Reviews by kaemi

Several times, and I must say I’m batting a thousand on this (baseball (good (what have you never left the house and encountered terrified another person that exists (I’ve scored a double century, get out of my epost)))), I’ve held off from reviewing a game, because I had an inkling that it was a trap, that any type of response was the type of response they vituperatively awaited, and I don’t need to dial up my dialup to be reminded I’m not enough, that comes without any effort at all. This is the essential dejection that faces our vampire assassin, eager to be unreachable by this predicament: “Whatever I belong to it’s been long erased from the sapphire landscape. I make my own space. I make this city my bitch. I’m important like that. I make my own importance.” The fantasy of a magic invisible, not that it’s magic, only some sort of system functioning where they have not yet defined, if you struggle enough you can squirm through their strictures unfathomable: “Just cut the connection cable connecting to the wider world. Then I’m in. / Of course it’s not that simple. I understand that. I’m ready for it.” But what if you can’t reach it? What if you’re paranticipated in some system simply loops back to this expectation of? Is there a self worthwhile if not elsewhere? “I’m a liar. I take the subway back home, ducking into the ground, worming my way through the veins of the city, a virus without a ticket, undead and self-replicating. That sounds stupid. I’m not stupid. I’m smarter than that, smarter than a smart card, I need to stop thinking.” How do you get out?

Because there’s no way to reach the man in the panic room without being one of “thousands of stories, you see, I must have done all the possible combinations. Any object you can think of, any backstory, any personality type, they’ve all been used for murder. It’s all I can see now. Swimming in my mind, drowning my thoughts…” And there’s nothing that makes you want to see if your skull has other states of matter brainreachable more than to be expected by the kinds of people who are expecting, these answerably gazing ghouls who “could be your father, the one who slaps you on the back and tells you to watch out for women. You never know what we’re thinking.” Suddenly we’re not arcane but rather an awkward phrasing, “Keep mansplaining my predicament and I’ll kill you faster” which is what they’ve always thought we were, their sentence misspoken. These experts on the correct form, they assure you from a world which you slither perpetually after afterobserver, it’s a shame the publishing industry but at least “literary launch” lies out of unabstract compression, the more you consider it the more you’re willing to accept their terms and acidify nonervator: “They don’t retrain you for the world that comes, they just wait for you to stop being part of it.” There’s no approach that doesn’t make us connected, and if we so become, then it’s justified, this vituperative “CONSTANTASSURE”. Who wants that? Who is the wanting here? This alarm that has ceased to alarm you. How do you get out?

Take this sentence, and you will, I’m sending it by certified mail so that they will tell me about you, register forever how you interacted so I don’t even have to be there to know, which is all we really want, to be somewhere else without poisoning the thereness with our presence, the United States Postal Service knows where you live and are contractually required to report back to me, I’m not sure if that’s really economical at five bucks but that’s what they asked and I paid it and it’s not really up to me if this is subsidized so that one day I Will Be Found And Recorded: “I’m just like any other. I could be on the cover of a book or magazine, but I couldn’t, because I can’t appear in photographs. That’s good; it makes me less precious. Less precious people do more important work. I’m doing real work; I’m not worried about my image. I haven’t got an image. These are my gifts.” Now yes you’re thinking that’s more than one sentence, just stop, will you, for once. Just, please, for me. So take this sentence. It’s glib, it uses a rhythmic return in lieu of posing the thought precisely as it’s poignant so that it skims through the cheap ha ha, and you could read it and get nowhere you’ve not gone before, which is you’re probably right, someone slick with it can say the phrase class consciousness while the rest of us bury ourselves in concrete until whichever blessed whenever rescues us the revolution, the next paragraph has been written before: “The job is: he’s a successful crime writer, successful enough to retire on a fortune. I’m planning to take his gifts. It’s work, mind you, more work than he’s been doing. I don’t leave people to starve. I balance out the system.” But I’m still here, holding this sentence, I am trying to hand it to you. You haven’t had the moments when you were most important make you less precious? You don’t realize what it’s like the first time you come home and look in the mirror and just see what’s been observed? Losing the frame by which imaginative. They’re taking pictures of you all the time and you’re in none of the captions which will outlive this captivity precisely. I just want to be less, if this is what it means to be less, get me there faster, more totally oblivacated. “I suffer from shiny surfaces but I don’t need them. My kitchen is a freezer and an empty space for appearances.” Mere appearance as a mastery, yes fine okay I’ll admit I’m envious of “Once he stopped looking like the image enough that people started commenting, he stopped appearing in public.” But then he wins again. That’s not right, is it, somehow we end up liquefying his soul and letting the tap drip it down the drain, or. And this proves that we’re, you know, in some way, you know that’s probably not one of the combinations he’s written, they could put us on the next cover, looking like death, that’s what they keep wanting, why. “He is smiling … but not smiling so warmly that anyone would think he is not a tough man, tough on crime, tough on his characters, toughen up by reading him. It’s a smile I’ve tried to imitate, but I can’t tell how it looks, I just have to trust. He is in repose.” Well I’m supposed to be the vampire here, why does he get all the undeath, that’s not fair, I’m supposed to be the vampire, to be undeath, to be some kind of… and he’s just reciting lore at me like I’m a thing that can be known, so, why even be, right, less precious, find something important into which, some how to get out, an event which fulminates fumeroles to new blue impossibles, codas without concordance. “I’ll break out. They won’t be able to process me. They saw how it started but they can’t judge me on what happens next.”

