Reviews by EJ

In this short visual novel, a time traveler resolves to leave her partner because she is distracting him from his true calling as a successful game developer—from her experience of alternate timelines, she knows that his career would have taken off by now if he hadn’t met her, and thus, for his own good, she must go. (He gets no say in the matter; the game does at least acknowledge that it might be selfishness on the PC’s part to make this decision unilaterally.)

This is the creator’s first release, and they created every aspect of the game except the music, which is impressive. The art is lovely and well suited to the fantasy-romance focus, and the prose has a nice flow, although it returns to the same metaphors a little often. The soundtrack’s melancholy music-box tune fits the mood well.

However, Threads of Snow’s single choice is a glorified “restart or quit?” and I was unclear on whether it was meant to have any in-universe implications. If it was, they didn’t really work for me—the PC might be tempted to loop through this short moment again and again rather than move on, but the player has little incentive to do so.

I also think that I would feel the dilemma more keenly if the partner’s potential illustrious career was something that brought more concrete good to the world than game development, or even if it were an artistic career in a field that wasn’t so notoriously grueling. The partner’s relationship with the PC really might bring him more happiness in the long run than a game dev career would, I suspect.

[Pyg]malion* stars a deity who has been murdered and temporarily reanimated in order to find their murderer. The suspects are all embodiments of various societal forces—politics, celebrity culture, Big Data, capitalism—and despite your divinity, it rapidly becomes clear that you are the underdog here. (Presumably the allegory is that one or more of these forces has supplanted religion in modern society.)

The game’s visual presentation is very slick; I was impressed by the graphics, and I deeply appreciated the ability to swap out the retro game font for a regular sans-serif. The descriptions of the strange dimension the game takes place in and its denizens are inventive and striking.

But, all right, let’s cut to the chase, here: you can’t solve the mystery. The crime scene has been cleaned up before you get there, so there’s no physical evidence to find, and the suspects give a handful of pat responses about where they were and what they were doing that are impossible to verify. And ultimately it doesn’t matter anyway, because all of the suspects are above the law.

You could debate the merits of subverting audience expectations versus the disappointment of breaking the implicit promises set up at the start of the story; you could discuss how much value there is in upending the expectations of the rather conservative mystery genre, specifically. You could argue about whether undermining player agency in an interactive medium is a good way to make a statement or whether it’s more likely to annoy players enough that they’re not inclined to listen to what you have to say.

But I think the most salient point is this: such a narrative just isn’t very interesting. Once the player realizes that the mystery is unsolvable, which happens fairly quickly, there’s nothing else to be gotten out of the game. There’s no other plot, the PC is a cipher, and the social commentary is not deep. The interactivity only exacerbates this issue. By the time the night is halfway over, the player has probably seen all the dialogue, and not much really changes, so the only thing to do is to wander from mostly-empty location to mostly-empty location, running down the clock.

In its unusual concept, memorable descriptive writing, and appealing retro visuals, the game shows a lot of promise, and I would be interested to see the writer’s future works. But it’s unfortunately too static and too repetitive to be satisfying as a game or as a story.

Excalibur takes the form of a fan wiki for a fictional ’70s science fiction TV show. The show itself is now completely lost to the BBC’s tape-erasing practices, but the fans have come together to assemble what information they can from their own memories and whatever ancillary materials they can get their hands on, documenting the content of the show and the behind-the-scenes dramas of the cast and crew.

I found this premise intriguing, given my own experiences with fandom. The relationship of a fandom to its source material is often less straightforward than one might think (especially if that fandom has been going for decades). Theories about a show or interpretations of ambiguous elements can become widely agreed upon as fact even though the actual contents of the show support multiple possibilities, and the popular theory/interpretation may not even be the best supported. Small details are given disproportionate importance—a joke that appeared two or three times becomes, in the minds of the fans, a running joke in practically every episode; something a character does or mentions once becomes a prominent character trait. Popular fan writers invent characterization and worldbuilding details that other fan writers adopt, and eventually everyone forgets those details weren’t in the show. In a very real sense, a fandom is not so much about the actual source material as it is about a version of it that lives in the collective imagination of the fans.

