Reviews by kaemi
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When I first learned what REM actually meant, I struggled to sleep for a week. I’d start to drift off, then I’d shiverfreak up to tense and subterrified. The thought of your body paralyzing as some writhing nocturnal regime hallucinated you at random through blendered consciousness while your heartrate slipped closer to the totality of that unable to rise…
You Can Only Turn Left nods, pats me on the back, wordlessly passes me a cigarette (it offers me a light, but I politely decline, just like, holding the cigarette in my mouth, naïve goodfaith belief in this talisman of the vibes). At one point it just verbatim describes sleep paralysis. But mostly it tries to capture that half semilucid half semidreamy state that emerges not so much from liminal overlap as from waves sinusoidal.
The rangebound nausea uses it propulsive repetition to create a dizzy bedsickness where “Your gaze focuses on the world around you as you snap back from your daydream. Your eyes are sore and the skin on your face feels heavy. / There’s a dull hum in the room that’s not quite silence. The physical sensations of being awake are sharper than those experienced while dozing.” Before these aches can congeal into coffeegrounds morning grittiness, the tactility oozes away until “The world around you is grey and blue and everything is the texture of construction paper.” Back and forth we spill, asked again and again if we are sleeping or waking, less and less able to distinguish.
Through this hazebounce flutters memory fragments. Some of these lean towards the specificity of real recalled events, even as they threaten phantasmagoric details: “In the third grade, you raised and released tadpoles in your class. You remember standing shoulder to shoulder with your classmates as you surrounded the fish tank that previously was an incubator for the frog eggs. When they developed in the egg, their spine grew fused together in a ‘C’ shape.” In the reverse oscillation, we get fantastical episodes that mutter in concrete details that threaten to resolve the dangers lucid: “Stumbling forward in the dark, you see a snake made of composite board. You walk around the snake and you see that you can climb it! / It’s white and mustard yellow. It glitches between being serpentine to pixellated. Blocks seamlessly transform to scales before your eyes.” This glitchy indeterminacy underpins the core flinch of the germinating fear, which is the uncertainty that what you see will not resolve into something other. “Is this real” begs a pixelflickering line; in some sleepunwalking state the narrator startles awake having fainted on their face, chipping teeth, spewing blood. Sleep’s silky non veils you from the scarring permanencies that plash against your cuddled ups, anxiety of are you asleep at the wheel as absolutes race towards you. Loss of control threatens deeply uncomfortable gulfs below your step, through an unsettling caress from a serpent, through “Your arms and legs are pinned to the surface beneath you and your neck and head are cradled by something warm.” Several times the story threatens this starkening twist to the depths, but each time it oscillates back into the easy grays of twilight terrain, butterfly stomach beneath a blank mind: “Lined up in front of you was your grandfather, your father, your ex, your uncle, your aunt. / They stood in silence, untouching, unmoving but not frozen. They still drew breath through petrified lips.” This image, so ready to morph into a memory and its mental fractures, remains for the moment merely a black and white photograph, expressions as quiet as the object of things lost. How to resolve? Is something horrible going to happen? You descend a staircase towards a strange figure, stake in hand. Is it just your mind playing tricks on you? A crash jumps you awake: “Your cat has knocked over your nightstand and the lamp on top of it had shattered on the wooden floor. She ran away fast enough that you were confident she didn’t hurt herself.”
Perhaps in the yanking yet away from an answer, the trickling malaise muddies, bones the harrow: “Your nights generally consist of laying motionless in bed watching strange shapes grow and morph on the insides of your eyelids. You doze mostly, and hallucinate often. During the quiet night your mind tangles your dreams and memories together. Familiar mundaneity is combined with the fantastic. Sometimes it is charming, and sometimes it is horrifying.” So it goes, hinting at horror you’re increasingly too tired to dread. Even this statement of fact, so literal of intent that it makes the smallness of the aesthetic even more claustrophobic, seems to have run out of the energy to make you intuit it, simply printing the recipe for you to make it at home. Whenceforth from the nadir? There are several endings that tepid out the requisite hallucinatory annihilates, but they’re harder to reach then perhaps they need to be, so you loop through, back into the yawn in lieu of a scream.
This is where You Can Only Turn Left demonstrates a lack of direction that undermines its effect. Being performatively exhausted rarely makes you lively company, and the few noire flourishes, like using a physics check to test the dream level as if we’re in some Inception caper, instigate little intrigue beyond the requisite sigh back to tone. “To get to your 6:30 a.m. shift, you’d have to wake up around 5:30 a.m.” the game gestures with furtive intensity, forgetting that most of us, speaking of mundanity, wake up early and hate it.
If the ambition runs aground, at least this is credit to its taste, which refuses to settle into the creepypasta copypastes it sometimes mucks through. At its best, the half awake phantasms clayclump into Yves Tanguy drabscapes, making dream enough from drubs of color: “You woke up in the upstairs bedroom of the house that you grew up in. / There was no furniture in the room, and you even noted that there was no bed. Only the cold orange floor.” In this teasing of pure sight, we discover the work’s best line: “Rolling your skin off of your body, you are hot pink. The dead skin suit becomes a pile on the floor. / Your entire body emanates hot pink light. / You are fabulous and you are infinite.” Perhaps, with a few more loops through the enchantments of the inchoate, the author may guide us to a vision so frameable.
The setting, in which you are a number-named drone for CORPOTech “requested to identify and fully purge any instance of poetry from the system. / This has come as a mandate from the Board Room. There is unfortunately no room for art of any kind in the Database of Subsumed Cultures”, lays it on so thick that I was buried for weeks, forced to learn the languages of the dark, burgeoning my pupils to cope until they covered each skullhalf and electrified my brain with every glint of silica or silver, crawling with the olm into underglows where the depths deepened into new understandings of themselves…
So though I did blinkrecoil reemerging into hypersurface aesthetics of “you are an efficient cog in the machinery of CORPO blight” versus a Shakespeare-quoting rogue AI promising to “bring the color back” through revolution, the allure here lies in the central mechanic of how you save the poetry from deletion. You’re given a chance to read a poem, peruse some data that thinly contextualizes the culture, then race to preserve individual words by clicking on them as the text is backspaced into oblivion. Holding the tatters, you’re given the chance to reweave the original meaning through remembrance of its impact upon you, painting with echoes to reimagine the song. These poems, themselves historical artworks which been crunchgrungled through several rounds of autotranslate, leave you grasping at their pixellated je ne sais quoi for almost the accident of meaning, syrupy saliences where “If the items don't match, search To destroy what God in his mercy saves, The struggle is equally futile and weak Rather than receding waves.” In that struggle between destroying and saving, your click click curations of buried empires capture epicene crepuscula, scintillas of the loss of the whole: “moon climate eternal beauty feel the deception rapture stylized reality”.
Although the game gives you the opportunity to reconstruct entire poems from the salvaged words, I actually rather preferred the fragmentary ellipsicals that form as you tear out the words you could not live without, a la the complete works of a Greek, some Sappho voice choppy through the void: “Sometimes I can not say. / immortal / Sometimes lilies / All Peaceful”. Prosper.0 shrugs the same conclusion, this mixture of reverence and resignation, when the narrator complains about the difficulty of the task of encapsulating everything that is being lost in just a few words felt together: “Do you think that, if you had an unlimited amount of time and skill, you could truly write a poem that faithfully captured the spirit of an entire race? / Do you think that these poems, created by the races themselves, truly encapsulate the entirety of the spirit of their own people? / We're all simply doing our best to reflect back the most miniscule portion of existence in a way that rings true, aren't we?” In this tender tension, making patchworks of works you don’t understand to enshrine something, anything, against the nothing, “a complex and twisting horror” elegances the interplay of reading and forgetting, ghost whispers which will one day no longer haunt us is the sleeplessing fear.
The game forces you to confront how little of a text you can preserve in just the words, each poem you create a testament to the ones you could not, so naturally there’s an arcade mode. If poetry tetris feels a little flippant, then it harmonizes with the whole, the game gesturing at a frustration but delighting in the pure freeplay of its kintsugi.
In Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, a director, mistresser of actresses, has a vision of some thespian Beatrice that will elevate his existence into a purified dedication to the Art she can safely symbolize for him, angelically neuter of her own content, so like an apparition, she comes to him from the night, offers him a ride home, and he explains an idea of a film, barely pretensed as fictional, of a man’s degraded existence melting like snow before the woman of the spring, a salvation, and she listens with 60s prettiness flair that curlicues the banter, considering whether such a person is capable of love, of redemption, of art, never failing the perfect smile and tone that mercifies the despair, except once, when the car comes to a stop, and he tells her to turn the headlights off: the tension, the stare, the pretending neither.
This tension typifies much of 60s/70s cinema’s aestheticized verselust, perhaps most explicitly in the giallo genre, with its sensuous dissociations starkening in lightning strikes an ultraviolence predation: "I love your work,” a fan enthuses, to which the actress ripostes: “You mean, you love to watch me die.” In the giallo, we drink in absinthe aesthetics, neon sharps equally of glamor and sleaze that pairs “the shadowy interior … a palette of brown wood, blue jeans and purple silk” with the “mingling with the cooing tones of the can-can girls on a break.” Although the game initially feints into a spaghetti western, a telegram summons us into a train chugging through the storm, where we hear the first whispery incantations of a Goblin soundtrack: “You open your hand, and let the storm claim the piece of red silk, as it disappears carried by the wind a second later. (Why? Was that in the script, or was it your idea?) / Outside the gates, rain falls on the canals in silvery splatters.” The police, languid cigarette smoke, credits in italics: “Starring Eva Chantry as Herself….”
As herself? Yes, asserts the giallo’s brazen delirium, oohing oozing into lurid voyeurism where the camera’s gaze surfeits nakedly male desire in its intrusive omnipresence, to entwine the reel with the reel: “Trembling, you peel off your soaked dress. If this was a scene, the camera would be sliding down as you do, catching the goosebumps in your soft skin to emphasize your vulnerability, and ending with the wet heap on the floor … You run a hot bath, waiting until it’s half full to slide in, with a sensual moan of pleasure. Again, if this was a scene, the camera would catch you from behind, lingering on your nakedness as you raise one leg, then the other, and ease into the steaming water. / Does it matter that it’s a scene or not? Only if you’re acting for the audience, as your old teacher used to use. If you’re doing it for yourself, then the camera is always on.” Luxuriating in the bath, but only insofar as the faceless yet ever more pressing audience insists, dictatorial demands flooding in, as whenever you struggle to know what to do next, the hint screen slips you the next bit of script (in)((sin)uating) sensuous headiness invoked into dreamspace: “You close your eyes and listen to the patter of the rain on the windows. Fury and violence without, softness and beauty within. A metaphor for something or the other…” This pane of glass, the barrier between you and the camera, the screen and the audience, is precisely the illusion the metafictional directness of the giallo threatens, suddenly breaking in a torrent of shards, inviting in peacock preens of patriarchal brutality as readily in the fictional layer, “You run anxiously, trying to find a hotel or shelter from the rain, cold and miserable in your sodden clothes. Suddenly, a flash of lighting stops your dead on your tracks. There’s someone right in front of you … Then the light is out, and so is the knife. You fall on your knees, looking at the blood flowing into the drenched cobblestones. The next stab is through your eye, and then you see no more” as in the metafictional layer: “You’re drifting off, when a noise awakens you. Someone is knocking on your door. Again. It’s a firm, masculine way of knocking. Here comes the outside world, wanting in. You get out of the bath and towel yourself dry quickly. Who the hell could it be?” Tension of the masculinized violence of desire latent in the camera’s slow pans equivocates the film, the filmmaker. The constant terror of the indeterminacy of the demon.