So how do I get there? That’s all I, less precious by the second, want. Don’t even need to take anyone with me, “I don’t have time for love. I don’t have time for any of that. Well I have time but I don’t have” and that lacking is all that needs to propel me, how should I even introduce myself lol, hiya I just have a bit of a strange question but can you tell me how to get there.

Demon Game for Sophie fuzzpedals heavy metal: “Manifest nightmare. A lake of fire, a brimstone pyre, the smoke thrown out by acts of eternal, never-resting torments reaching up and out into eternity. Rivers of blood, non-euclidean corridors, bodily fluids leaking from walls of mashed genital-shaped flesh.” This is a place where symbolic scenes in staining glass imbue you with devilish powers of the four menhorses of the apocalypse, “where darkness masquerades as light, where suffering is painted as a virtue,” where your climactic duel liturgies its impieties: “The smells are rose, frankincense, myrrh, and human piss.” Such high gothic has some successes, like “an icicle headache”, and plenty of grandiose gestures at nothing: “For something born deep beneath the earth, the light builds slowly.”

What you quickly notice though is a flippancy of tone, which sometimes errs on the side of voice, “They say ‘curiosity killed the cat’. But why? What do they not want the cat to learn?”, and which othertimes crumples up the paper pouting, “The knife is simple, a kitchen knife. A / It’s covered in blood. You’ve got claws and stuff so there’s no point taking it.” The sharp “A” into a fragment is not unique, passages wear their typos as sneers perhaps to the exacting concept of proper forms: “The room around you is blood. / bodies lie broken and scattered around you, flesh and stained black robes torn, bone slpintered, fractured, organs ruptured bloodvessles burst, brain lumps spattered onwooden walls.” Written in an urgency that can’t be made more correctly so, could this be the problem…

Flippancies ooze out of the prose down into the mechanics, which attempts a kind of D&D it can’t be bothered to texture: “Your disguise – desperate young maiden, harassed holy man, a simple voice in the mist – hardly matters. Neither do your words: be they a plea, a promise, or a threat. Neither does your tone, your bearing, your movements. What matters is what they all come together to make this man - a tired, bleary-eyed trader in sight of home – feel.” Hardly the dungeonmaster, more the dungeontemp. While you can die and lose, actually you can’t, why bother, what’s the point, ensu(r)e the selfbarrage: “You see, this could be my fuck up. I want to think that it’s yours, not that I think anything at all because I’ve no idea who ‘you’ are or if there ever even will be a ‘you’ listening to this. But I also worry that there’s a chance I’ve balanced this wrong, or explained it wrong, or just put in a bug somewhere that just kills you. I don’t know. So here’s an out. You’re already on the bad ending, it can’t get worse. So in the spirit of agreeing that Souls games probably should have difficulty settings, you can keep playing, same as before. But you can also know that you failed. Or I failed. I don’t know. It’s up to you. And if you die again you’ll get this again. Just play till you win if you want. I’d turn off achievements at this point but I don’t fucking have any. / Fuck it. Ship it.”

This contempt, the need to punch through the canvas to reach where the picture lies, ostensibly follows from a despair of reception, trying to channel Weltschmerz into “something worth saying. Something now forgotten.” which makes the attempt to try again feel hopeless: “It means nothing to me. Almost nothing. There’s just this little fizz of resentment. You might have picked up on that earlier. I’m pre-emptively angry that people might like it. That there might be people out there who play through that whole story and kill the archpatriarch, and then come and listen to all of this, or vice-versa, and think that story was the better use of their time than this one. / How dare they. It’s an insult to art that Call of Duty sells better than Disco Elysium. And it’s an insult to reality that people will watch all the Marvel movies but not watch the news. The real news, not the ‘entertainment’ bullshit they have in the states. / I thought this time I’ll write something easy, something fun. Because for once my life had meaning, so maybe my art didn’t have to? Well here I am. / I’m not proud of myself.” And this goes on into threads I shall gently leave in situ, contortive memories of sacrifice desperate to summon a sacrifice more noble, guilts which should be shared but aren’t, and are here, and aren’t, until finally dizzied misanthropic repulsion harangues the very humanity of memory: “Burial takes up land, cremation wastes energy.”

Drowning in these moonbound tides of bloodshed, can we learn to hurt some estranging way? “Most fundamentally and most ephemerally you are that which binds you to this place. You are your manifest, your connection to this plane which will never be your home. Each time this world strikes at you, your connection to it will waver and your manifest will reduce.” Recession, from those you must address, from the causes which must matter to you because they matter more than you, unbecomes defeat before the systems claromancing how the dies roll, your role in the masquerades of our “non-paradoxical mix of hope and despondency.” And what’s wrong with a little erasure? Perhaps it will blot out the fact that we’re within it. “You teach the child to close his eyes to the darkness, that if he sees horror, then all he can do is look away. It is a lie he would learn anyway, eventually.”