The concept of a fandom whose source material doesn’t exist anymore provides a great opportunity to explore this phenomenon: the fans are trying to reconstruct the show as accurately as possible, but does it really matter what was or wasn’t actually in there? Are these fans sticking around due to love of the show, as they profess, or is it more that they’re getting something out of the social aspects of the fandom? If Excalibur had been more focused on the dynamics between a work of fiction, its creators, and its audience (and among that audience), I would have loved it. Instead, however, it was trying for some grander themes (Do we place undue importance on memorializing things—or people—that are gone? At what point does “remembering” turn into “being stuck in the past”?), which didn’t quite work for me.

This may be a matter of taste; in general, I prefer exploring themes like this through characters rather than as philosophical abstracts. In this case, I would have liked to see either different characters grappling with the comforts of memory versus the benefits of moving on, with different results, or one particularly richly textured, well-drawn character’s personal journey. Instead, Excalibur mostly offers philosophical musings alongside characters who are caricatures of common fan types—including the central character, Ian, who is that guy who loves being a big fish in a small pond, and is perhaps so high on his own self-importance that he’s forgotten how small the pond actually is. The caricatures are well-done, and in a game that was more parodic in tone I would have no faults to find with them, but they sit somewhat oddly alongside the game's high-minded thematic concerns.

One section of the story that did work for me was the portion of the game focusing on VerdantKnight and HandOfBedivere, who, having met through Excalibur fandom, are working together to make a fan documentary and are also in a long-distance relationship. Then, after a visit to the main filming location, Bedi disappears from the internet. Did he fall victim to the show’s supposed curse, or has VK just been ghosted? Either way, it’s a tale of an obsession with the past that is at best relationship-destroying and at worst deadly, and VK, in his grief, reacts by clinging even harder to that obsession, insisting that he will finish the documentary on his own. And in that moment, I cared about how destructive that obsession was, because VK felt like a real person, not A Certain Type of Fan.

But then, “felt like a real person” is a slightly ironic thing to say here. On several occasions, Excalibur brings up the idea that the show never existed and no one involved in creating it ever existed. That’s all very well and good, but then it suggests that (Spoiler - click to show)the fans never existed, or at least that many/most of them are sockpuppets (that is, fake accounts) made by Ian. So if the show isn’t real, and the people making the show aren’t real, and their on-set drama and the mysteries surrounding the making of the show aren’t real, and the fans aren’t real, and their interpersonal dramas aren’t real… what’s the point of any of this? (You might, if you were being a smart aleck, point out that this game is fiction, so of course none of it is real. But emotional investment in a work of fiction requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, so it’s hard to make that investment in a work that doesn’t believe in many aspects of its own created world and doesn’t want the player to get too comfortable doing so either.)

The point, in fact, seems to largely be Ian’s personal psychodrama—can he bring himself to let go of this fandom, or will he be stuck in a spiral of unhealthy obsession forever?—(Spoiler - click to show)but then, that actually makes less sense to me under the “sockpuppeting” interpretation, too. If the other fans are real, then the reasons for his attachment to the fandom are obvious, but if this is all a one-man puppet show, then he’s not actually getting any attention or respect, so what is he getting? But perhaps the bigger problem here is that I don’t quite care enough to come up with interpretations of his motivations, because for most of the game he’s presented as an exaggerated, two-dimensional stereotype, which was funny, but didn’t really prime me to be interested in dissecting his psychology.

Despite this wall of text, I really did like Excalibur overall; the reason I’ve written this whole long review of it is that I almost loved it, but the “is this fake? Is that fake? Is it all fake?” kept distracting me from (what I felt was) the good stuff.

The visual design of the game is fantastic, and it does a mostly good job of wrangling Twine into the shape of a wiki despite Twine’s protests (although I did feel the lack of a proper back button). And I did think that the first two layers of the narrative, the descriptions of the show and the mysterious goings-on behind the scenes, were well-executed, with a nicely unsettling atmosphere, when leaving aside the repeated suggestions that they might never have existed. But with those suggestions in place, these two layers rely on the third layer, the goings-on in the fandom, to give them meaning, and Ian’s story didn’t do that for me.

In Cygnet Committee, the player navigates an abandoned military compound and learns the story of an AI based on Joan of Arc. The opening scene, swimming to a beach and then avoiding mines on your way to the compound, seems like pretty standard spy stuff. Then I reached the compound and found the beanstalks growing ears, and I realized this game was going to be much weirder than I first thought.

In general, the world of the game is strange, and some things are definitely meant to be humorous, but it’s not a farce. It strikes a tricky balance between the objective strangeness—ridiculousness, even—of the situation and the sense that this is all deadly serious within the universe of the game, managing to be thought-provoking and elicit some empathy for the Joan AI even though a bare-bones summary of the plot would seem like a joke.