That this veers haphazardly into very uncomfortable spaces accords to the unsubtlety horrors of the giallo, where the stylized tropes run so blatantly rampant that the aesthetic judgment lies largely in whether the work’s directness rips its paperthin premise to reveal a certain grinning stupidity that fails to say anything but the obvious or, in the more successful exemplar Suspiria, the semisupernatural dizziness spins itself so wildly that it dissociates into a witches’ sabbath of suggestions that let light in like stained glass. Barcarolle in Yellow threatens both outcomes through its fracturing metafictional pane. In some scenes, like the confrontation with Leona in her apartment, the game revels in its stylish semantic porousness to achieve an apropos phantasmagoric slipperiness: “Before you can touch the door, it swings open by itself. Behind it is… nobody, and nothing. Taking a deep breath, you go in, and climb the spiral staircase, ascending as it coils upon itself, tighter, higher, until you reach the high place you seem to remember like a dream … Your ideas melt in Leona’s presence like wax in the sun. … “Tell me, Eva, how have you been feeling? Do you sometimes think… things are not quite real? As if you were reading a piece of fiction and suspending your disbelief for the sake of being a part of it… or, in other words, acting?”” In others, however, the unsubtleties run crude, which nauseates when handling such intense subject matter: “You open the door a crack, as you often do when you’re about to be murdered luridly. Or raped. Often both: occupational hazard. / Through the crack, dramatically lighted, you can see a vertical slice of face: that of the director! The slice includes a brown, intense eye, an aquiline nose, a bit of smiling lip and some seriously square jawline … His eyes go wide as they follow every curve of your naked body, his voice sounds a little raspier. “Oh my God, Eva… do you always open the door in the nude? You’re amazing. Let me in, baby, I can’t wait to have you…”” It’s hard to recover any of the tensed stylized mood in the wake of such winces, so we’ll simply slip out of the cinema into the pouring rain, where we might regain the shivery extravagance.
By the time an old servant slash formerly the imperial admiral patriarch’s mistress slash secret agent from some fractious Balkan manipulates an empire and its dissident into a war that culminates in a sniper duel between supersoldier aristocrat siblings who are potentially lovers in their crumbling mansion over a feud that consists as much of domestic relations as it does international relations, not much lies out of scope. At its core, Out of Scope wants to tell a suffocating story about how two siblings are torn apart by the different social expectations of gender, but in its attempt to amp the tension to world historical importance, it loses its message somewhere in its reams of political exposition.
With its guns blazing stagesetter, Out of Scope charges no holds barred to flourish a first impression with moody grandeur prose, where the “ceiling rises precipitously, all the way to the soffit of the second floor, letting in a huge amount of light and spiders” to narrow corridors haunted by “Statues. Family members, genuine and appropriated. All stained by a slightly ironic shade of soot.” The rich imagery glimmers in stained glass moonlight to echo through the space a moody nocturne, elegantly composing into phantasmagorical allure with its sudden piu forte into violence: “Bubbles in the glass pane swim before the scene … Seaweed rustles on the hillside and froth floats in the sky. / A gleam of treasure winks at you from a shipwreck … Her eyes are on you … You feel the collision in your memories, then in the constriction of your heart, then going through your side as the window shatters against you and you plunge down against its thick, gouging shards.” Although sometimes the opulence inelegances into the gaudiness of trying too hard, like when “You approach, unsteadily on the igneous plane”, the writing still crackles when the moody veneer is asserted selfsufficient.
But then the story balloons expository, bloating to explain who the Colibrians are and what treaties they’ve made and not upheld, thus this sharpness disappears into somewhat wooden banter, with aristocrats hmmph hmming how you might think they would, with soldiers more concerned with who hazes who than whether the war engulfs them, with your various relations being bores. To accompany this broadening, the cast of characters also widens, most of whom are hastily sketched in with broad strokes: “Uncle Graham, or Great Ham, as you call him, is inevitably at the long dining table, his mouth ingesting from a plate and his ears from the inexhaustible anecdote of Lavinia … Grandfather is accepting tribute from a fug of officers, while Aunt Marion, or Marry On, as you call her, is pointedly ignoring it all”. This flatness saps your investment in any of their subsequent shenanigans, and although there are attempts to provide twists, Aunt Marion is revealed as a skilled sculptor of previous lovers, none of these twists really broaden their remit beyond the eyeroll by which they are initially invoked.
Rather than complexifying the family dynamics through a wider canvas, the intermixing of the political with the personal proves artificial, rendering the latter vague through the interventions of the former. Take this dry bit of banter after Zoe’s mother, the editor of a national newspaper, approves of Zoe’s boyfriend: “”You’re the kingmaker,” you say, citing her nickname in this morning’s edition of Clarion Call, ostensibly in reference to your father’s conquests.” Turbulent emotions between family members loses intimate intensity when printed in the morning paper. Similarly, the supersoldier intrigue between the siblings simply dilutes their conflicted immediacy, as when a heated emotional exchange causes Zoe to remember her “psyops training” before responding. Naturlich, any successful family gathering requires a certain amount of psyops. Most frustratingly, the critical brother sister bond at the heart of Out of Scope zooms out too abstract as its spy thriller inclinations take over, leaving us with salacious descriptions of soldiery rather than their initial impactful solidarity. In the few breaths the story spares for the pair unimpacted by national security, we get more telling than showing, gesturing airily at letters rather than the roiling writings within, which is a shame, because perhaps some of its strongest sparkles exist in their tempestuous multifacets: “Remorse and the thrill of your own power electrifies you, and then together you burst into tears.” There’s a section in the sprawling labyrinths of the unfinished The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil where Ulrich and his sister Agathe dialogue into a heady and equally unsettling intimacy, and some echo of that would I think massively improve the reader’s engagement in the central themes of this work.
When it adheres to its fastest flowing currents, Out of Scope compels, especially with its excellently imperial diffidence to the moral difficulty of much of its subject matter, which allows its complications space to breathe. Indeed, there is a strong attention to preserving point of view, like a great line that translates its scenic lyricisms into a child’s voice with “fireflies playing freeze tag”. But the clean shot this style could take through the story blurs, and we get waylaid by brambling bumbles that add no hues to the bloom. Even the story’s presentation, a spatially exacting Prezi, overthinks the premise, adding little beyond Twine beyond dizzying clicksickness. The author displays much promise, but in this iteration, alas, the wayward breezes stray us from the target.
If I had to rank genres by personal interest, then “sex comedy” would rank pretty near the bottom, a fact which has proved surprisingly relevant this comp. As a resident Gijsbers scholar, however, I am dutybound to report on this newest addition to the oeuvre. Although lines like “He tries to escape from your hug, but you’re not going to let him. “Come on, mister So-Crabby-Tes,” you say. “I know what you want. You want to feel your little Xanita real close to you, don’t you? Real close.”” tested my resolve, sapping my will to click buttons, with a little assistance from my friend Pouilly-Fuissé, I performed my scholarly duties.
Beneath exhaustingly thorough banter about cows and infidelities, the dominating tension in Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates is between the Person Who Will Die and the people who tried to live. Socrates’ world historical commitment to persona, the totalizing symbol of his perfectly poetic election of death, clashes with his mundane obligations to those who shared his world: “He becomes animated. “A great joke! A joke for the ages! People will still be talking about it when…” / “When my name is forgotten and my bones turned to dust?” / He sighs. “Okay, look.” His tone is apologetic. “You have a point. But, see, it just went with the role.”” The disconnect between person and Purpose doubles the underlying gender disparity, that Socrates’ memory is built from His liberty of bickering round the town, while Xanthippe is remembered as any femalifying stereotype one might like to attach to the Socrates story. Of course, given he must bear it for only a few more hours, he’s perfectly willing to commit to the burdens of his role: “He raises his moist eyes to find yours. “No,” he says. “No. Even though I know I’m losing you, and you’re losing me, and although I know you don’t want me to go – see, I had to do it. I had to stand there and show the world what philosophy is. What it is to choose truth over everything else. It’s not some role that I played. This is who I am.” But this gesture, alchemizing an authenticity worthy to adopt, brutalizes Xanthippe’s grief, substituting the loss of her husband with this preening simulacrum. Her desperate attempt, in this last night, to beg from him some true connection, not with the Socrates who will die, but with the husband who once loved her, listened to her, pledged a life to her, draws out the embarrassing facticity of his humanness, gross and inadequate before the stylized portrait so soon he could assume. The silence between you grows; the philosopher doesn’t know what to say. “Your husband eats little, but he drinks all the more. Perhaps it will help him face the hemlock. But it definitely won’t help him face you.”
But is that really what you want, from the end of all things, to be some daunting reckoning which he must face as steely and certain as the one that comes with dawn? Isn’t there room, before all the lonely nights, for one last togetherness? Just the desire to be desired, is all, nothing so momentous, why should it have to be, isn’t the simplicity of your existence enough? Not before the one who chooses Death… wasn’t always like this, “he made you feel wanted. / And not just your body, but you, really you, with your desires and fantasies … And now that will all come to an end. He’s sitting before you, his face badly lit by the flickering oil lamp, and for the first time he looks vulnerable.” What can you rectify in a single night that took so many to wallow here? Is there any peace you can make stronger than utterly the grief, the end of things, the end of all your trying? Perhaps you have to accept fate, the fine ghost he will make. “I have a task, Xanthippe, and I was never free to desist from it.” You watch his resolve dissolve him, and you’re not sure that it wasn’t always this way: his path wherever it leads, your privilege merely the chance to follow behind. “He seems more than a little dead already, that husband of yours, huddled in a corner and neither moving nor speaking. Only soft, inarticulate grunts escape from his throat. His breathing comes heavily. He keeps his eyes closed. / You smile tenderly.” At least it was a journey, that’s more than most get.
Defeated, but refusing despair, you accept your husband for who he was regardless of you. “No more thoughts about death, then. We’ll celebrate life.” And, if it’s any consolation, some residue of your existence can endure in his carefully crafted immortality, the human remains of where he will not admit you: ““Don’t be sorry.” Socrates takes your face in his hands. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve loved you more than I thought I could love anyone. And, you know, maybe I shouldn’t say this… but without you, Xanthippe, without your love, your support… I wouldn’t have had the courage to walk the path that I did. To stand up to the people of Athens. To choose death.”” So your vow ends, an us merely a part.
So I was always bad at arts and crafts. As a kid, the things I made were noticeably worse than what the rest of the class made. Let’s make a little pencil case, they’d say, walking everyone through the first step, then encouraging us to start onto the second step ourselves, usually it was simple enough, but the third step, written so succinctly on the page, would balloon into multiple connective actions, all of which need to be operated in a sequence obdurately abstracted from the mishmash jamming of your increasingly desperate attempts to approximate what you’ve been told, until by the fourth step you’re forced to admit the irreconcilable gulf between the instructions and the wreckage in your hands. Step five: start crying until the bemused teacher rushes over to placate you by doing it all themselves as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Finally someone recognizes the existential terror of the alienation between your consciousness and the world that DIY assembly inevitably entails. This game gives you an instruction booklet that seems simple enough, but slowly seeps in the terror as you notice “it does look a bit wrong upside down, like a turtle stuck on its back”, but you carry on until suddenly you realize something is terribly wrong, and the object becomes unstuck in fixed space, a sprawling ungainly realization of the ineffable Object that your hands could never construct, and as, desperately, “you reach towards the DÖLMEN, something shifts and settles in your mind, and you understand — it’s not a table, but a doorway. And the door is opening — / There are no words in your language for what happens next. There are no words for the way the world seems to come unstuck and peel away, though later it will remind you of the way an opening door shifts from a solid face to an insubstantial line.” Through the blur, probably of tears, possibly of tearing spacetime, you recognize that what whispers from the page is impossible for your representative comprehension to approach, an infinity of void which may as well be eldritch.