Toitu lyricates you into the stream sensorial primally grasping at a before buried in “tangled in barbed rosewire” which overwhelms the ordinated course of things til you find your “feet succumbing / to the crag and slip / in the canopies / the empire of birds / musical”, a freedom in “courseways of leaf”. And it works, of course, as “you crackle over the forest floor” to watch “a brush of sun explodes on a tall bough, brightening and magnifying the hillside”. Who so scullery serious doesn’t enjoy such things? Even just “a huge kowhai tree nearby drips yellowy petals onto the grass” is lovely in the sense that I know now such a thing as a kowhai, this has improved my attachment to this earth, which is all we must ask of a sentence.

Of course, too much color without shape induces vertigo, so we find “you are standing in what looks to be a men’s urinal”. Alas that having something to say. Well very well. We’re now teetertumbling through Dunedin to pit the poets against the bankers, their whole accursed line stretching back to “the first sailor stranded himself on the shores of Murderer’s Beach” who have enslaved the native landscape into “all these things we have he says, opening his arms in a widening circle around himself”, metonymized by the act of diverting the stream to harness “All that power going nowhere, out to sea, wasted… all that water, that precious water…” Through this act of appropriation the magisterial architecture of downtown Dunedin, its banks, its gardens of the queen, full of statues to names immortalized to History by right of being the superintendent who “despatched the first shipment of wool to London”. It is written, what you will remember.

But other stories have tried to be written, to overcome “the teeth like mountains to climb / the tongue like a moving hillock of grit / and everywhere the breath, the breath”. We wander the whorls of half place to seek the “forgotten stream, forgotten poet / the world cannot keep up with the barreling wheels of time” through loose drafts of Janet Frame, a Dunedinite writer rescued from lobotomy by a well timed literary award who, in this telling, has not been so rescued: “they silenced the poet / they will try to silence you, too, if you are not careful / the only way to remember your name is to be heard / the only way to be heard is to remember your name”. The invocation of the name hearkens back before we were tamed to flow through waterwheels, when different forces flowed the river forth on journeys which cannot be mapped by streets. That Dunedin has forgotten that the city is built upon the Toitu is the imperial act of selfgrounding which recognizes that “We had to master the story, to remove the stream not just from the hillside but from people’s minds” in forging a place whose story starts in 1770. In defiance of “these people, the ones who own and control the narratives / they understand the power of a name”, find yourself “fortified against it / because you know the name of the stream / the source of the power” through intuitive construing of alternation progressing beyond where “the lines are joined. Everything is named / how can you possibly live with it? / well, I shall write it upon a piece of paper”.

As the ambition ramps more definitive, the poetry strains to retain semblances of its original charm. Sometimes it’s just hard to lyrically elevate the mundane: “you find a box of coffee grounds with some italian name across the front / add the water / you set the lid of the plunger on top of the glass and watch the water turn a murky black / wait / the coffee and water mixture is strong, the plunger gives slowly, with some satisfaction / you pour the coffee out into a plain white mug / you sip tentaively, blow”. Othertimes the obvious is more pleasant when pleasant: “the skinhead sees you coming, stares you down / there is something malevolent in his way”. Then there’s just the occasional absence of an editor’s pen: “it is so cold and smooth it feels alien, as if made by aliens”. There’s no rule that we can’t enjoy excesses beyond the power of editors, though, so I rather enjoy “a doziness comes over you”.

Shall we find ourselves struggling for purpose the further we stray from which edens introduced us, then we’ll find a companion here, where “the bricks seems to breathe and squeeze you with their breath” as we strive tirelessly “to find a place beside the graves, in the soft grass”. We yearn together for the voice of one whose name was writ in water within these walls where “they are for the cars, the crosses / and the rain is for the people”.

At its poetic core, The Anachronist yearns to lash together Reformation England and the Mughals’ confluence of the two seas to pursue some Baha’i commixture of contrasts, digressionally compressing a polyphony of thoughts into “the moment of encounter between contrasting objects” which can “through deliberate thought and intentional cooperation … create coherent new structures out of the contrasts that they observed”, allowing generative tensions to tesselate the plane discretions of the possibility space: “a finite number of fundamental principles are accessible to the human brain. These principles can only be combined in a finite number of composites. Name a principle or a composite of principles: that is a god. Bring that god into conflict with another: that is a story. A list of all the myths of the known world would be a compendium of the fundamental concepts and interactions that are possible to conceive.” This convergence is not so unprecedented, and Levine cannily invokes Avicenna’s innate heat as a plausible locus for the fever narrative firewhirling round the pyre til one’s “whole form is burning like a dry autumn branch.”