The gameplay is innovative: you have four audio tracks, visually represented on the screen, that play when you mouse over them, and you have to select the one that plays the correct sound (listening for a “click” when you’re picking a lock, for example)—or sometimes no sound at all (as when you’re navigating a minefield and need to avoid the tracks where your detector is beeping to indicate the presence of a mine). Sound-centric gameplay like this is rare even in video games, and in IF, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been done before. It’s certainly unique and memorable.

The problem is that, for me, it wasn’t actually fun. With a few exceptions (about which more later), every single puzzle is the same “listen to these four tracks and select the one that’s different” task, which offers little opportunity for increasing difficulty or complexity over the course of the game. I got some enjoyment out of figuring out the gimmick on the very first puzzle, but after that it got repetitive very quickly, especially as the player has to redo previous tasks every time they want to revisit an area.

It’s not that I require complicated puzzles in order to enjoy something. I frequently enjoy works of IF and video games that have no gameplay to speak of. I’m happy to play a walking simulator or click links to advance a linear Twine story, as long as it feels like interactivity is serving some purpose in the game. But when a game has gameplay elements that are nominally challenges, but are so easy that completing them gives no real sense of satisfaction, it ends up feeling like busywork to me.

The timed segments are, I think, a bit more challenging; I was extremely bad at them, because I have poor reflexes/fine motor skills, so I feel a little weird saying that I think the game would have been better if there were more of them, but I do think that a game focused more around the timed segments would have felt more rewarding. (Although these segments would have benefited greatly from having a timer on-screen, I think.)

I can see how much work this must have been on the technical end of things, and it seems very polished, without bugs or places where the essentially-custom system gets noticeably wonky. But in the end, while I appreciate it as a technical feat and admire the delicate tonal balance that the writing achieves, I didn’t really enjoy the game.

The Legend of Horse Girl is a gleefully absurd take on Western tropes, starring a heroine raised by wild horses and featuring a bar staffed by coyotes, apparently sentient tumbleweeds, snake oil farmers, dairy spiders, and more. It’s also pure, (mostly) unadulterated fun. I am not exaggerating when I say I laughed out loud multiple times while playing this game. I was unreasonably amused when the character Butch McCreedy turned out to have a twin named Femme McCreedy, for example. And then there’s one puzzle solution that involves (Spoiler - click to show)dunking bats in milk as if they were cookies until they get fed up with this treatment and fly away, the mental image of which just killed me. (I thought I was going to be (Spoiler - click to show)actually drowning them, which would have been ridiculous enough, but the way it played out was funnier.)

Speaking of the puzzle solutions, they’re generally just as absurd as everything else in the world of the game, but most of them are signposted well enough that it works anyway. Given that the gameplay is very straightforward (get items, use them on other items, repeat) and requires few unusual verbs, one could say that trying to figure out what might work per the internal logic (such as it is) of the zany setting is the puzzle, in most cases. And when that works, it’s tremendously satisfying. There were a few places in which the leap of logic the game wanted me to make was a bit too far for me; I don’t know if there were things in the game that I missed that would have hinted at these solutions, though.

I did wish a little bit for a built-in hints function, although the list of necessary verbs in the “about” text sometimes proved helpful – not so much for guess-the-verb issues, which I didn’t feel the game had many of, but because in some cases the very presence of a verb in the list hinted at an approach to a puzzle. Also on the subject of quality-of-life features, I did appreciate that the game usually removes objects from your inventory if you don’t need them anymore.

There was also one aspect of the structure with which I struggled a bit: you can, essentially, encounter the introductions to the majority of the game’s puzzles right off the bat, without even beginning to solve anything. This made it sometimes unclear to me what order I should be trying to solve the puzzles in, and whether I didn’t have what I needed to solve a particular puzzle yet (probably because it was gated behind the solution to some other puzzle) or whether I did but hadn’t figured out how to use it. But this is, I think, not an objective flaw but a matter of taste – I personally get a little overwhelmed by having a ton of "open" puzzles at the same time, but others might prefer that to a more linear approach.

And in the end, the charm of the writing carried me through these minor frustrations without much difficulty. Despite any nitpicks, I had an absolute blast playing this game, and that’s the important thing.