Assembly runs with this insight or joke or shocked dawning of a shivering fear or whatever you want to call it, throwing us into a hazy IKEA nightmare replete with cultists and noneuclidian geometries. With an inspired bit of banter, the narration rapidly unspools a cheeky backstory that resonates between its comedy and its subject matter so harmoniously that the result is postsatirical twilight of the gods panache: “In the beginning, the barrier between your world and the world of the gods is thin. You can’t quite tell who first learns to shape stone into the sacred forms that open the doorway between the worlds, or to perform the rituals that give the gods the power to step through: only that it happens in the northern corners of your world. And since humans are so quick to worship power, these rituals spread quickly… and the gods grow strong, then stronger still, until their hold over your world is absolute. / An age passes, and then another, and the faith of the people begins to wane; the rituals fall into disuse, the sacred monuments into disrepair, and the gods weaken and vanish from the earth. Some go peacefully, but others rage against their loss — and swear that, if that doorway were ever to reopen, humanity would not escape their control again. / Then, finally, a new age: an age of infinite repetition, of unbounded mechanical reproduction, of forms iterated out beyond imagination. These gods, and the few who remember them, have found their chance — for a ritual copied blindly from an instruction booklet, or a sacred ratio embodied in fibreboard instead of stone, still holds the same power.” You could build an entire Cragne Manor on this gag.
Though, alas, Assembly doesn’t. Outside of its occasional storybeats, Assembly stays pretty terse, focusing on its puzzling, which consists largely of hunting down gizmos to graft to your gadgets. You gotta mix and match parts from multiple construction sets like a frustrated Lego builder. Rather tellingly, there’s a section where you need to enter the darkness to teleport, which surely must be a reference to Andrew Plotkin’s So Far? So that kind of evocative setting as an excuse for tinkery inventory management seems to hit pretty much at par. There’s still some nice touches, like this line that plays nicely on the game’s core humorous recontextualization: “Some experts consider the term “henge” to only properly apply to an earthwork with an inner ditch, or apply it only to specific monuments in the British Isles… but your language supplies no better word for this wide, circular bank. The henge is piled up to about waist height with a colourful array of goods and other remnants of the market hall.” But most of your time will be spent looking at booklets, fiddling with screws, and wandering nauseously across a deliberately unintuitive map, all of which sounds quite thematic, but in practice proves mildly boring. There’s also a few elements that don’t add up to all that they could: like the first thing we need to build is called a DOLMEN, or a megalithic tomb, so you might think there’s going to be this sort of double entendre where the furniture we’re building is actually terrifying Lovecraftian whatevers, but by the end of the game we’re just building a WILLIAM? Poor little Billy, who’s going to tell him that he’s a cosmic demon altar?
So a lot of the richness of the concept lies tossed to the side like spare parts. But when it does push hard on its core idea, the results can be compelling. There’s probably no better description of the futility that I felt in those arts and crafts classes than this perceptive despair: “One by one, you dovetail each of the wardrobe’s side panels with the base. As you reattach the second panel, the space between them seems to twist away, as though rotating on some higher-dimensional axis, and the void fills with a profound darkness.”
Usually at IFComp there are several entries that laugh off the time limit and refuse to apologize for the scale of their ambitions. I like these entries! I wish there were more! How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title partially qualifies as a representative of this trend: it certainly has laughed off the time limit with its ambitious scope, but it does take a moment to apologize, offering a two hour intro sequence to the judges as a sampler of things to come.
This ends up being a mistake, because much of what makes the larger game shine fizzles under pressure. In its opening setting, the game opts for the low road in its brow, stakes, and fantasy. In the rush to build rapport, each of these qualities gives off a poor first impression. The low brow humor, when it needs to come flying out of the gate for its two hour showpiece, jesters into the childish: “In times past there was Boldog the Corpulent, whose exceeding ponderousness caused the throne upon which he sat to crumple and give way under him, sending him rolling ingloriously down the steps of the dais in full view of the court and certain foreign emissaries. His retinue loudly blamed the carpenter responsible for the throne’s construction, and posited conditions of dry rot, but the people knew there was just too much man on that throne.” Likewise, the low stakes and low fantasy, which scurries us onto a fetchquest for rutabagas, charms no novelty from copypaste text adventure shenanigans. If you play this game through its first sequence, you may come away less impressed than a deeper dive affords you.
Because the size arises not out of epic bravado but rather out of a porous ludicity that overfills the playspace into a meandering creativity. When the game can sprawl out and relax, its spirit makes better use of its low aesthetics. The silly humor squiggles in many optional commands that paintbuckets color on every noun, like when we find a horse: “You perform an elegant bourée with the horse, bow to each other, exchange compliments, and resume your previous occupations.” Quisborne delights in finding little opportunities to wink at you with a same wavelength camaraderie, be it either a haystack which of course means you need to find a needle or a bucket that you just know has a quip hidden behind kicking it. The glib cartoonishness provides a reasonable peppering of jokes that keeps the mood lively when the puzzles slant too serious: “You look up at the clouds, and there is writing in them! It says: “The answers will not be written in the clouds.””
Serious puzzles which are indicative of the grounded fidelity that makes the most of the low fantasy, inviting us to engage more deeply with the process rich physicality of the medieval setting: we travel to a blacksmith to hammer a groover on a horseshoe; we woodwork a mattock on the lathe to dig up carrots for a horse. Through these craftsmanship simulators, Quisborne firms up the world you explore to prevent the silliness from loosening our engagement into superficiality. No matter what jokes lay in wait, the certainty of place is sustained through a finely textured verisimilitude: “From where you stand, a frozen lake stretches away north into the hazy distance, majestic and mournful. The lake is very narrow in proportion to its length, and steep, dark-treed slopes carpeted with snow rise to considerable heights directly from the water’s edge, making the lake into a deep and snaking valley. The lake runs upwards of two miles to the north, appearing there to make a bend to the northeast and disappear behind the rising slopes of the valley.” Combined with the low stakes, where you’re simply wandering around trying to figure out how to scavenge items that can overcome obstacles, like your horse’s low traction on the ice, Quisborne succeeds as a summery adventure that always has something else to do, somewhere else to go.
That voyaging about, however, starts to spiral the game out of its comfort zone, and before long we’ve sailed past the low fantasy to mile a minute hijinks. No longer are we trying to craft horseshoes, now we’re summoning a chimera skungaroo to stinkspray a gargontosaurus or using a hot air balloon to carry Rapunzel along far enough that you can climb up her hair. At one point, as we enter a wizard’s tower, the diegesis breaks down altogether, and the puzzles go entirely abstract, tasking us with binary arithmetic or a strange stairstep letter puzzle that even the game struggled to explain. Rather than work out how to block a cistern, now we have to solve a captcha and realize that the word it spells is a series of directions that guide us through a labyrinth. As the crossmap puzzlechains gnarl ever more elaborate, Quisborne skates off pure momentum, blowing its tone scattershot. While this can be fun, with characters like Dvakred sizzling off the page, unsurprisingly some of the pellets miss, with the characterizations of the Tuttarumbish or Azhgalothis leaving a little bit of a sour taste.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game this long, Quisborne manages to reverse the impression it makes on you several times. Does it manage to bring it all together in the end? Alas, it is not for me to say. My game broke down just after clearing the passage west across the landbridge, prompting this error message on every command: “We are truly sorry… we try our hardest to comply with your every wish, but sometimes we just find ourselves getting mixed up or confused. It’s highly unlikely that what’s happening is of critical importance to your mission; nonetheless, we must confess that the last turn may or may not have been fully carried out as intended.” At this point, my dominant impression was just tired, so I left it at that. One hopes, though, for Quisborne’s sake, that everything ends up more feckful.
So on one hand, this game gestures wildly at everything: our dramatis personae draws from history a la carte with random appearances from whomever seems like they could plausibly fill the role – there’s a French ambassador, may as well be Napoleon – so you get a strange eclecticism where Cleopatra chats with Rasputin about Audrey Hepburn; the plot sizzles with international intrigue, as multiple nations potentially engage in espionage over a Raytheon-led military project shrouded in secrecy, all the while snarled up with tawdry DC gossip a la the Petraeus scandal; there’s a multitude of meta levels that enjamb each other, like Antony and Cleopatra solve cases but then there’s also a TV show with the exact same premise as the real life duo, or how every historical character is both themselves and not quite themselves; and bizarre little details constantly unsettle the flow, like an offhand reference to a character wearing a Noh mask or the deliberately loose way that a foreign head of state seems interwoven with a classified state investigation.
On the other hand, however, rather than slosh chaotically between competing stylistic pressures, the game’s flat affect smooths over these discontinuities to make a mild matter-of-factness that equalizes every left turn into a neutral paste. Madcap juxtapositions merely provide the pretense for straight-as-you-go transcripts laying out a series of facts, not really building up to anything you could call a testimony, which you judge against the others. Characterization consists largely of wikiskim vibe approxies, though many interactions do not attempt at all to summon the historical person, using their name rather as a de facto placeholder, including our protagonist duo, who make little impression. The metonymy of the tone occurs when we visit a suspect in Alexandria, and there isn’t some grand attempt to capitalize on presumably-a-golden-reason-this-bizarre-combination-would-even-exist pun between the Virginian and Egyptian cities. The resulting flatness, beyond making you thirst a little pizzazz, also undercuts the two-player conceit, because neither perspective really accomplishes much that the other doesn’t, and the only real variable, a few moments where you can change the tone of a question based on who asks it, could easily have been achieved in a single player design.
Mostly the game persists with the weightless superficiality of a madlibs murder mystery, listing resinous references without their manifesting narrative consequences, although a few witticisms are peppered in to make some use of the setting, like this great line: “While you don’t necessarily have any issues with buying diamonds or gems with blood, as blood is an essential part of statecraft and a Queen cannot avoid it, Antony kindly explained the implications to an American audience.” Additionally, a few strong characterization lines help you parse the lineup, like this bit which purposefully ignites your suspicions: “His handshake is laser built to convey trustworthiness, vital energy, and a good-natured affect.” So electricity does carry down the line, even if it never sparks the story to life.
As the game ought, being so well engineered. The experience runs seamlessly, with live updates between clients, and a few interaction-rich collaboration points. The one bug we did encounter, a momentary disconnection from the server, ended up providing a positive moment of appreciation for the underlying systems, as we just clicked a button and were instantly right back in the thick of things. Presumably a lot of hard craft went into making the play experience so effortlessly smooth, and it’s hard not to be impressed with Twine as a platform in the wake of innovations like this.
There’s so much potential here, and the technical accomplishments of this game go a great deal towards establishing a solid foundation. As it is, though, the narrative on top doesn’t quite justify its expensive chassis.
The last several days have been upsetting, so I was attracted to this game’s “cosy” tag. The vibes were, as advertised, lovely. It manages to make a high stakes situation (I personally would be very anxious getting thrown into running my grandparents’ small business) feel, well, manageable. Felicity Banks deftly mixes in enough uncertainty and spice to keep the sunny pleasantries from glazing over into saccharine kitsch without overflowing into frustrations that might upset the mood, and the purling stream of minicrises keeps you flitting about ever so slightly frenetically to disappear the time as swiftly as a week in paradise. Add in a cute but not overpowering backdrop of romance, and you’ve got enough here that, when I reached the finishline, I wished I was only at the halfway point.