The lashing proves too loose to loosen what binds our ashing on two ties. The first is the knotting is mostly in the nodding. When finally our winding our way through thoughts waywarding leads Ajita before the Abrahamites and their gentiles diversiform, we seek the altar of the unknown god in the discursus long promised: “The Jesuit cited Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God; Ajita countered with Brihaspati’s argument that the soul was really the body because we cannot perceive the self. The Jesuit said that nothing can come from nothing, so the universe must have a creator. Ajita countered that there never was nothing; the universe has always been.” Well, that does sound like an interesting argument, would have been nice to have heard it. Gesturing at names doesn’t make an argument so much as provide a bibliography. At one point, we’re given an image of Derrida’s notations on Barthes’ On Racine, which is probably genius, if you spend seventy hours meditating on its seventy times seven implications. This superfluity undermines the integrity of the welds on which so ambitious a structure relies: a nod to Marlowe goes wasted without the totalizing thread of Tamburlaine; a long attempt to recapitulate the peasants’ revolt, John Ball and all, all the way to the Thames Valley Police stutters so thoroughly that the author sheepishly scrawls in the margins the intent: “This whole section echoes the Oxen of the Sun episode from Joyce's Ulysses (1918-20).”

The second is that the itchiness to always be onto the next thing simply cuts the gordian. A fascinating reconciliation of mystic conviction and the reformational theological complexity erupting a millennium of doctrinaire esotericisms into passionate public debate skips too quickly to a sparse declination: “She had burned to live in the days of Luther and Calvin, when individuals could advance the designs of providence with great public acts of conscience founded on their own erudition … Of course, great public acts could never be appropriate for women; and sooner or later, Anna would have to revert to being one.” Surely St Catherine disagrees? Could we not resolve this more remarkably with an attempt at Margery Kempe? The Ajita poem, genuflections towards the majestic, hazards up the closest call for the digressions to enchance upon thesis: “For it is / a miracle that when we multiply, / manipulate, and analyze our figures, / we can return safely to where / we started, just by applying your rules – / or can achieve the same answer / by many routes. There are infinite paths, / and you have put them all in order.” And yet in the fumbling of figures dithyrambic, the poem loses its mythic purpose in its prances rococo: “There is deep meaning in our holy myth, / but also quite a lot of senseless sound: / articles, particles that waste the breath” in various nudities, play pieties, and the archaism proprieties presumably due a legend.

So if we don’t quite get there, let us celebrate the journey. The spiritual urgency strikes a plainting chord, as in this sinner’s Gethsemane: “if those flames are merely a foretaste of endless hellfire, Thy will be done.” This tensive vividry culminates magnificently in an inspirationally inverse martyrdom: “The highest form of faith was to die at the hands of the very Church that you loved and served with all your being. It was to die utterly alone, condemned by the entire communion as a traitorous heretic, because you had ministered better to the Church community than any inquisitor or cardinal did. It was to die in doubt that your own visions and beliefs were true, because they were personal inspirations and they might be diabolical. It was to die in hope, and in love, and by choice, but without any arrogant certainties.” One only wishes a whole chapter of this negaweil!

The writing turns its briskness into athleticism by dressing the sets with a hurried Holbein’s eye for detail: “books laid flat on shelves, polished sea-turtle shells, antlers from numerous species that he has arranged in order of size, pendulum clocks, globes and celestial spheres, small antique marble busts, stuffed birds, a camera obscura, a lute, mirrors, retorts and beakers of blown glass, porcelain from the orient, a cabinet of dark wood carved to resemble a palace façade, a pot of rosemary, for remembrance, crude beads strung on leather, a Saxon inscription, an abacus and an astrolabe, a human skull, three prisms hung from the rafter that turn slowly in the air, a table covered with a Persian carpet, a matched pair of rusted iron statuettes showing Hermes Trismegistus, and a printed portrait of the Queen after Nicholas Hilliard.” When the writing does redouble its impressions impasto, we get a lovely little triad that tangles us up to announce us tangled: “In the forest, we seem to see numerous imperfect objects, superfluous duplicates of one another, blended and crowded and heaped together in an indiscriminate tangle.” Though the philosophies philosophically peregrinate, we do get distinct distillations to savor: “To occupy a body is to have one maniera—one place in time and space, one way of representing what is reflected on the back of one’s retina, all driven by one set of desires. Imagination and compassion offer some freedom from this embodiment, for we can enter other minds by understanding them. With each style that we adopt sympathetically, our attachment to our original manner lessens, for it seems a narrow, arbitrary thing. A perfect imagination would be bodiless.” I almost want to argue some reverse, starting with Husserlian intersubjectivity and reinventing Merleau-Ponty by rapturously relitigating Plato/Artistotle extramission/intromission to no one’s benefit, which is the award of any Idea, to infuriate your interlocutor to their own.

Which, in our roundabout way, reorbits The Anachronist’s poetic core confident in “belief as a force that directs and gives meaning to human life, rather like language, clan, or caste.” Perhaps the tapestry adumbrates the tale, still we Tintoretically marvel at “the way just a few bold brushstrokes conjured yards of drapery” suitable for so grand a stage as these histories.