The Fall of Asemia is a game about language, or a game about history and culture and the fact that these are necessarily mediated through language, which is something that can be lost. I suspect Asemia’s name comes from Greek: the negative prefix a- and the root sema, or “sign,” as in semantikos, “significance,” whence the English word “semantic.”

Asemia is not without signs, and those signs are not without meaning, but those signs are no longer legible to most people in the world in which the game takes place. The PC is charged with translating them, but seems unsatisfied with her ability to do so. Translation is always a challenge, but beyond that, the protagonist seems to be dragged down by the weight of the responsibility of serving as a conduit for the lost voices of the Asemians. Or perhaps not – we only see her in a few brief exchanges in between the translated journal entries that make up the bulk of the game, and though her stress and feelings of inadequacy are clear, the reasons for them are open to interpretation. But I did feel like there was a lot going on in between the lines.

The game is mainly played by clicking on glyphs to change them and reading the journal entries that result. The glyphs are lovely, aesthetically, and I was impressed by the fact that those of the five Asemian journal-writers managed to look like the same language in different handwriting, while those of the soldier of the invading force were immediately recognizable as a different language. I did find it somewhat hard to remember which glyphs I had chosen before and which I hadn’t, and I’m not entirely sure whether the texts I saw were sometimes quite similar because I was accidentally selecting glyphs I’d already seen or because changing glyphs doesn’t necessarily change sentences in the way I initially assumed it did.

I also have to admit that it bothers me a little that, although the conceit is that the player character is translating the glyphs, what the player is doing seems not to be interpreting, but rather changing the source text. Unless we’re supposed to take it that the player character has fragments that she’s trying to arrange in the correct order? Regardless, I would have liked a little more clear connection between what I was doing in the game and what the PC was supposed to be doing in-universe.

Regardless, the translated texts convey the Asemians’ sense of loss and displacement with painful clarity. They are often poetic (“The strange vowels of this province flood my mouth like chewing on leather. Someone has painted the sky a different color”), and even the blunter and more straightforward passages, mostly courtesy of a child diarist, sometimes contain surprising and effective imagery (“I don't even know the name of this town, but the clouds here make me want to punch them in the face”). The banal brutality of the invaders is also starkly apparent; one passage, after talking about mass executions, concludes with a complaint about the music tastes of the original residents of the writer’s stolen apartment (“The records are mostly jazz. Who likes jazz?”).

Ultimately, despite my complaints about the relationship of the interactivity to the narrative, I did find The Fall of Asemia to be an intriguing and memorable experience, and though the short length of the game meant that its exploration of the intertwining of language, culture, and history did not have room to be very in-depth, it was well-executed.

My favorite kind of horror fiction is the kind where supernatural horror elements are used to explore struggles that people face in the real world. Thin Walls takes this approach to a topic I haven’t seen explored in this way before: having housemates.

This probably sounds like a joke, especially if you’ve never lived in shared housing, but Thin Walls is very serious about this, and so am I. Like the characters in this game, I live in a very expensive city and I spent most of my 20s unable to afford rent on an apartment of my own, instead living with a series of housemates, most of whom I knew very little if at all before moving in. Having strangers in your space all the time can be draining, and for me, at least, housemates rarely became much more than strangers. It’s hard to be friends with someone when long before the point where you could really get to know them as people, you already know that they like to practice guitar in the living room at 1 AM, or that they refuse to touch anything that might be even a little bit dirty (thus leaving you to do all the cleaning), or that they keep using your dishes even though you put a sign on the cabinet saying “EJ'S DISHES, PLEASE ASK BEFORE USING.” Or, in the game’s own words:

“If you live with friends or with a partner, and something goes wrong, there is a relationship, a history, a memory to cushion you: the knowledge that, overall, this person is actually okay.

“But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it.”

The house in Thin Walls is continuously growing of its own accord; it increases in size every time two tenants have a spat, but somehow never provides them enough room to get out of each other’s hair. The number of bedrooms may be endless – allowing ever more tenants to move in and exacerbate the existing problems – but there are still the pitfalls of shared kitchens and bathrooms, and of course there’s the issue of noise (see title). We see these problems through the eyes of a kaleidoscopic array of tenants, each with their own worries and frustrations, their own reasons for being here and for not being able to leave. (Some don’t in fact want to leave – but most do.)