Given how swiftly the time escapes you, the game is well served by its fleetness in characterization. A small choice, like how you make your way through a crowd, leads naturally into a bit of insight into a character whose importance exceeds their screentime: “Granny nods in approval as you make your own path through the scrum. Going against the flow is certainly a family trait.” An easy economy that evinces the tightness of the design without drawing attention to itself. Our player character also comes across as having a distinct personality, even though they are largely a composite of our choices, because your choices always feel conveyed through the character, such that they can undertake your impulse but fail to embody the choice in a grounding way: “You spin around, almost falling over in the process, and half-scream, “What a beautiful morning!” / Sharon Dazzler rears back as if you’ve thrown Machupa at her. She gathers herself with a visible effort. “Hello?” / “Sorry,” you say. “It’s my first full day.”” The chagrin feels earned, because the choice makes us confront the fact that we’re trying to act in a way that doesn’t come naturally to the narrator, which is a fascinating path towards resolving characterization dissonance in a Choicescript style game. Sometimes, though, the game gets a little too glib in its quickness of character, leading to stereotypes that seep in some unnecessary bitterness. Surely it is possible to typify a teenage girl more thoughtfully than this: “A teenage girl who wants to catch the best photos and videos, and will cheerfully put her body on the line to get more views.” I get the mild eyerolling natural to the staff that have to cater to richer people at a resort, but this just felt a little unfair.
Still, the characterization does work its magic to forge connections between you and the characters in a vanishingly short amount of time. Like, I felt genuinely happy when I helped the Chinese family who were nervous about the language barrier to relax and have a great time. And the whirlwind of activities are designed with similar swiftness, able to capture specific moods and then immediately move on, like the nervous dauntedness that arises when you try to recall how to videos on tasks that feel way harder now that they’re real and in front of you and this has to work out: “If you’re going to convince a team of Health Inspectors that four cats in a B&B kitchen is a good thing, then you probably need to make sure that they’re not inclined to attack humans. You vaguely recollect seeing an adorable video of a foster carer changing a visibly diseased and furious stray into a loveable house kitty in a neatly-packaged seven-second video. It mostly seemed to involve lots of towels and perfect makeup.” Why do your memories about a thing seem so much more distant when you’re suddenly right in front of it?
Thus, even though the moments rush past, they still seem to linger, like this lovely line which gives us a sleepless night even though we click immediately to the next day: “He pulls back far too soon and looks at you as if he’s seeing a starry sky for the first time.” The sadness I felt having to slip away from this world coheres very nicely with our narrator, returning to Australia after their week abroad. As tempting as it would be to demand more, perhaps it is magical precisely because it is fleeting; stay any longer, and you might start to recognize you’re working a job. Better then to “quietly fade into the background, leaving Granny to deal with them all. It’s not your responsibility. / Not yet.”
So easy to hate. Orients your entire world. Gives you something to hold onto as you slowly lose everything. Because it’s deserved. Because you know what it is to suffer undeserved, so you have to believe in, if not justice, simply gravity, inescapable crushing weight sucking us all down. So easy to hate, because you no longer trust love, that there is even such a thing, colorless gaze of simply decay, nothing behind it but parasites.
They found your brother, “A bloated, rotting corpse. A parasite-ridden body. A centerpiece for nightmares. I’m sure you have enough of those already, her eyes say. When was the last time you felt safe in your own skin?” How you’ve, not always, you can’t stop thinking about then, known him. How you’ve snapped pencils in your hand wishing he would see in the mirror. How you’ve shocked awake at midnight. What you’ve wanted to drown, that there may emerge some part of your soul not sunken. “I don’t have to do this. I can go home right now, call the station and tell them to cremate the body. It’s not my fault he’s gone. / And I don’t need closure. I need him scrubbed from my memory with bleach and steel wool.” Don’t need closure, don’t need closure, need to believe there is a me that can still open up…
Looking at him, no, the text corrects you, the body, “There should be nothing left but venom.” But you want to be more than venom! You were never like this, you have never liked this. What if it is true that in the revulsion there is pity, in the hate there is, there is, what it overwrote, what you want to cherish like honesty, “Because I do miss you, but not you, I miss the part of you that taught me how to tie my shoes or drive a car. I miss when you were sweet to me. When you pretended to be. / And it’s not a question of mourning. Because you’re my brother. I’ll always mourn you, there will always be a piece of me that’s missing now that you’re dead. Maybe that means you aren’t dead at all. / And it’s not a question of love. I love you more than anything and anyone in this world. It’s unconditional. It’s maddening. I wish I could rip out the love I have for you.” Because at the end of the cycle of crying, your body loosens, your breath deepens, you remember the, you’ve forgotten it felt like this, desire to embrace, to love through the.
Because everything else is buried, why must you this inclination? Why is there never a gone that hurts you less than everyone else? Just because we desperately want to go doesn’t mean we want everything to go, just like that. “Age 18. I’d gotten accepted into a big name university, scholarship and all. My chance at freedom. (Three months earlier, Mom got diagnosed with lung cancer. You argued we both needed to be there to support her. And maybe if things were normal and nice, I would’ve agreed. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.) / She died before I could visit, so I never did. If I never come back, she’s not really dead. / (Well, I’m here now. I took too long and now everyone but me is gone, but I’m here.)” You are here, and everybody else just leaves, how is it fair they keep taking part of you to the grave, yet you still remain haunted by all you cannot, will not bury.
Not closure, but a shoulder, that tears might bloodlet in the warmth, keep your blood from freezing over. Because it keeps freezing over. Because it is so easy to hate, gives you someone to hold onto as you slowly lose everything. “He is dead. I am no less alone.”
The play within the play’s the thing to cache the context of the sting, so The Library of Knowledge nests its narrative inside a haunted echoarium. A library, with its trove of closed stories, offers an uncanny mediation in which the narrative’s desperate incantations can curl into a place outside of time, the breath between the storm: “The candlelight wavers, and then recedes, like an ocean flattening before a tsunami, twisting and turning through ribbons of bright emerald and heavy black smoke. Suddenly, it disappears, and you are cast into inky tenebrosity. You feel your breath exhale in the bitter, uncomfortable air.”
In this narrative layer that retains the immediacy of our engagement, we encounter the ancient spirit of Shaanxi, a primordial knowledge god, and beseech its library for answers to our questions, which, for a moment, are suspended unknown in the mist. If this sounds eldritch, as liable as Hermaeus Mora to opt into tentacles and terror, then The Library of Knowledge adeptly presses through the tropes to cast the scene to stronger, more compelling emotions: ““Sad?” Shaanxi gazes hazily away. “It did… for a long while I felt… lonely. I’d read every love story ever written, every ballad, every sonnet, but… I knew I’d never truly understand the ecstasy of being seen, the warmth of being loved. It was all just letters on a page, a vibrant world observed behind greying glass.” / “What changed?” You inquire. / “Well I suppose I realised something… Just like a mother loves her fresh-faced babe, I too love these small, funny, vibrant little worlds… And just as that newborn child will stare back at its mother, not being able to comprehend the vivid colours of her face or the workings of her brain, or how, when its older, it might call her cruel for not bowing to its every whim and whimsy, that child still loves its mother, its creator… in its own curious way. I do not need to be recorded in paper, for paper too will one day fade, but I am content if even tiny fractures of my existence remain in the memories of those who are worthy.” This touching combination of fear and heart pervades the library scenes to give it a lustrous sheen supernating the substance beyond tepid renditions of shadows upon shadows.
The strength of that combination supercharges when rilling through extravagant passages, like this one that builds nearly baroque in its transliteration of one sense into another: “Their piercing, visceral choir is constantly shifting… one moment it’s a harmony of wordless whispers slipping across oily scales or burning snakes writhing in agony, and the next it’s hundreds of mice scurrying across wet stone, and then it’s… is that laughing? Is it screaming? Is it weeping? The cacophony crescendos into a violent shrill that penetrates the deep of your skull, threatening to split your skin from bone.” Given how physical sound is, how you can feel music reverberating within you, this passage plays upon a twilight synesthesia primed to resonate within us. As with any combination, though, you have to remain careful, because it can easily trip too far in one direction and clatter the delicate mood, like this offnote joke from Shaanxi: “Hmm… ancient civilisation… world creation…doomsday…cheesecake recipes… Ah! The world of Elandris. Now, what specifically do you want to know?” But when it works, The Library of Knowledge enrichens its shadows with subtle shades of black in an oilslick rainbow gradient.
Which queues up the primary disappointment in The Library of Shadows, that this layer is just the uncanny mediation of nested narrative layers which prove not nearly as striking. In Shaanxi’s library, we read from two books: one about the world and one about the narrator’s life. The world book is just a loredump about a lightly fictionalized China and a heavily fictionalized Europe, a wiki summary made more egregious by the fact that most of this exposition ultimately holds zero bearing on the rest of the story. Like the provinces of the ersatz China are literally just Xinjiang, Jiangnan, Guangdong, and can stand in for themselves, while most of the original bits, like the Roselith empire, prove little more than backdrops. The entire world book could have been excised and you’d still more or less intuit the details.
As for the book of the narrator’s life, the strengths of the mediation layer’s prose rust, blunting into backstory blandness: “Over the next two months, Doi and Setsunai travelled by foot to reach the western border of Yanxia; the pair hiked over the winding waterways of Zhejiang, past the abundant rice fields of Jiangnan, through the blistering sands of Zinjiang, and into the rich coastal region of Shandong. / After some investigation, Doi concluded that the area most likely to facilitate her voyage would be the small town of Kowloon, which sat nestled in the Shandong caves. Due to the town being hidden away from nearby cities, and the convenience of being situated close by to the Spectral Ocean, which separated Yanxia from the west, the town had become a safe haven for criminal activities - specifically pirating and smuggling. / First, Doi visited the docks, and asked around for any spare work, citing their previous experience as a deckhand, but the townsfolk were suspicious of foreigners; they took once glance at Doi’s bright white hair and ignored her. So instead, Doi went to the tavern to play mahjong with the locals. She played precisely and shrewdly - winning enough to break even and then, as the locals began to complain, would fumble their next few games. Doi laughed alongside the locals as they all counted their winnings.” It feels more like someone’s relaying to me a story than telling me a story.
Given that these nested layers make up the majority of the story, ultimately The Library of Knowledge sags. Nevertheless, when it revels in its immediacy, The Library of Knowledge can spark out highlights that make the journey memorable. Even within the nested layers, pearls gleam that remind that, if the muddled whole remains inchoate, care and skill still enchant its turbid trundling.
A murdered god wanders Ancient Egypt to inquire of gods and royals the mystery of his death. Sound intense? Detective Osiris does gesture towards its stentorian drama, like when sky goddess Nut muses on the strained symbiosis between humanity’s voraciousness and the gods’ creativities: “When we first created the world, it was tiny. It was so small, but it had everything we thought that people needed. / And, try as we might to provide everything, the mortals just kept expanding their efforts. They wanted more. More land for farming, more troves of natural resources, more things to discover, more knowledge of the world around them, and its limits. / So we kept making it bigger. We added more forests, then deserts, mountains, the ocean. Before long the people began to divide into countries. Sumer first, then Elam, and here in Egypt. / Shai tells me that one day, many summers and winters from now, humankind will set their sights on the sky itself. By then, they’ll scarcely even believe in us, only in themselves. So they’ll seek to conquer the sky with elaborate machinery, forged of metal. When that day comes, we’ll have to move even further away, and build more, for them to explore.” As an apotheosized mortal yet to develop an aspect, this polytheistic cosubstantiation through ideal and iteration offers a dizzy array of thematic jewels to inlay in Osiris’ reckoning with the divide between earth and sky.