Below the mode of being, not so below you cannot still feel it, a longing hollow from “Years of deprivation” having “pared your body to bone and wire,” lies the recognition of some valiance lovingly imagined of yourself “extended in an eternal gesture of longing … showing only as a hole where interior hollow meets exterior plane.” The central metaphor here, embedded in a magicomechanics hoardedly lored, is a phantasmagoric kaleidoscopia where “whatever phantoms lurk in the half-created space between fantasy and the real world may escape through the mirror”. Desire as a tenuous malleation of reality as “simply an image” which could substantiate, could we only seek ourselves some deeper fundament buried beneath salts of our tossed wayward upon strands, shatters us into a thousand sins, “for we fall short of the Gods and their desires for us”, the tendrills specificity of this sundermust buried heartcore within our howling thisafter lodes the cursed mirror “hidden somewhere within the Host’s body” our communions cannot consecrate.

Do we, deep beneath the surface, discover from the distortions faces? Partially. As we might expect of an uncanny liminality between dangerous presence and exoticating internus, The Saltcast Adventure sustains its fantastic charge in the alternating current of intensity and mundanity. We encounter, in cavernous depths, the cursed spirits haunting the land, and it’s simply a society much like ours, markets and wars and stories refractions of our own. This ambiguity creates a spiritsickness in the heaves of uncertainty, where apparitions undergo apatheia to mere appearance, or so it appears, apperceive in their inreflections a vastness beyond our contained: “The first leap of flame eats a hole in the world, sears through your eyes. A moment afterwards, once you’ve finished blinking, the modest candlelight reveals that the smallish room you’re in is almost entirely bordered in mirrored glass, re-creating the minor crowd of beings around you as a vast throng of duplicates.” In every visagestation of the weird looms the blooms of buriedness, briefly, as we’re harried through, lambents of the spiritual to, suffer it through the blinking need, “stare out into the interior space of the Seeming.”

Until, that is, the current alternates, and we’re onto the next thing. The Saltcast Adventure establishes its rhythm by skipping the first hour of the Fellowship of the Ring, page one at “This is the furthest you’ve ever been from home.” Always we’re hurried onto the next thing, almost by Act III to the point of parody, when Patricia skips in her mother’s footsteps, intuiting immediately “She must have found a Blessing Stone, or something of the kind”, a secret knowledge we’ll graciously attribute to being “a bard, build for aftermaths”, then swiftly encountering Saltcast who swiftly recognize her as Madelaine’s daughter, so that we might expeditiously fastforward her mother’s expedition into the Hydra King’s lair. And then the next thing storytelling sallows out the assortiment of sentiments, suggestions accumulating sedimentation: “You stare blankly ahead of you for a few moments. That was certainly an encounter … You move on as quickly as you can.”

I’ll take it over in the year thirty second of the reign of so and so, but this tendency, when combined with the story’s penchant for sheer incident, leaves us “floating in the dark, and around you swim darting shoals of light and colour and sound. There’s no way to reach out to them, but sometimes their course through the void brings them close enough to perceive clearly. Laughter, soft but cruel. A pale hand pressing on glass until it breaks.” The Saltcast Adventure correctly intuits that a pervasion of mystery is the route by which its proper nouns can parade to the theme, but we must of the mysteries manifest more than the might be or the sublimity it implies softens simply to sensations, a séance of “the nothing in your head—your whole self, your entire sense of reality flattened into a stage for that voice to occupy. You don’t understand the words, but it doesn’t matter. They fill you anyway, swelling inside your skin, beautiful, terrible, indifferent.” I’m not without feeling, though, I can cherish sensations for their sake. Isn’t it lovely, such a turn of phrase: “The circle of wavering light in which you move makes the darkness beyond look like a receding tide of ink, pooling in the depths as you make your way along”. A bit of humor also helps: “You’ve got such a human sort of look on your face. Gormless.” Anyways, in all these mirrors and mystications, sometimes it’s nice just to feel seen: “His fiancé’s spider collection is getting pride of place in their new home when they move in together.”

If the central ambition melts away into world historical strings of fantasy pseudoconsquence, then precisely in its hollows we hallow the unmade, which ever lingers our losstouch to literature: “They believe that we come from the souls of the unmade peoples of the world the Gods discarded … And they believe that the Dead God exists still on the other side of the mirror, and might grant them their memories of what they consider the true world back if they call on her enough.” Who doesn’t yearn a bit of gnostic needing? “Someone should have saved you, but you don’t have a face for the someone.”

The selfposession required of selfreference is to avoid seeming so selfevidently selfinterested, which is gauche, when we’re all quite vogue, thank you, perfectly selfaware. The characters are stuck in a loop, but never you worry, they’re tying themselves in knots to prove their agency: “Chalgrove: Human action is repetitious. We establish a routine and it propagates to others. / Broadstairs: Yes, and the vocabulary evolves accordingly. New words are created, or older ones get repurposed. / Appleby: But here we’ve encountered a semantic token with no apparent reference. Which implies an entire process of action which hitherto we’ve been unaware of. / Chalgrove: So I’m classifying this as a Phantasm. For the moment, at least. / Appleby: OK, and whatever else we encounter will simply accrete. Until we glimpse its nature. / Broadstairs: Then our own vocabulary will adjust to explain it. / Chalgrove: A new case then? / Broadstairs: A new case. Top priority. Happy now, Appleby?” A reciprocus structure cycling over and over, and “With every repetition we precipitate new meaning.”

