world to some extent. I guess navigating the boundaries between online and offline is what every person needs to manage on their own, deciding what they want and how much is enough.



Story excerpt:

Melodrama is only melodrama to those who don't share the same concerns and stakes of the characters.

We have been taught to withhold our emotions, to calculate, to belittle those who make a mountain out of a molehill.

In short, we are taught to be monsters to each other.

---

Because we are monsters, I see relationships as fragile, ephemeral, always in need of repair. They are susceptible to decline when we stop being proactive about maintaining them. We fool ourselves into thinking they are small matters until it is too late.

This is a game about assembling a portrait by selecting one of four motifs (cat, turnip, boot, astronaut). Each time you make your selection, you see some text, and the process repeats a certain number of times until you reach an ending.

My first playthrough of this game took about five minutes, and I put that in as the time it takes to complete the game, but it's misleading since you can play many, many times and get many, many different endings. There's an ending achievement system and extra content unlocked in the "guide" (which is more like another part of the game) as you achieve more endings. Over about two hours I've found dozens of endings, and I'm sure there are more. Probably. The mechanics are purposefully obtuse. I didn't get enough sleep last night.

The writing is very abstract. For the most part it's impossible to pin down a concrete meaning to the words. It feels like modernist poetry. Or postmodernist poetry. Whatever it is, I'm not smart enough to know. Something faintly autobiographical but presented in a scattered, fragmented way. Fiction and reality juxtaposed. Snippets of a life. The repeating symbols of the cat, turnip, boot, astronaut, and wolf hovering alongside, the wolf in the gallery, which might mean something if you squint, maybe not...

There are also overarching returns to abuse, pain and trauma. It feels a bit like a nightmare, in that way.

And there's a lot of playing around with the look of default Inform menus. The standard ways of displaying Game A by Author B, Short Description C, Release D, You Have Reached Ending E, get messed with until they become part of the conceit.

The occasional passage with more clarity describes an American life, the life of someone who apparently has or had several cats, who has lived through something that might be a marriage or relationship, and mental illness and solitude, who stares out the window at night and sees the blinking lights of suburban houses... a ground truth buried in this labyrinth of images. But it's difficult to tell for sure.

I liked it, being a fan of surrealism. The sleep deprivation also might've helped, who's to say.

Finally I want to mention that in the Pactdice TTRPG setting created by Wildbow, there are locations called "Paths", extradimensional dreamrealms that can be navigated by "Finders" in a videogame-like fashion. By completing the right steps, a Finder can beat a Path (like beating a game) and receive a reward. But the Paths are also occupied by the Wolf, the manifestation of your personal trauma, who wants to torture and kill you while destroying everything you've spent your life building. It's a pretty cool setting. It has absolutely nothing to do with this game, but I was reminded of it due to the Wolf thing.

I will probably keep playing this and may update the review if I unlock anything that explains more.

An excerpt:

Natural Nature
A spiraling fancy by Kim I. Colburns
Release V / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

You're ruining everything.

Throne Room
Are you a good kid? A good little person?

All night you have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
(*C*) cat dreaming of wolves
(*T*) turnip at the she-wolf's breast (times incorporated: 1)
(*B*) underwater footprint
(*A*) martian canal hobo (times incorporated: 2)

>b

It doesn't hurt.

Stop yelling!
It doesn't hurt
much





*** The Lithium Makes Your Blood Bitter ***



Just try to enjoy it.

The basic mechanic of this game is fascinating. There's an infinite number of "pages", some pages have text, and you can only change which page you are on by clicking a plus or minus button. No flipping ahead, and importantly, no way of telling when you're done. Is there more? Should you continue on? Is it worth continuing on?

That last question is crucial, since this game is also, as the description indicates, about suicide. The symbolism is inherent in the gameplay. To even reach the first bits of text, you need to first click through many pages of darkness. There's a lot of black space, and moments where you're alone with your own feelings, uncertain, clicking a button over and over again without knowing if you should really keep trying. The game itself comments on this.

This is the game.

...

It's fucking boring.

...

Don't tell me it gets better.

Dark apartment room. Smells like rotting food. The stain of a woman on the wall, grease patterns frozen in contortions of great pain.

Acceptable delusions for trapped people:
-tested by God
-emitting pheromone that marks oneself for cruelty
-cursed
-no one would treat a human being this way therefore i am not human
-i deserved to be treated this way

It began late last year while Rebecca was attending Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland

...

For more than a year...15 middle-school children...urged her to kill herself

...

Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide.

...

She then changed her online username from Rebecca to “That Dead Girl” and left her phone on her bed.

We cut ourselves, starve ourselves, blame ourselves, kill ourselves.

Oppression removes its fingerprints by forcing us to use the knife on ourselves. Self-harm is harm.

...

They try to explain away our pain with vague gestures at mental illness, hysteria, some magical disease we acquired that couldn't possibly be explained by the fact that you dehumanizedrapedabusedharassedgaslitostracizedliedbeattorturedmutilated us.

...

Creating the circumstances by which one is forced to contemplate their own death is a form of violence.

When you see a person, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is least human and 10 is most human.

...

You already do that anyways.