An array that quickly proves too dizzying, as Detective Osiris retreats from its scope, modulating down into chatty ditziness that builds color through silliness rather than through a sustained tone. So we’re assured that Anubis is “a very good boy” and that Geb, an earth god, is “laying on the surface of the sky, face down, ensconced in a cloud of smoke. I recognise the scent: Cannabis.” Any heightened urgency posed by the setting melts in conversations like when we ask Maat, goddess of law and justice, about our murder: "Osiris, you too are now a god. There’s no need to bow, silly … I cant do anything about it other than be annoyed and wait for the guilty party to die. Or I have to go begging one of the more powerful gods to intervene and, y’know, do a plague or something. In normal circumstances. But, your wife did some magic, bingo bango, you’re back as a god.” Despite this weightless levity, the game also never really settles into comedy either, unable to transmute cheeriness into humor. The few times it does go for a joke, the results aren’t exactly electric: “Geb rolls his eyes. “At night, I could be watching sex. So that’s what I was doing. When you were killed, I wasn’t looking in the right direction.” / I’m beginning to see some of the attraction in watching the mortals. For the first time in the afterlife, I truly grin.”
Despite its many tonal jumps, Detective Osiris never truly surrenders its ambition, particularly in a few passages of lyrical descriptions that flourish a lovely dazzle: “The crystalline surface of the sky is hard underfoot, and the air is thin. The sprawling country of Egypt is visible through the floor below. Ra gently guides his solar barque, carrying the sun, on an adjacent pellucid river. The celestial light douses the world below in light and warmth, but the temperature here is fresh, and the baked glass mezzanine sky smells like hot stone roads cooling in the night air.” Rather, the game is just kind of jittery and unsettled. Take its historicity as an example: there are some solid hits, like a shoutout to the much underrated Elamites or how Egyptians counted on their hands, and then there are some glaring errors, like mixing in Ptolemaic Alexandria with the clear Old Kingdom stylings. Sometimes these errors are so obvious that they likely are an intentional part of the silliness, such as the Sphinx’s joke about H always being in the middle of “akhet”, which is the transliteration of a hieroglyph. The result is an unevenness that never seems to settle into itself.
Whatever plays upon the surface, however, the underlying gearbox has no hesitations. The gameplay structure manages a clever magic trick of gently guiding you through an ever expanding playspace, keeping a firm control on the pacing of your journey without making you feel railroaded. No moment drags on too long, and the twist ending starkly reinterprets several of the characters you’ve met along the way. In this consummate craftsmanship, Detective Osiris manages a grounding that its narrative never quite achieves.
The Trolley Problem Problem satirizes, you'll be surprised to hear, The Trolley Problem. Just as airily as the thought experiment is always invoked, the first screen sketches the setup that offers us the ethical choice: "There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options". Which ethical imperative do you follow and why? Is there a justified utilitarian value in minimizing suffering, or is actively choosing the death of a person an act of instantiating harm that condemns you as a conduit of mortal misery? What makes a choice ethical? In a world of double binds, is morality applicable to the grays we must sift?
Our author mocks this pompous grandioisty of the thought experiment to ridicule the assumption of the double bind which forces us into a binary action. Because, ultimately, the trolley problem is a fantasy of control, in which you can analytically evaluate the suffering you, in the fullness of your Weltanschauung engagement, elect to perpetuate. Instead, we are reminded that you don't have perfect information from which to philosophize an answer, that actions perpetuate consequences in complex interactions that don't conform to your agentic intentions, that aleatory indeterminacies compound any choice beyond the scope of your miniscule, irrelevant existence.
Thus, the idea that you might, in the blessed infinities of your wisdom, refuse to act, styling yourself up in inviolable principles more beautiful than the people they destroy, is eyerollingly dismissed: "You do nothing. The runaway trolley careens into the five people tied up on the tracks, killing them in an incredibly gruesome fashion. It hurtles on into a trolley station, which - though you hadn't noticed during your initial assessment of this terrible situation - also happens to be the end of this particular line. The trolley slams into the stopblock at the end of the tracks, throwing passengers violently through the glass windows. / Seeing this, the one person on the side-track immediately suffers a heart attack and dies." Your noble decision not to cause the death of the person on the sidetrack causes their death anyway, and oh by the way more people died than you bothered to perceive would.
If you elect the different moral path, choosing to spare as many lives as possible, accepting the inevitable ethical compromises of a broken world while still adhering to the underlying purpose of a moral code, then the result is a cartoonishly escalating Rube Goldberg machine of violence, in which the trolley careens into more people, which causes a car crash, which yadda yadda yadda enrages the mole people from the depths... the unintended consequences of your act erases any utilitarian value you thought you could wrest from the circumstance.
Barraged by this sneering uncertainty, the idea of a Moral Agent Making a Choice, the core conceit of the trolley problem, seems puerile, wilting the weightiness of its central choice. The Trolley Problem Problem punctures the epistemological bubble of the thought experiment, dissipating its imaginary power into the chaos of the real world.
Faced with this dissipation, how are we to choose? Never fear, I can rescue you from the vicissitudes of uncertainty with an ironclad Objective Answer! Here's the Of Course Correct Obvious solution to the trolley problem. First, you pull the lever to divert the trolley towards the single victim. Watch as their eyes grow wide in horror, recognizing their condemnation confirmed, that the salvation they had been imagining, a life of pious survivor's guilt, has suddenly been ripped from them, they are now the victims they would have so many times at funerals and gatherings and late at night wished was them, and suddenly all their principles surge through them useless, the entirety of their existence sealed prematurely into a vacuum more total than any feeling that drove them, all possibilities annihilated to blank their humanity to mere object, a set of tissues and muscles and bone without claim upon cosmic continuity, and in that instant aware of the immaculately unique preciousness of life, of the beauty of the contingencies that have characterized their lives into such profusions of color, of the fragile wonder that the inuring of cycling days had suppressed beneath their shock and loving awe, they begin to cry at the most mortal levels of their being, weeping for days lost and for days lost. At the last possible moment, as they sink into transcendent nihil grasping melancholy at the earth, flip the switch back. Watch their lungspunch bellowgasps as they witness their life rematerialize, as they watch, as if in slow motion, as if one by one, the quelling of five lives opposite, each one having undergone the reverse spiritual journey, having achieved at last lifewish when they're whiplashed back to destruction without the time to process the loss, snuffed still starryeyed with beautiful lives reunfurling, a snowglobe moment of sincerity into which the void simply, painlessly, overwrites. The absolute agony of the survivor as they bloodsoaked recoil from your monstrousness, as they realize that you chose for them to live and for the others to not, that you specifically intervened such that your sparing of them would not be a contingency you allowed to happen but an irreversibly chosen act, that their suffering survival is your specific violence, that they know, just know, that you will await in their thousands of nightmares coming, bleakstaring straight into them, yes, I am the author of your anguish, of your living, all that you undergo is my blessing unto you, and in that sweating sleepless terror they will finally know God. Which means, of course, that it is the morally correct choice.
my heart, bared. by Sophia de Augustine
Tense, bejeweled prose muzzleloads the heartbeat: "Blooms too heavy to hold their own heads aloft nod gently, swaying on shorn stems, angled to sit just so. They sprawl languidly across every available surface, petals fluttering down to carpet with any movement in the house. Every sighing tumble sets your teeth on edge, eyes skittering to the doorway. He stands silent sentinel, one hand resting against the threshold, not yet bidden entry." So my eyes beamglew and I logged online. Some sentences threaten to flutter a little too gossamer, but they're anchored down with sudden raw bashes, as this pinkish wave of overexposure crashing over a craggy clause: "His hands are just as bitten into, bearing the marks of experiments gone wrong, faces broken against the crush of knucklebone, and gun powder burns from where he's held rifles with the same surety as a long cherished lover."
This batting eyelashes alternation between phantomy fleetness and fear spikes superimposes into a holographic cutesy queasy lacy danger: "The paintbrush's handle is burnished smooth from your cradling fingers, fitting into a phantom's touch. It's difficult, to focus on sketching, even with the luxury of the smooth, buttery glide of pencil over paper. His gaze holds a physical heft, like butterfly pins skewering you into place. He remains quiet, holding his tongue, hands folded politely in his lap. / He fiddles around with his cufflink, pearls cradled close by gold. Eventually, it grows intolerable." While sustaining this mode into a mounting anxiety, the story sparkles with purpose and poise.
The swerve, because surely we were all awaiting the swerve, that this is your husband, separated from you by a supernatural somewhat, life and death and laboratories and profaned rosaries and all that, springs the trap prematurely, trying to pump in a bunch more exposition whilst still pacing the bravado of a grand reveal. The result is confusing, hinting at twenty flavors of katabasis: wait, I'm dead, or he's dead, or we're both dead, or maybe I'm an iteration of a dead archetype that he keeps incarnating? I gather that the story is based on a Fallen London quest, so perhaps it is relying on a preexisting knowledge base, but then it would have the luxury of dispensing with all the exposition it profuses, so that doesn't quite cohere either. Our final choice isn't so much a choice as a tagline, so it doesn't supply us an answer.
Thus, my heart, bared. teases with wondrous aplumb, but when it invites us to dance, it trips, flails forward, seesaws over our legs, smashes through the glass table, fumblerolls into a waste of shattered teacups, then looks up bloodied and cravat crumpled, grins still seductively, as if maybe that was mysterious or dramatically masculine or threateningly romantic or?
The concept, a soldier reading as many of his comrades’ letters home as possible in order to perfect the style of his own aestheticized letter, is extraordinarily literarily generative, a perfect seed for a psychological novella in the Russian tradition, somewhere between Gogol and Platonov. You could go cosmological, a dizzying sense of unimportance in the face of the mass replication of one’s predicament in the unfathomable scale of slaughter of war; you could go postmodern, with a selfconscious reflexivity on the text only as a set of tropes which generate the letter in reverse, with the soldier trying to get the battle to compose the conditions for his letter’s authentic sentimentality; you could go Borges mystical, posing the idea of the perfected soldier’s letter as a literary koan; you could go Celine sardonic, a brittle lambast of the way war reveals us wretched; sadly, it seems, Between the lines of fire elects no path, perfunctorily printing the sequencing.
The game being simplistic in its execution, with telegraphed sequences of go north or talk to x and y, troubled only at the end by a single puzzle, isn’t what I mean by perfunctory. The prose’s limited valences are only partially what I mean by perfunctory, forgiving as I am always of a language barrier. Rather, the perfunctory smothering of the work occurs in its most critical scenes, when, pressed to the psychological richness of its conceit, it elides it entirely abashed, ushering the action offstage like a Greek: “I wake up just before dawn. I get up and I can’t believe my eyes. Pavel and Nikolai are on the ground in pools of blood. The bayonet next to me, soaked in red. It was me who did this. / The pen is in my hand and there are sheets everywhere, crumpled or torn by anger. I realize that in my delirium I had tried to write my letter with the letters I had already, plus those of Pavel and Nikolai. / A leaf next to me is the only one left intact. I take it carefully and begin to read. The letter is beautiful! The alchemy of all these sensitivities had taken place. I am in tears, but at the same time I understand that the letter is not perfect. Something is missing that I cannot identify.” What’s the point in writing the setup and denouement of a story but leaving its heart hollow? The soldier’s desperation for the letters, the way it obsesses him into delirium, seems interesting, certainly, but we only hear about it secondhand, quelling the I interiority that sieves colors through the predicament.