Do we? New meaning requires a first meaning, some germinating core which roots whatever proves straining this point to structure fruitful. So very well, who are our interlocutors to localize all this interlocution? Some characters are sketched promisingly: “To consult with Broadstairs is to discover a beneficent uncle. To engage him awakens a mighty foe. His letterhead crowns only solemn undertakings. His monogram makes most weighty the deed. / He is sincere in every syllable. So he will spare you the details. You will be unable to recall exactly what was promised. And when he gives his Word, his Word comes not with a word. The Word of Broadstairs is a nod. An affirming smile. An intoxicating handshake.” A dutiful but ambiguous operator, certain of his authority, affable uncertainly along the banks of a ruse, excellent, but where is that in the actual dialogue? “Broadstairs: Pie and chips? Or Welsh Rarebit? / Some place where we can smoke and sit. / A pint nearby, my pipe well lit. / And these two sitting opposite.” Whatever ambitions you might have had for this man to fulfill all go up in smoke, alas. Each turn you take through the looping draws up more and more of the blanks, which is great for Russian Roulette, but in a story the mirror of the soul is made a meta vanity. The structure of the text is structuring the text, every reincursion blunts the borders dully unporous, suffocation in the selfsame: “Broadstairs: Do we have a stable representation of our situation? I’d like us to agree on some sort of interpretation. / Chalgrove: OK, here’s what we know. A new word has appeared. And it is propagating everywhere. / Appleby: No, we need to think in terms of processes. Language is action. / Chalgrove: Action by whom? / Appleby: I don’t know. But forget where you think you are. If I’m right we’re experiencing some sort of poietic fruition. / Broadstairs: This is becoming a three pipe problem. I need to reflect for a few minutes.” So’s the issue with dialogue ultragained to white noise, we think only in the terms of processes.

A mention is made here, I cannot imagine idly, of a Winograd matrix, and like a lot of Eastgate era hypertext, the text is the hypertext, so it’s an inconvenience to be dragged back to the text. I blame all of this, of course, on Samuel Beckett, whom I’ve never forgiven. Beckett in the past tense is perfect, you see, so many negative constructions all minimus arrayed, any presumption pops to plummet you voidnausea, voila. The problem is that, at some definite point in time, you’re engaged in reading it to have eventually have read it, and precisely then the gap between you and the nothing drones nonzero, which I insist it is, still, it’s spring outside, there’s got to be a world out there, somewhere…

Anyway, this is a satisfying sentence: “A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals.” Sorry for complaining! I’m always complaining. Oh well. Thanks!

The Name of the Rose is a strange inspiration for a murder mystery, because it isn’t. Like most Eco, it’s lavish, loosely interwoven tapestries of intertextuality as a mode of lifetexturing intellection hung in such a sequence as to imply progression for those in need of instruction. It’s more a mystery in the sense of medieval mystery plays, biblical stories breathing life into everyday scenes. William of Baskerville is precisely the joke, the Doylean deduction inspires the crimes towards a shared spiritual frenzy, whereas the real motive is and always will be a book.

This somewhat awkward inheritance is where I think the central tension of Our Lady of Thorns lies. On one hand, a murder mystery in a medieval monastery offers an excellent tinkerbox for the intrepid adventurer: the eight offices provide a carefully orchestrated timeline for you to explore, understand, then optimize; the setting is a redolent admixture of ambient physicality so readily repuposable to puzzling, with a Latin motto indicating how to open a secret passage and stained glass scenes indicating how to open a secret passage; and the extensive gardens and botanical knowledge thereby trained offers a grounded intuitional network for several satisfying guessworks. On the other hand, the weight of simulating so specifically stimulating a space stresses out the story’s modest ambitions: in lieu of the glossaries, the place is painted in vague accumulations of time, from “The stone floor is worn smooth by centuries of feet” to “The steps dip in the centre from generations of sandaled feet” to “worn floorboards where chests were dragged back and forth over the years”, repetitions dulling the atmosphere fogged; and the central motive for the mystery, that a brother is stealing psalters produced as the “primary source of priory income” to support his struggling family, isn’t really accurate, English monasteries didn’t make books as commercial objects on spec, as it were, but rather as gifts to patrons or to fulfill a specific commission from an important figure, and by the fourteenth century this gift would probably have been a book of hours rather than a psalter, so while the scenario isn’t implausible still it relies on a vague high monasticism rather than a genuine engagement with the monastery as a living social institution.

Of course, an interactive fiction game playing at a medievalism that vagues the prior to prioritize the puzzles is a story worn smooth by centuries of feet. If anything, it’s the delicate sense of craftsmanship that pervades Our Lady of Thorns which sufficiently stirs you from your default stupor to summon such complaints. Lucky we, treated to so laudsable a labor of love constructed from months of “ritual, timing, prayer, silence. It feels both comforting and confining. You’re not sure which feeling prevails.”