However, while it may at first look like the game’s thesis is that hell is other people (a bookshelf that appears at one point contains a copy of No Exit, alongside House of Leaves and other relevant titles), as you progress it becomes clear that the real horror is the conditions that get people stuck in this situation to begin with: ever-rising rents, lack of opportunity, and, of course, unscrupulous landlords.

Eddie, the landlord of the uncanny house in Thin Walls, never appears onscreen, but his shadow looms large over its residents all the same (Waiting for Godot is also on the bookshelf). Tenants report sightings of him as if he were some sort of cryptid. His leather jacket appears by the door and then disappears again, but no one sees him enter or leave. (The game doesn’t get much into this, but I imagine his elusive nature would make it difficult to get in touch with him if you ever needed something repaired.) Nevertheless, somehow rooms keep on getting rented out, and someone’s collecting the rent money.

Many unscrupulous landlords I’ve had were doing things that were probably or definitely illegal, but they were essentially untouchable because anyone with the resources to get them in trouble for it wouldn’t be renting from them in the first place. Eddie, it seems, doesn’t even have a license to rent out rooms, but he is literally untouchable – how can the borough council do anything about the transgressions of a phantom?

Though the title page uses default Twine CSS, the game itself does not; the design is simple, but very readable, and makes good use of changing background colors to indicate different points of view.

My only complaint is that, while it’s obvious when a new chapter has opened up, it’s not always obvious what you need to do to trigger one, and generally just involved going into every available room until I found the one where something had changed. But that’s a minor quibble – overall, Thin Walls is a well-written piece of surreal (but also, very real) horror that resonated deeply with me.

I tend to find IF with animal player characters very charming, especially if the author really sells the idea that the character’s perception of the world is different from that of a human. The Bright Blue Ball does a good job here – I like that the PC experiences the world mostly through smells, as many dog breeds do. The descriptions of scents were simple, but well chosen, and since smell is a sense that IF usually does not do much with, it gave the game a fresh feeling. Parlaying this into a game mechanic of tracking objects by scent was also a fun and unusual idea, if a little under-used here. I also appreciated the hint system – something a lot of first-time authors don’t think to include.

(On a side note, I was delighted that “bark” was a recognized command, but my childhood dog would have been disappointed that “chew [noun]” was not.)

Unfortunately the game does have a lot of the problems common to first-time parser authors, such as under-implementation, missing descriptions, and accidentally unlisted exits, the latter of which led to a few instances where I had to figure out how to progress by repeatedly bumping into walls (which, to be fair, is not out of character for many Golden Retrievers I have known). But these things are fixable, and I think the fun concept and endearing writing speak to the author’s potential.

Don't let the flippant-sounding title fool you; Depression Quest is in fact quite serious. The game goes through a series of vignettes in the life of a twenty-something depression sufferer, allowing the player to make various choices in an attempt to drag themselves out of the pit of horrible gloom and become (hopefully) a functional human being. However, often the "best" choice is struck out and, though the player can see it, they cannot actually select it; depending on the character's level of depression, other decent-to-good choices may be struck out as well, and the player may be left with only bad or unhelpful options.

According to the authors, the two goals of the game are as follows:

"[F]irstly, we want to illustrate as clearly as possible what depression is like, so that it may be better understood by people without depression. Hopefully this can be something to spread awareness and fight against the social stigma and misunderstandings that depression sufferers face. Secondly, our hope is that in presenting as real a simulation of depression as possible, other sufferers will come to know that they aren't alone, and hopefully derive some measure of comfort from that."

Well, they're set up in such a way that no one person can actually speak to the effectiveness of both of them, and in my case goal #1 is the one I don't know about. I would actually be really interested to see some reactions to the game from people who don't suffer from depression; thus far I think all of the reactions I've seen have been from people who do, who are obviously going to respond very differently.

As for goal #2, though? At least for me, it was a success. In a public venue like this one, I'm not going to go into too much detail about my experiences, but there were definitely many things in the game that felt familiar. There are all the large and obvious things, of course, like feeling unable to go to work or go out and socialize, insomnia, general feelings of worthlessness, negative thought spirals, and all that jazz, but the game also included a number of smaller details which are not typical to fictional depictions of depression. Some of them were things that I had not previously related to depression—one that I remember particularly is the scene which depicts the feeling of being restless and wanting to do something but being unable to enjoy or maintain an interest in any of the things you usually do, describing it as "like an itch in your brain." Which may not actually be an experience unique to people with depression, but it's not something I've seen much mention of in general, and coming across it in the game was definitely one of those moments of recognition, of "hey, I'm not the only one who feels this way sometimes!", that the writers have said they were aiming for. It would be easy for this sort of thing to come off as a run down a clinical checklist of symptoms, but in general I think there's enough human detail, enough insight as to how all of this looks and feels from the inside, that it feels real and affecting, at least for the most part.