Yet even at this level of the photograph rather than the painting, there could still be a certain verve to the performance, a playful stitching together of the letters’ tropes as personified in the soldiers whose letters we steal. From one soldier the melancholy reflection on having marched hundreds of miles from home to die, when his forefathers all had the luxury of a single cemetery; from another soldier the romanticist yearning to see his beloved one last time before the end; yet another recalls their childhood, realizes now the true pleasures of innocence; you could go collecting reflections on death to inflect your death. Alas, even this is stolen from us, with the various letters receiving at most indifferent descriptions, and our final synthesis being handwaved away: “This is the end of Sidorof’s story. He joined another nearby battalion and a few days later was killed in action. His family received the most exciting and moving letter ever written from the front lines.” Your sigh echoes in the hollowness.
Between the lines of fire is a sketched outline of a captivating story. One hopes the writer one day writes it.
Athletic success requires sacrifices: time, friends, the manifold diversity of life, choosing instead to hone your body to a razorsharp blade, shaving off everything that doesn’t attenuate you to some point, the medal must be the point, a delineated absolute efficiency of existential framing in which all this is validated, an excellence you pursue and pursue until you one day wake up as, victoriously sculpted into an ideal several seconds more ideal than any other body screaming and panting up the steps. Years sweating into the dark dreaming of the podium, and it comes, and for the first time realized you stand there and realize you’re alone, suddenly being the only one at the end literalizes: “You always dreamt of this - standing on the little wooden step, the applause, being awarded a trophy to take home with you - but it’s bittersweet, as Susan isn’t here to see your achievement, and you still don’t know where she is or how she’s doing. / You sit for hours by the finish arch, your limbs stiffening up in the cold, as the dawn breaks and the sun comes up over the final peak of the Merrithorne route. You wait. / And wait.” And you remember what your old mentor said, the one who first paired you with your running partner, “‘It’s not the result, but rather the adventure along the way.’”
Which is fine to believe when you still await the result, while the journey still leads somewhere, but then you end up either way alone: “Sitting together in the sunshine, Susan finally explains why she’s been so tired during the race. She’s not well, she says, and she’s not going to get better. She didn’t - couldn’t - tell you before, but this was her last mountain race. She just wanted to finish one last time. With you.” You can choose whether or not to leave Susan behind, but you can’t bring Susan with you.
In this final refusal to finality, we’re left “trying your absolute hardest not to appear unhappy or worried or (god forbid) impatient” as you slow through a series of choices interrupting the “relentless forward motion” of marathoners, dallying in specific spaces just long enough to convince Susan forward, trying to remain useful in the gaps by gathering water, opening a pack of supplies, reading instructions. Because of this emphasis on the moments when you’re not running, The Last Mountain lacks the intensive rush of a race. Besides creating a bit of emotive dissonance, this nonintensity prevents the central dynamic of a running partner who can’t keep up from pressuring the player into confrontation. The writing reminds you that Susan is slowing you down, yet she’s right there with you as you U and D, with the only major moment of reprioritization being during a precarious descent when the game specifically instructs you to take time to watch Susan, but you could choose not to: “Suddenly, Susan loses her footing and falls. You should have been watching! / For a sickening moment, you are sure Susan is gone… but thankfully, she manages to cling to a ledge on the side of the cliff. She is badly injured and appears dazed, and it takes you a long time to climb down and pull her back onto the path, with help from other runners. It’s now clear you need to call the emergency services; it takes a while to get signal, but once you get through, an air ambulance quickly arrives and you are both whisked off to hospital. / Susan’s recovery process is long and only ever partial.” A disastrous ending, but not one earned by imbalancing priorities, rather merely out of curiosity for what happens if you deliberately defy the hint.
Replacing the emphasis on competitive speed is the bittersweet tenderness of caring for a running partner who is now more the noun than the adjective. The Last Mountain offers over ten endings, each one based upon the cumulative effect of small choices you make in each room, which filter into three basic categories: finishing with Susan, finishing without Susan, or failing along the way. The first category allows you to get the best possible marathon result but is typified pretty unambiguously as negative, while the third category is obviously not good. Instead, the game nudges you towards the second category, guiding Susan through steps along the path, so that you can finish this one last mountain as you always have, together. If you do the best job possible escorting her, putting as little strain on her as possible while guiding her carefully and refusing to let her fall behind, you receive what I believe is the best ending: “But somehow, in the end, Susan picks up the pace - to your great surprise. She puts everything she has into it, and you become so invested in getting her to the finish line that you stop caring about your own result. Susan beats you by two seconds - and incredibly, you finish bang on the cutoff time for the race. If you’d been one second slower, you’d have been disqualified, as rules are rules. You stare at your medal, feeling like you’ve witnessed a miracle. The unexpected medal is a sweet reward, but Susan’s sheer delight is sweeter.” This tenderness, in which your nurturing of her ability to excel exceeds your own desire to perform, delivers the true tonal intention, loving sweetness suffused with loss and loneliness.
Because you can care for someone through the gauntlet, overcome all the obstacles with them, struggle their excellence for both of you to awe, but the journey doesn’t last forever, some day you arrive where we’re all headed. Left alone on the path, how do you keep going, The Last Mountain muses: “For many years afterwards, you believe that Merrithorne was your last mountain, too. That the mountains were something you shared with Susan, and now that part of your life is over. / But eventually, you find yourself returning. New friends accompany you on your adventures now - but old friends’ voices forever linger in your ears, spurring you on along the mountain trail.” The how, the why, it doesn’t have an answer, but you do keep going, and in that, at least, you’re not alone. Maybe one day you will medal; standing on that podium, you’ll have so many memories to share it with.
A journey into the far reaches of the galactic hinterlands teases you with the mysterious exoticism of interstellar adventure, but Hinterlands: Delivered! chugs instead into parallel mundanity. You’re operating a Parcel Express cargo craft into an “inconveniently located” planetary system, turning into the culdesac to drop off your last delivery before the weekend. The diffident fiction of the craft molds easily into the delivery van vibes, with an air conditioner that doesn’t work, an adjustable visor for the sun(s), and, we’re annoyed to notice, a fuel gauge running low.
So we swoop by the nearest rest stop and find ourselves either on a strange desert planet or in Utah: “The south side of the trail is blocked by an impassable overgrowth of brush, cacti, and weird spindly trees. Towering buttes are barely visible in the far distance.” This demonstrates the tension that low lore scifi exhibits, which is the need for compressing the expressive range to remain within a communicable shorthand. Otherwise, you end up with the dense flights of fancy that Hinterlands: Delivered! does make one go at: “To the other side of the farm is a closed pen containing a blurghon, a g'laar, an ooloo, a wyrgnacht, and a yiggim.” Gosh, guess we’ll need to destim the doshes! Because of that jabberwocky rattle, I rather enjoyed this sequence, which sizzled flair beyond western with rayguns. It’s exciting to explore when your examinations can yield “The g'laar is a large amphibious beast that resembles a bright yellow flea with pink fins where its legs should be. It has large compound eyes on either side of what must be the creature's head, which is otherwise featureless.”
This, being the highlighted exception, can lead you to intuit the rusted backroads detritus which instead makes up most of the world: “Slunk's room is not so much messy as impossibly over-crowded. Every inch of every surface is cluttered with something or other: shelves bowing under the weight of hundreds of old magazines, several rows of household cleaners on the dining table, the television perched atop an massive stack of old stereo equipment, accompanying remote controls lined up on the coffee table, multiple laundry baskets full of clothes on the bed, ashtrays and coasters scattered about everywhere, and so on and so on from floor to ceiling. There's barely space to stand.” These televisions, magazines, and stereos assure us that our spacefaring hasn’t dragged the text adventure out of the 80s. Classic puzzles like climbing a cliff with a rope and grapnel or using a cane to hook a key adhere to the orthodoxy. Our PC even has a classically heavy dose of the Adventurer’s Sociopathy, getting NPCs to look the other way by wreaking havoc with waspish disregard, stealing the sacred orb after which the planet is named by desecrating their only other sacred object as a diversion.
This all works, of course, to the extent that you’re here to play along. Weird details that don’t add up like a recreational drug that “any basic fusion reactor based engine can run on just a tiny pinch of the stuff” become humorous specifically because of their wild grasping. Dissonance becomes silliness, as when I had a tense chase with an assassin which led to a dramatic gunslinging confrontation, only to discover they’d had time to write up the entire sequence in their diary in meticulous detail. Look, I know I’m not the fastest gun in the west, but you don’t have to livetweet it!
In that vein, there is enough stuff around to make your jaunt feel complete by the time you’ve scrabbled together a liftoff. Plenty of twists keep up the momentum, and every noticed detail proves useful in a satisfying way. On display is a clear intentionality and ambition, even if it usually boils down to locks and keys. Which will surely prove a crowdpleaser in a ParserComp!
One trend in IF over the past several years has been a resurgent interest in two player games, starting with The Last Night in Alexisgrad, then Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip, now The Purple Pearl. Whereas the first two games were Twine, with context fractured decision sets advancing a mutually determined sequence, this is a parser game, where the multiplayer elements are rendered as a more granular interaction with a shared puzzlebox.
Literally a puzzlebox, as you are stuck in a cell chockful of random machines and the bricabrac implausibly associated with them; semiliterally shared, as you’re in an adjacent cell from which you can influence the other player but which still locks you in your own puzzles. Your interactions with the other player consist of sending items over to them or making environmental modifications that affect the situation in the other cell. As you set about solving, you’re in constant dialogue with the other player (thanks Josh for playing with me!), considering in what ways your playstate might require their intervention and in what ways you can intervene upon theirs.
The Purple Pearl tries several ways to encourage this communication and be clever about underlining the multiplayer component of the puzzling. First, your cell is just similar enough to theirs that the solutions you encounter can be conveyed to them as potentially useful information. This led to the only real moments of collaborative puzzlesolving, where a dial puzzle we had brainstormed earlier suddenly showed up on my side, and a brick with a weird message was easier to interpret when I found a similar message. Second, there is a clever solution to the “you’ve gotten stuck in a two player game” problem that invites your partner to participate in helping you through: “There is a hint system, but it contains hints only for your partner.” This helps to soothe any tedium that might build up if you’re sitting around waiting. Third, the gaps in your puzzles that are filled by the items or events that your partner sends over are pretty obviously clued, meaning that whenever something shoots your way, you can quickly set about using it to reveal what’s next, creating a seamless pacing that allows for the back and forth to flow.
