Ratings and Reviews by EJ

(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.)

It’s not all that common to see alternate-universe or secondary-world fantasy stories that deal primarily with small-scale personal dramas. Plots centered around a woman dealing with a troubled marriage and learning to stand up for herself are not very often found in worlds that also have tensions between magic-using aristocrats and generally non-magical commoners about to erupt into revolution. First Draft, however, combines these elements very deftly. The family drama is interwoven with the larger political goings-on of the setting in a way that feels believable. Rather than trying to tell a sweeping story about the whole of society, it focuses on one incident in a way that hints at the underlying broader issues: the protagonist, Juliette, is the low-born, non-magical wife of a magic-using nobleman, and one of her husband’s youthful by-blows has just turned up in the company of a charismatic friar with heretical ideas about the magic-using class’s supposed God-given right to dominate everyone else. Juliette is drawn to the friar, but he, it transpires, has ulterior motives for getting close to her. In recounting Juliette’s interactions with the friar and the boy, the game never goes into any depth about what kind of movement or organization the friar might be involved with, why exactly they might want to assassinate Juliette’s husband, and what their larger plans are, but it’s clear that the friar is not some lone maniac; there’s some unrest here that goes far beyond that.

Juliette’s story has a climax and a resolution: she decides of her own accord to get her husband’s illegitimate child away from the radical friar by forging a letter the boy from her husband, and then writes her husband to tell him what she’s done, and what she expects him to do now, in terms that brook no argument. It’s satisfying to see a character who at the beginning seemed to feel powerless to do anything about her own situation find the courage to take that kind of risk to protect her family, standing up to her somewhat domineering husband in the process. It adds a positive note to the ending, which is otherwise rather ominous (for Juliette and her family, at any rate): the boy seems to still have radical sympathies, and the friar has gotten away to continue fomenting revolution elsewhere.

The political situation, on the other hand, never really comes to a head, but having it loom threateningly in the background works well, and was probably the best decision for a story of this length. The story builds a convincing sense of inevitability, so that even though the setting is fictional, it has the feel of one of those stories set on the eve of a world-changing historical event, like World War I or, well, the actual French Revolution. One gets the impression that the revolution will happen sooner or later; it’s just a question of when.

The story’s epistolary format works well for it, and its handling of the climax. These can be tricky to do in epistolary works, since the constraints of the form usually demand that any big decisive action must take place “offscreen” and be reported after the fact in a way that can feel anticlimactic. First Draft neatly sidesteps this by having Juliette’s decisive action be the actual act of letter-writing. The game’s “editing” mechanic, which gives the impression of the player peering over her shoulder as she writes, adds to the effectiveness as well.

It’s a short and linear game, but in twenty-odd short pages it accomplishes a lot, and the gameplay mechanic and epistolary format both serve the story–the unique format never feels like a gimmick. It’s a well-crafted thing, and my only real complaint is that there isn’t more of it.

You Can’t Save Her is a short piece about two friends raised in a monastery in a fantasy setting. One friend finds a forbidden tome that reveals the existence of a different god and becomes a heretic, gaining strange powers in the process. The other remains loyal, and when the heretic becomes a threat, the church sends the loyalist to kill her.

The most interesting part of this piece, to me, is the way it deals with faith. The loyalist, it is suggested, also has her doubts about the god she was raised to believe in; her refusal to follow her friend into apostasy isn’t due to an unwavering commitment to the worldview the monastery espouses. Rather, it’s because she’s also skeptical of the new god her friend has found. To overcome the inertia of her upbringing, it’s not enough to no longer believe in her original faith; she has to find something else she believes in more. (Spoiler - click to show)(Which she does, ultimately, though it’s not a god at all.)

Leaving a highly dogmatic faith that has been a large part of one’s life to that point is something I don’t have personal experience of, so I can’t say if this rings true. But it is an interesting contention, and a somewhat unusual angle on this type of narrative.

The prose is fairly laconic, but there are moments of striking imagery—a cathedral that “pierces the sky like a stalagmite”, moonlight through stained glass “painting a rose of rainbows on the floor”, a rift in space that “closes like a wound”. It adds up to an atmosphere that’s beautiful, nearly empty, and uncanny, enhanced by a droning industrial soundtrack. The sparseness of the words on the screen (most of the time) also feels appropriate to a story that’s largely about two women alone in a vast desert.

The interactivity was the work’s weak point for me; I found that the choices felt largely cosmetic (does it matter if you’re trudging off to kill your best friend with a saber or a broadsword?). This was thematically appropriate to the earlier parts of the game, in which the loyalist’s perceived lack of choice figures prominently, but later on it might have been fitting to let the loyalist’s belated rebellion be something the player had more of an active hand in. (This not being the case then makes the earlier lack of meaningful choice feel less like a thematic decision, also.) Failing that, I think it would also have been an improvement to stick to the use of cycling links that probe a little deeper into the character’s psyche with each click, and just get rid of the choices that change a bit of text in the next passage but don’t really carry any weight. But it is an enjoyable piece of writing nonetheless.