The crossing-out of "better" choices, and the way the blocked-off options increase as the character's feelings of depression do, seemed like an appropriate mechanic to demonstrate how these things can feel sometimes: it's not that you don't know what the best thing to do would be, it's that you cannot actually make yourself do it, as hard as you might try. (That being said, I still found myself making better choices than I probably would in the same situations in real life, because when all it takes is clicking one link instead of another, it's easy to make the choice you logically know is best. So, okay, it's not perfect mimesis, but, hell, for a choose-your-own-adventure game it's pretty damn good.)

I appreciated, also, the variety of paths to the best ending. Therapy might help and medication might help, together or individually, but neither one is absolutely required; you can also reach Functional Human Being End simply (well, "simply") by building up a strong support system of friends and family (and maybe getting a cat for those days when talking to humans is just too much to handle). It's nice to see a work of fiction that does not demonize psychiatric drugs (or tout them as The Best Thing Ever, although that's much less common in my experience), and it's also nice to see a realistic portrayal of therapy which also acknowledges that it is not for everyone. In general, different strategies work best for different people, and the game does a good job of portraying these different strategies even-handedly.

However, despite my appreciation of the game as a portrayal of depression, I have some qualms with it as a piece of interactive fiction. Or rather, just one qualm.

IF has the eternal issue of how to handle "you"-the-character-in-the-narrative vs. "you"-the-player, and in general there are two ways to approach this: make "you"-the-character as blank and transparent as possible so that the player can effortlessly self-insert, or make "you"-the-character a distinct character who is very clearly not supposed to be the player.

In a game like this, the former approach obviously is not going to work; besides the fact that not everyone who plays the game is going to be a depression sufferer and that even those who do have depression experience it in different ways, the various vignettes of the character's life wouldn't work without some specificity. However, despite giving the main character a number of distinctive traits, Depression Quest still seems to be trying to make the character an everyman to some extent, and it ends up in an awkward middle zone where the character is neither one thing nor the other.

The authors mention, on the first page of the game, that the game is based on their own experiences, and that they are aware that different sufferers experience different symptoms and that not everyone with depression has access to or is willing to seek out therapy and medication. Those aspects were not what I had a problem with. Rather, it was the other parts of the character's life that seemed to vary oddly between detailed and sketchy.

We learn, in the course of the game, a fair amount about who the character is. They're a 20-something middle-class vaguely WASPy American with a boring white-collar job and creative ambitions. They have a mother and a father, both alive and still married, and an older brother who is more successful than they are. They have a girlfriend. They watch a lot of movies. They have some close internet friendships. These aren't the most fleshed-out of details, but it's enough to make this character clearly not "you"-the-player for some people, to make seamless immersion impossible unless these things also apply to you. (Many of them apply to me, which may be why I found the game so eerily accurate in places.)

Some of these things get fleshed out further. We learn a lot, particularly, about the protagonist's relationship with their girlfriend and their family. Other things get left oddly blank. We never get any kind of idea of what the PC's job actually is, nor what the big creative project that they've been working on in their spare time is (a novel, a D&D campaign, a cooking blog, an elaborate knitting project, a text adventure game?). The vague circumlocutions about "your job" and "your project" are fine when the focus is on something else, but in events which focus on these aspects of the character's life, it gets a little cumbersome and awkward.

The PC's girlfriend, Alex, also suffers from the vagueness/specificity divide a bit. Not so much in her characterization, but in that the character is referred to 60% of the time as female and 40% of the time in gender-neutral terms. It reads as though Alex was originally "your gender-unspecified SO (project onto them whatever you prefer)" and was sloppily changed, somewhere late in the process, into "your girlfriend".

I found these things irritating distractions in what was otherwise an interesting and well-done game, and would have been happier if the writers had just given the character a job and a hobby, even if the game didn't go into too much detail about it. Would my identification with the character have suffered if they had done that and the job and hobby proved not to be similar to my own? Perhaps a little bit, but I also don't have a successful older brother or an evil boss, and yet I still managed to sympathize with the PC's problems with them. I feel like in this case, the emotional honesty and the general sense of "yes, I've been there" were more important than the details of the PC's life in terms of how well I related to them. Of course, that's going to be different for players who aren't/have not been depressed, which is one of the reasons I'd be curious to hear from them.