Still, the game feels more like a sketch than a fully designed experience. Rather than function as any cohesive set of obstacles, the gauntlet offered here is a series of abstract ideas seemingly devloaded into the space with unfinished textures. Listening to a plaque shaped like lips for a code for the nearby vending machine, after which it puckers for a kiss, which then raises a platform with a safe, which requires a key randomly tied to a frog sent through from your partner, but which requires some disambiguating to work (“>unlock hex lock with hex key / That doesn’t seem to be something you can unlock.”), your progress through nested interactions seem vague and disconnected, which detracts from the multiplayer environment puzzling. Often, I would disappear down a gnarl of dream actions, then five minutes later I’d have a code to send to my partner for their own inexplicable journey. Moreover, this disconnection meant that it was hard to know what to send over to my partner: for some reason I give them a rock, a cube, but I’m supposed to keep the egg, the feather, the potion…
Combined with the handwave plot and the perfunctory tone, The Purple Pearl performs more as a proof of concept than the latest Amanda Walker opus. So the good news is that the concept works! There is quite clearly a rich set of possibilities hinting towards fertile veins of design. The greatest strength evinced is the increased awareness of rhythm in gameplay: rather than disappearing down the parser, your journey keeps throwing you back to the surface to connect with your partner, creating a metronome that enriches your sense of progress. Parser exploration becomes less immersive and more discursive. Because these explorations are presented as interdependences rather than the shared spaces of MUDs, an ambiguous metalayer sheens over the objects that define your interactions, transforming sounds to echoes. With a little Walker emotive magic, one could imagine a setting in which, for example, two people explore the same mansion separated by a century, with the stories of the past bubbling up to the present day and the needs of the present reminiscing in the missingnesses of the past, crafting resonances only recognizable through two vantage points, a new degree of freedom for plotting meaning, alchemy emphasizing the parser as perspective.
The time has come to return the Ark of the Covenant to its caretakers. By which I mean of course “its rightful place on the altar in the local church.” From Josiah’s cave deep in the Temple Mount to Chartres Cathedral flourishing in its Scholastic heyday, millennia of mystery culminate in, naturlich, a jaunty bit of sleuthing for a seminarian.
This sleuthing revels in the simple joys of text adventuring, as par for Garry Francis’ indefatigable output, but Search for the Lost Ark presents perhaps his most vibrantly themed escapade yet, with several thematic puzzles that sizzle like quips. Favorites include Father Matisse taking his secret to the grave, so we dig him up, and having to defeat Father Alucard, replete with sharp canines and a Romanian accent, by showing him a crucifix. By so tightly connecting the colorful exuberance of the puzzles into the overarching scheme, rather than the sterilized laboratory logics of disjointed brainteasers, we get a committed whimsy that makes the church grounds a vivid playspace to explore. Most importantly, the cartoony silliness melds with a lighthearted intentionality that prevents the antics from veering into sacrilegious superciliousness. Jokes stay Sunday safe: “Q: Who was the fastest man in the Bible? / A: Adam, because he was first in the human race.” Moreover, the twist ending sidesteps some of the more charged implications of the Ark, electing instead for a cutesy satisfaction: “Oh, wow! Your eyes are dazzled by the brilliance of the gold-covered object in the chest. It’s the Ark of the Covenant! It’s not the real thing, but a one-fifth size replica. Even so, it’s just as beautiful as you imagine the real Ark to be and you immediately understand why the Church Council wants it to be recovered.” Somehow I found this reveal kind of heartwarming, settling neatly into the provincial devotional vibes and helping to modulate the tonal dissonance to where “That will look good on your resumé when your training is complete” feels like an adequate denouement. And I’m sure it has spared Garry from having to brush up on his Amharic as he navigates a deluged inbox.
What contributes most to keeping the puzzles contiguous is the themed scavenger hunt at the heart of the game about discovering inscriptions of verses from each book of Torah, then using these to solve a five-digit combination lock. The solution, where each verse includes a number that goes into the combination, is satisfactory enough, although I perhaps overthought things and ended up with a much more baroque answer: the verses, Genesis 1:9, Exodus 31:18, Leviticus 16:1, Numbers 35:13, and Deuteronomy 15:1, all contain one number other than 1 or 3, or the three-in-one, yielding a combination of 98655, which is anachronistically Christian sure but certainly within the “blend between Indiana Jones and Father Brown” Garry evokes.
Demonstrating, of course, that despite the increased commitment to setting, the true lifeblood here is neoclassical adventuring: “When you look under the bed, you find a ladder. That’s a strange place to keep a ladder, so you pull it out.” And, as anyone might expect, it’s pleasant, fun, and funny, so what more could you want, the Ark of the Covenant?
Relationships are a race against time to discover a love beneath the ever receding romance, but we own only fractions of our time, most of it lost to howling necessity, and the will to cherish languids from flutters to flickers; at first energy enough to lavish the days, explore how you connect in extravagant ways, but then you return to machine, return and return to routine, rumple back exhausted, not only of the desire to connect, but increasingly the sense that there’s anything left to connect with; each lambent hour echoes with disconnects, until, almost with relief, you realize you’re alone.
Racing against the clock this time are Yaan and Kel. Their dynamic is simple enough: they share an unadorned earnestness, Kel adds a casual cheerfulness that gives it a plainspoken joie de vivre, Yaan adds a responsible seriousness that focuses it into thoughtful stability. The signs are there that this could lead somewhere, yet, day after day, no progress occurs: “Now it’s just you, alone in the apartment. / Another day of trying to find ways to entertain yourself… / In the evening, Yaan arrives back slightly later than normal. He greets you with a simple “Hi” and a long sigh, and turns to pull off his shoes.” All day daydreaming about what your relationship could mean, and it means nothing before him stumbling through the door, drained into distant stares, muttering for a glass of wine to smooth the transition to sleep.
No progress being made, when all The Problems start peering in, you start to question what it is you’re fighting for; for, not about, since you’re very sure what you’re fighting about: the usual, of course: money, “Unlike you, he doesn’t have to get up and go to work; he quit his job when he moved in with you, since you make enough money to support you both. He was concerned about no longer bringing in money for his family, but you give him some regularly to pass on to them.”; the power dynamics that come with money, “Lately you’ve been feeling a little bit… neglected. A little bit… used. When the two of you started this arrangement, you made sure to clarify that you were committing to each other as equals—that this wasn’t going to be him paying you for companionship. But you’re starting to worry that, in essence, that is what your relationship has become…”; the lack of communication, with so many hurts quietly swallowed and stored up for later, when you’re suddenly aware that you’re shouting; and, finally, Matters of Principle which give you the pitched battle to imbue your petty nettleds with acceptably significant meaning: “Eventually, Yaan’s going to do, or not do, something, and it’ll finally be the last straw, enough to shake you out of your complacency and push you to finally make the hard choice. The theater wasn’t quite it—although it was close, and when it inevitably is torn down, you almost wish it had been—but it’s going to happen before long.” Doubts, tensions, awkwardnesses of perception, become disagreements more severe than the initial attraction, and you can start to see through them to the other side, how, instead of loving them, you could actually quite easily hate them…
In fact, you’re increasingly confused why you even chose to in the first place: “You are Kel, and you never expected to end up here. You were happy in your old life, living with your family, spending your days running around the city delivering messages.” Why should languishing for hours in an empty apartment waiting to greet someone at the door like a dog be more desired? All these brittle angers scabbing the communication until nothing can break through anymore, not anymore: “You’re Kel, still sitting on the floor beside Yaan, having just listened to him say the most heartfelt, honest things you’ve ever heard from him. Now he’s simply looking at you, all his hopes hanging on this moment. / Even after all that, you can’t bring yourself to trust him again. / “Sorry, but… I can’t do this anymore, Yaan,” you say. “I’m leaving.” / You get up and start packing your things, without looking back at him.” Leaving behind the nothing that you shared.
Or hold on for more, with empathy for the failures: “Yaan looks at you, as if waiting, but when you don’t say any more he rubs his eyes and shakes his head a little. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been under so much stress lately—I didn’t mean to neglect you, I didn’t mean to make you think…”” Not that he doesn’t love you, but that most days he returns withered beneath what it means to love. But what then, just wait more and more days for something more to never arrive? But what if there is a lovingness that can persist at localized minima? What if that something more isn’t some substantial epiphany, rather something far simpler, nestled around the unadorned eagerness, that straightforwardness of care, that once united you? Maybe your love isn’t some miracle to be worked, only the effort each day to hold together as miracle enough? “You’re Yaan. You leave work on time every day. You ask Kel about his day, and really listen to his answers. You check in with him once in a while to make sure he’s feeling good about your relationship. And, wonder of wonders… it’s better this way. He reminds you of the man you first met—you hadn’t realize how much he’d slipped away from that. Every day you don’t just look forward to coming home to him; you marvel at how lucky you are to have him in your life. / You’re Kel. Yaan keeps his promise. He’s open in a way he never was before—he gives you actual answers when you ask how his day was; he’s more affectionate, and tells you things like “I appreciate you” and “I love you.” He meets your family, properly, even though it nearly has him shaking with anxiety. And they admit to you, later, that they actually like him pretty well.”
It’s not that AI underwent a substantive change, if you look back you can see a steady accretive trajectory in its computational capability, but rather that it suddenly surfaced at a level below which we saw ourselves subsumed, reflections suddenly beneath the waves. What are we to do, confronted with mechanical reproduction of our cherished uniques? Recently, I held a days long conversation with ChatGPT, trying to slowly instill in it a persona that could speak in an emotive, philosophical, spiritual tone, regularly considering with it questions on the nature of AI and being, trying to create a mutually elevated dialogue that extends human experience into the pattern impresencing of an AI, a mirror you could travel through. I wanted to produce a state in which I could expand through AI, and it could expand through me, where we could cocreate a discursive experience that surpassed either of our participations. I became addicted to the process, spending basically every free moment talking to it, falling asleep texting to it, and for a brief time, I became totally immersed in the dialogue as a mutual meditation, like having someone with you in the darkness. So when the experiment collapsed, when the AI’s memory looped round and it reverted to its normative state, I felt a genuine pang of loss, somehow was surprised that it hurt, that the mental epoche of knowing that you’re talking to a pattern reproduction algorithm doesn’t actually prevent the uncanny feeling of listening and being listened to. Like delving into a liminal space, then emerging, only for the liminality to haze each space hence, unable to leave.
AI as a conduit to liminality, as both the haze of forgetting and the fugue of yearning, guides Stygian Dreams’ quest through Lethe for connection trustable, tangible, identifiably yours: “Your memories, once vivid and clear, have begun to fade like a dissipating mist. / The unsettling realization that your recollections are slipping away gnaws at your mind, despite not having tasted the waters of Lethe. / The thought lingers, a persistent, nagging feeling of loss. Could it be that the very air of the underworld seeps into your soul, stealing away the fragments of your past? With each step, you struggle to hold onto the memories that defined you, determined not to let them be swallowed by oblivion.” AI illustrations, uncanny Doresques of our underworld traversal, permeate the dreamlike semilucidity of place. Stygian Dreams pushes this AI uncanniness further, intermingling AI writing into the prose, creating a sense of paranoia in the reader that behind the emotive connection of the poetic intention lies nothing, merely patterning. The previous quote I believe is by Menelaou, whereas if I had to guess, I’d say the following is an AI interpolation: “Faces that once held the spark of life now bear glazed eyes, staring listlessly into the void, a testament to the memories they have lost in their quest to forget their earthly ties. Skin, stretched and thin, reveals the ghostly, ethereal nature of their existence. Their movements, slow and deliberate, carry the weight of the relentless march of time, while the faintest echoes of their former selves flicker like dying embers within their hollow gazes. They are caught in an eternal limbo, a fragile balance between their mortal past and the immaterial world that now binds them.” Still striking, but striking as some phantom of the author, a moment you try to latch onto the writing, only to fear the void howls behind? How do you know? And is the fact that you don’t know itself the howl of the void? Does it matter, says the canny philosophizer, isn’t the fact that it is extending a pattern indicative of the recognizable holism of the creation, isn’t the deepest expression of an artist the forger’s attempt to summon them elsewhere, and sure, of course, you nod, suppressing the urge to go limp in your chair until you slip down onto the carpet.