So this 4AM I was flailing out of bed to you know as it happens vomit blood, don’t look at me like that, you some kind of aristocrat who sleeps through hyperefficient daynight cycles in your Gulfstream G666 Fluidless Sheen, I bet you’ve never even seen yourself in the mirror on account of a complete lack of pours, you’re sandpaper in a tan suit, you’re a Miami highway migraine, you’re some atavist Atacama where the heavens shine so clarified no life strains beneath them tormented, and while on the whole I don’t recommend the experience, there was yet this pleasantly delirious moment where you’re dripping over a sink lightheaded maundering like “Splinters of throbbing light. Blood trickles from your nose. You’re promising too much. Causality grates against your nervous system. Put yourself in the path of entropy any longer, and you will be destroyed. This world is but a shell. Pressure shivers it from within.” Nodding to yourself gently holding the hair back by the curled wrist, yeah but everything’s a shell, it’s all a shell game, shell corporals holding shell corporals holding shell corporals holding back your hair so you know it doesn’t the blood.

Wildeyed mycologies exquisitate our subterranean jumblescape to alluring lithographs of “Toxins that erode the lungs, destroy the nerves, rot the flesh in an instant. A battlefield covered in skeletons covered in pink foam.” Worldbuilding iridises its inscrutable stains, “These aren’t all my lichen. Most are feral, or wildtype. Semiotic mimics”, which could mutate to gutterpunk jabberwocky which darksparkles the sludge too smooth, selfsame, sludge sprawling, but the prose does hazard its splatters to graffiti, it is I assure you always nice to have something to say, “They evolved to maximize attention. They emulate written speech: warnings, prayers, infographics. There are thriving colonies in the upperworld now, cultivated at shrines,” here you’re going oh god oh no is this lore but luckily we’re saved by the swerve to luminosity for the sake of it “plastered apotropaic over airship hulls. People like them.” That final plunk of throwaway candour keeps the theatrics easy, which is good until it goes all glib in teenspeak dissipations of its own moments: “sounds really peak for suffering and subjugation honestly”. Rather the purpose of making it look effortless is to emphasize all the effort. When the “grossbeautifulvile” overlap glitches too hard towards any one axis, the “fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic” glistens decay harshly to “A shit graveyard.” And in such climes the game wanders always on the edge of shitpost, which is sometimes charming, “ever at Your service! cya” and manytimes not so much, “A grub cat masturbates on a pile of scrap integument. Half-formed larvae squirm on its back, a few scattering off into the discarded chitin and sinew.”

When it does maintain composition, this magic of having something to say while expending most of our energy revelling largely in the raw pleasure of saying still must be balanced against the other tendency, for it all of course to mean if you squint. We get the hatchmarked sidesketch of the spiritual thrum: “The subworld is a repository for disavowed projects. The toys that some upper power threw down in disgust. Or the things that crawled from the corpses of those toys. If you seek influence, learn their ecologies.” This, counterposed against an overworld ordered by Commerce Torture, we make all the requisite rounds, “Most of them work the soil to produce food. Or in mines to produce matter for manufacture. Their bodies are destroyed by the toil, captives of obligation. Above them, a handful reaping the produce. A chain stretching absolute up to the sovran” assembles us right and ready for the Porpentine revolutionary lashout, final slimergences wheresoever “A different evolution obtains” in the overlooked margins, since “Scientiffs know not our screwing-algorithms”, demiurge unchained here we go, but then some random uh oh cuts you out to a cutaway ending, congrats you’re leftover limbs to be surgered, congrats uh well it turns out there were too many limbs actually, congrats you can’t feel your limbs on account of lichen, congrats you uh just kind of chose a boring option so let’s end the game anyway, go back to the beginning if you want the true ending, but then the fulcrum I found isn’t so much a climax as a thesis statement: “Sovran Absolack: But of course you do. It was the face of history as an unbreakable fortress.” The pleasure of this austere surprise is dampened a bit by “Absolack”, but you know maybe the real vengeance was all the friends we made along the way, “haven’t done much killing lately though… don’t really miss it or anything. just chilling in the catacombs here”.

And that’s fine! Vibing’s how you get the vibes, what are you a JRPG protag here to Masamune God, relax, the whole point of being exiled is to leave your troubles behind. “You wait. Small sounds take place in the dark. Is that a real glint of light? Or the prisoner’s cinema, a visual trick of your pareidoliac mind?” Stop fretting that you can’t get a grasp on anything and give yourself over to the paresthesia’s pleasures.

Like any good poet, I’m on my way to fail an imperial exam. Since there’s so many ways to fail, in essence it acts as a personality test: which failure will you become? To determine, you select an opening image, align perhaps with one of four pitched philosophies, then align perhaps with one of two pitched politicies. Probably there’s some condensing method, the 23 offered endings don’t totally itemize the factorials.

Wandering the imperial gardens to formulate a poem grants more domain for inspiration than for Cao Zhi, as any ambition ought to be tested to an elusive qualia. To the game’s credit, the poems you can craft from the compilations genuinely resound in the mood: “Loose on stormy waves, dancers tread on air, / Mountain peaks standing tall, above human desires, / As pure as the constant moon, / Grief for the past drowned by joy of the future” has an infinity within it, should you grant it some fraction of that consideration. Why not let’s indulge another, surely the treasury affords its like: “Caged by circumstance, twisted shapes flourish, / Swimming fishes surge to meet the sporting waves, / Sudden winds scattering clouds, parting for truth, / Fresh kinds of grief may yet bring the same sadness.”