In general, I thought it was a solid game and one of the better fictional portrayals of depression I've seen, although it could probably stand a bit more polishing, at least to fix Alex's "they" vs. "she" issue and the handful of SPaG errors that crop up in some sections of the game, if not to fill in the vagueness surrounding some aspects of the PC's life.

(This review was originally posted as part of the 2012 Semi-Official Xyzzy Reviews series, and focuses on the game's nomination in the Best Story category.)

howling dogs is an interesting choice for Best Story, because at first glance it doesn’t precisely have a story. Not a single story, at any rate. Rather, it has several disparate narratives contained in a fairly loosely sketched frame.

The frame concerns a person trapped in a cell of some sort experiences the other stories as virtual reality scenarios while their (her?) real-life surroundings slowly decay. For company, the protagonist has only the photo of a woman–a former lover, perhaps–who becomes harder to remember with each passing day. Besides the gradual deterioration of the cell and the protagonist’s memories, not much happens in this layer of the story–which is probably the point.

The VR-scenario stories start short and simple and get longer and more involved as they go. The first, in which the player must choose to describe a garden from one of several different perspectives, is almost more the kind of thought-experiment you’d expect to find in a philosophy text than it is a narrative. Then there’s a memorably chilling piece in which a woman decides to kill her romantic partner (having been driven to the act by an incident a year before which is never specified) which takes an interesting approach to the question of player complicity. The narrator in this section is an “I”, not a “you”, and while the player may choose to condone her actions or not, she’ll carry out her plan regardless. The next is an especially odd piece involving a soldier involved in a surreal battle who may reject this reality in favor of an equally surreal peaceful teatime; after that is a well-written if somewhat standard take on the trial of Joan of Arc (or someone very like her).

The stand-out, though, is definitely the last and longest one, the tale of an empress who has been trained all her life to eventually die in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This story manages to fit a lot of worldbuilding into a small space gracefully enough that it doesn’t feel forced or confusing, and the world it paints is fascinating. It is a world of living cities that grow like plants and plains full of buried gods and bone-footed empresses who seem to wield supreme power but ultimately do not own their lives or their deaths. We follow one of these empresses through her youthful lessons in how to be beautiful in the face of her inevitable assassination. We see her come into her power and decide how to deal with several situations that require her attention. Then we are transported to the eve of the assassination–which, as it turns out, is not quite so inevitable as one might think, as long as the player is paying attention. If you play your cards (or click your links) right, the empress can decide to go against the fate that has been determined for her since birth and fight back against her would-be assassin. It’s a storyline that’s exciting on a surface level, but also laden with all kinds of deeper resonances regarding women and power and appearance and societal expectations, and the execution is fantastic on both (all?) levels.

The empress story is also the only one to explicitly relate back to the main storyline, as towards the end (in the “good” ending) the lines separating the VR scenario from the frame story’s reality begin to blur; the empress is identified with the frame story’s PC, and the woman who aids her in escaping assassination is identified with the woman in the photograph. The empress’s escape becomes the protagonist’s escape.

So the parallels in these two stories are made fairly explicit, but what about the rest? Do they hang together, or is howling dogs really as fragmentary as it first appears? Well, some of them are a little harder to figure out than others (I’m still not sure quite what’s going on with the battle/teatime episode), but there are strong thematic connections running through all the disparate parts of the piece. Gender and the position of women in society is one of the most explicit concerns of the piece, clearly visible in the stories of the empress, Joan of Arc, and the woman who kills her partner. In addition, there are themes of figurative and literal confinement present to some extent in nearly all of the stories (including the frame, but excluding the bit about the garden), appearances versus reality (which is inherent in the entire concept of VR as well as appearing in many of the sub-stories), death and decay, and probably many other things I haven’t noticed yet. For all that it’s short, it’s a dense piece of work, the kind that offers up new discoveries each time you go through it.

The individual parts of howling dogs are fascinating and they come together into a cohesive whole better than one might expect. The game may lack an overarching plot in the traditional sense, but it still feels like it’s telling a single story through different lenses. The fact that its approach to story is unusual for IF only makes this layered and thought-provoking work that much more memorable.