In the combinatoric condensery of poetry can we calibrate the multitude to meter, alas as always the incitidents prove more prosaic. The philosophies presented are sometimes silly. When this merely means we’re not arguing points of Confucian but some binary more imaginative, the silliness almost seems intentional. Shall we pluck the plum? “You would simply lie there underneath the plum, and hope that it dropped into your mouth. You should want and desire nothing, only receiving what nature has given you. In society, that means a strict order of things, listening to your elders, following the laws of the community as decided together, rejecting freedom in order to live.” We must imagine Tantalus happy. Sadly, sometimes we drop the pretense of elegance, and so the consequence clatters: ““Exactly!” the man in blue claps. “Our focus on the human body, the body parts we each find beautiful, to the point where we immortalize them in transcendent words of poetry.” / “Why not just write about that without having to concoct such elaborate schemes and performances?” / “The scene is what makes the poem. The excitement of spying from afar, the pain of unrequited love, all simulated in a form that hurts nobody!” / You raise an eyebrow. This seems perfectly fine on the surface, but… / “Is this some kind of fetish?” you ask.” It’s hard to imagine that last sentence punctuated by other than a literal clunk. At least within the silliness we sometimes source a joke, as per the plum previously: “a few people actually begin to grind ink to write down a poem in honour of the plum, using their tears to wet their inkstones.”

One assumes some fatemaker might martial forth the jade seal pleasing the Emperor with whatever our heavens may mandate, but in the absence of his satisfaction our various endings also languish. The general wins, and this is sort of bad, or the princess wins, and this is sort of bad, or nothing really happens, but someday this will be sort of bad. Stuck in this loop, we yet pleasure in the riches votive to our vocation: “Each day passes much like the other, as you read and idly write poetry to fill the hours that yawn before you.”

What’s the point of being alive? I’m not being flippant, genuinely, it’s hard to squint through a coffeesip at Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, and not in your grimace wonder. Because, you see, the game opens with an insult: “# ERPS Dial-Driven Narrative Engine (Player-Facing Version)”. Not only the hubris to call 700 words of low effort garble a narrative engine, not only the sneer at calling the only text that exists in the context of play the player facing version, but most vexingly the realization that we’re not even meant to read what little has been offered to us, since one of the sections of this player facing version is a list of twists to shock us towards conclusions.

That the prompt immediately spoils the game it hopes ChatGPT will magically make is one of the many ways in which Penny Nichols is damned by GIGO. The rest of the prompt consists of nonsensical infinitesimalhearted gestures at RPG mechanics which are more likely to trip up the LLM than produce even the faintest verisimilitude of simulation. Even then, the few details meant to supply our adventure are ridiculous on their face: the color associated with the cost for “sneaky” magic is cyan, the color of a clear sky. I’d be willing to be gaslit into perceiving this irony as a constitutive opposition were any coherent commentary to emerge from the mechanics, not even within the magic colors themselves, I just mean like in general, at all, if there was even the slightest sense of a reflective consciousness.

Similarly confused is the setting, which the prompt insists is “retro-futurist, occult-nuclear” despite initiating play as an insurance agent, muddling us through a magic system with divination and conjuration, culminating the story in smaughoard dragons, and whose narrative style is described as “Scooby-Doo”. None of these vagueries will do anything to ground the hallucinatory expanse of a player cajoling the LLM to generate more interesting elsewheres.

Penny Nichols, as a narrative experience that an LLM could enable, breaks upon contact. Copypasting this prompt into Claude will generate a worse experience than simply typing “Let’s roleplay. I am an insurance agent investigating a claim on Mars.” Everything Penny Nichols adds, the clunkiest skeleton of mechanics, a series of twists it telegraphs, and an inconsistent setting, detracts from the basic back and forth you could have with Claude, whose training set has already stolen everything Penny Nichols hopes to take credit for, including Penny Nichols, a punning name already made in Phoenix Wright.

We’re worried about low effort AI slop avalanching over everything we adore, but actually here is a worse abyss screaming beneath us, the annihilation of the spiritual. Mockery of creative communication has been mechanized. This game was not really written nor really meant to be read nor really capable of being played. IFComp has been, for over three decades, a celebration of a computerized interface between writer and reader animating newly possible interpersonal interplay, but now some bugeyed demon ridicules this tiny community festival by weaponizing hundreds of billions of dollars of hyperscaling dishumanification to erase both sides of the interface. Other entrants have poured their hearts into years of hope in anguish, and someone thought so little of that filigree desire to exist they lampooned it here to disrupt the beautiful electricity as we congregate to care about how we care.

At least in troll entries there’s some interpersonal experience whose bathos puddlesplashes as you nod blankly at Uninteractive Fiction 2, and even in low effort AI slop at least there’s a desire for something to have been made that’s been outsourced though precisely is it the resin of human contact which makes the thing alive, but in this nullity is there nothing, nothing comes from nothing and keeps on coming til the nothingness reigns. Why be anyone? It’s an extremely humiliating process, and, in the end, whatever you you make will be dissimulated into the machine.