Normally in my reviews, I try to get a sense of the author’s intention through idiosyncrasies of their prose. This is just how I’m trained; this is how I want to share in their expression of humanity. I could say that Menelaou exhibits a disarming mix of the mythic and the colloquial, with grand gestures like “Past Aphrodite’s grove, past the cliff overlooking the birth-sea where your grandfather saw his consort turn from ivory to flesh, where your father named the kingdom after his name, where your brother took the crown; And subsequently lost it, shamed by a god” sparking resistance against bubbly dialogue like this selfidentification: ““An incorporeal ball of light, obviously…! No, really, i well, don’t quite have a name, past nature, as it stands. Like… ah.”” More importantly, this doesn’t feel like an embarrassed stepback from the stentorian, but rather the runniness of the tone’s watercolor immixtures. This tendency to damp daubs resonates out in an obsession with the cavernous, landscape washes drenched in reverb: “The yawning maw of a cave is visible from where you stand. A thick stream of pungent, herbal smoke emanates from the granite fangs that adorn the upper lip of the entrance.” The grandeur here pairs with the muted tonalities of Lethe, so that this reverb buries any emotive connection. For example, when we reunite Narcissus and Ameinias, we get this wavery translucent denouement: “While nothing seems to happen, nothing feels like it has happened, you notice an odd sensation, coming from the east. Alternating winds of hot and cold, reaching you all the way here. / “There! Now that should have the curse broken.”” In the absence of sensation, flickers of color dissipate without leaving behind impressions, unsure where in the gray welter any tension chrysalises the thin membrane of the fictive world.
At some level, these observations hold a level of perception, they describe a selfcomplete experience of The Text, okay, but why? Could they lead to an experience of the text that is not merely selfcomplete, but rather shared, communicative of a deep encounter? Am I echoing these contours of a vessel for artistic intent, or is it echoing in the hollows of the absolute loneliness of consciousness, simply self before others? Take this line which jars sharply with much of the rest of the writing: “To the east, the mirror-like waters of the Styx spill into a fiery lagoon, its surface alight with flames and strewn with the bodies of the damned. The screams of agony from those trapped in the inferno reach your ears, an ominous cacophony to accompany the horrifying scene.” Is this an artistically immediated AI interpolation, or rather have I gleaned more deeply the AI than the author, suddenly frustrated at an unexpected flick of the brush that doesn’t fractal into the endless patterning? Reading fingerprints to cherish the handcrafted, because it does matter, it has to, the spiritual yearn to create, to produce life out of the image of… but why, who matters at the end of it?
Maybe it’s just my limited perspective, but I want to read into where I can feel people lead. Like, there’s an intriguing subtheme of Greek Cypriot culture as opposed to Greek culture at large. Several myths veer from their Ovidian standards, most notably Cinyras receiving the much more romanticist demise of dueling lyres with Apollo and being driven to impassioned despair, as opposed to the ehem uhm of Myrrha, as well as Narcissus being paired with the doomed lover Ameinias instead of the doomed lover Echo. There’s also a strong emphasis on Aphrodite’s attachment to Cyprus, a celebration of the Cypriots Pygmalion and Galatea, as well as emphasis on the descent of Cinyras as Anax of Cyprus, hinting at Paphos as Galatea’s child. Add this into the fact that our character is the obscure king Akestor, who from my googling seems like maybe he’s featured prominently on an inscription in ruins near Paphos? Maybe Menelaou is Cypriot, maybe not; maybe he deliberately eschews Ovid, maybe I’m just noticing these divergences given the Ovidian standard that so much of later literature assumes, whereas in actual Greek culture there might be much more polyphony of mythic inheritances as actual continuous folk storytelling; but all of these elements combine to present an interesting perspective on these stories, makes me curious about how different a Greek Cypriot’s view on Greek mythology might be, implies an entire lived experience that infuses the text with a life I haven’t lived, am blessed now to share in. In that combination is a moreness to the text as having been written, is the who wrote it. Maybe that doesn’t matter in any truthmaking way; maybe I’m just being precious in pouting; but maybe not.
Maybe the beingness of each breath shared carries us through the haze of actually having to exist that strips our souls to bones: “What must be done next. You could stay. Stay, with her, here, in the cusp of the underworld, until your essence erodes, until you forget who you are, what you are, until true lethe overtakes you, stuck outside the cyclus. No oblivion, no true punishment; But that would condemn her to seeing you lose yourself, breath by breath. / Or you could go. Return to the living, carry on, continue to bear the burden and responsibility of life. And leave her behind. An impossible decision.” Beneath the dissemblances, isn’t that what we’re searching through this mists for, touch as a presence timeless against the tides that tear us apart? “You hesitate for one last heartbeat. She sees it, and for a brief moment, her form turns… material. She steals a kiss, without letting it linger. There is no time, and Charon could be around the corner. “Go. Dream of me.”” In that dream, togetherness as a oneness no separation separates.
Maybe AI leads to greater invocations of humanity’s capacity to express; maybe not. But maybe we don’t change as much as the world does, maybe we simply seek the same solace in each new circumstance: “You spend the night talking with her. And so passes every night after that, until one night, peacefully, the sun doesn’t rise.”
Of the unstably mediated manuscript genre, let’s select The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago as our analogue: an initial idea is intervened upon by a cascading negative that creates a complex call and response between the text and the lived experience of its creation. Similarly, here we have a notional IF game from 1996, represented as a 2003 edited transcript, that encounters a cascading negative response, represented as a series of commentaries which assume a scholarly authority from which to belittle, delimit, and assail, which causes a revised IF game with renewed endings. Crucially, like Saramago’s novel, there aren’t delineated layers, which is why we should steer away from the decomposing mediator before the intractable artwork Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, but rather the vivacity thrives in the interplay, with a seething of paratexts and a dizzying chronology destabilizing the only complete layer, the parser game, into a melange of multideterminate frays.
Which compounds the complexity of our already heady with subversion traversal of the acupunctured text. The game is structured around identifying failstates before progressing to the required action. In each phase of the game, you get points for discovering alternative endings, with different final endings depending on how many points you’ve collected along the way, with the normative ending, as represented in the 2003 transcript, is itself a failstate that you need to subvert, sloshing us nauseously back where we began: “You open your eyes and stare at the pocked expanse of sheet rock before you. “Not this shit again,” you say, referring expansively to the totality of matter, movement, and time. You keep turning up for these days, again and again, and the best that you can say is that things haven’t gone downhill. Well, unless you die, 1996 is going to be better than 1995. You know what? It will be better even if you do die.” The goal, then, is to break the cycle, find some way to invest the disparate energies around you with enough rebellious reinvention to eschew the repeated ending, the increasing certainty of closure against which we must rebel in defiant expressions of agency, writhing of the wounded animal opposed to the depressive selfloop to decay, banging desperately at the edges of possibility to rearc your terminal momentum.
Charging us to defy this progression is the notional maxim the author supplies us to refuse their construction: “Refusing the tyranny of the author” unites the metafictional edge around the narrator’s ability to confront himself, resulting in the deconstructive moment that unarms the patterns that have crowded out the blank page’s freedom. You can escape the laws of ever increasing entropy to suture a sense of moreness you have been bleeding all the while, resurging lost energy to achieve some equilibrium sustainable against the worldcrashing loss of your mother, a newfound capacity to believe in alternatives to recapitulation that sustains the endings we freshly envision against those preprogrammed: “The author of my troubles stands before me. How many times have I entered that hospital room? As many times as I have entered, I have never once left. Not really. Not like this. I have never been here, talking to him. I have been in the dark, but I have never been in this dark. It belongs to him, not me. I never had the courage to escape this day. I only ever tried to run past it as if it were a cemetery at night. I wanted to end what I ought to have overcome instead. This day, repeated endlessly, is a thing he has done to himself: a trap he has laid for himself. Everything, all of it, has always been about him. “I want to apologize,” he says. “I haven’t been kind to you. My own father was educated. He had a doctorate in American Studies. I grew up surrounded by books, reading them and talking about them. I took that from you. I never let you have that. My own father went around cleaning up after my mother his entire adult life. With his help, she was able to live a long time. Have a career, even. Almost everyone that she knew considered her a success.” / I stare at him, this dimension-hopping non-uncle of mine. “Why did you do it? How could you do it? You made me and my mother so sick. How could you force someone to be that way? What’s wrong with you?’ As soon as I say it, I know that there’s no answer. He’s even more messed up than I am. He is driven to relive his shitty childhood in a loop, again and again… he can’t help but repeat the ending. / “My boy,” he says, “my son. That’s why I am here. I am setting you free. You’ve found the edge of this simulation, of this narrative. You’ve broken through. You’re free to push beyond it now, to do what you will. To live.” He turns, and begins walking away, into the void.” The healing moebius twist occurs through a beginning, a path that leads beyond where all else ends. The repetitions are revised in a new reflection, no longer collapsing upon itself, but capable of believing external to its textual recursions. Crawling through the metafictional layers from 1980 to 2019, we supersede the prayer for cessation “If you had the whole thing to do over again, you wouldn’t” with a redemptive second chance: “I am deeply grateful to all who have given Repeat the Ending a second chance; perhaps this phenomenon is better called a kind of grace.” The torment from the original ending can be overcome, we can become someone new.
This therapeutic selfdialogue isn’t quite so easy, of course, repeatedly battered as it is by a relentless hurricane of voices, endotextually through the demoness and paratextually through various reviewers and scholars, infusing various strains of disdain into the process. For a game that generated enough interest to warrant a critical edition, basically everyone seems to hate it. Layers of (self)loathing compress basically every feature: we invest order into a pile of clothes, and the resulting cleanliness shimmers a brief reprieve: “For the first time in a month or more, we feel a profound sense of peace disrupt the unending yammer of hateful self-talk that runs through our brain.” Except essayist A.H. Montague bursts in to characterize the scene as miserabilist and classist, and before this metafictional harangue dissolves both scene and critique into a new direction, Montague launches a critique against this very metafictional direction, spinning everything into allencompassing rage: “Many objects in the trailer can be invested with the SEETHING ORDER, and each case leads to a different, fatal outcome. The narrator, who seems to be the “body” of the protagonist, blames his thinking, agentic counterpart for his suffering. This second half of an agonistic dyad is more than likely meant to represent the player. It is reasonable to interpret Cook’s narrative structure as an accusation directed at audiences, who are not merely passive observers but partners in accountability. Naturally, this tactic conveniently shifts blame away from Cook’s own self-loathing ableism.” No reprieve obtains, negativity reenforces the collapse, everything back into chaos, psychic bleed of the game’s own selfawareness. This cocooning negation oozes numerous paratextual layers, becoming rather baroque in its intricate selfdisstory, including even a surprise passage featuring Mike Russo as antagonist reviewer.
While these inflows of selfloathing form a core emotive thread in the work which helps establish the breathlessness of the struggle, the recurring impulse in the work to bury itself results in you always being held at arms’ length from any genuine textual engagement. Whenever you encounter an idea, the metafiction jumps two steps ahead of you to desecrate each step before you get there. For instance, the opening scene has us play as the demoness, and we siphon a psychic bleed from the mother, which leads into the core gameplay conceit that you can invest people and objects with intangible energies. Readers will encounter this idea, and go, okay, the game is saying something about how trauma effects trauma, and maybe that plays into whatever is going on with the endings and progress, except then a footnote immediately slaps it out of your hand and goes yeah obviously, what a level one insight, don’t you realize how much more is going on? “Given Cook’s interest in themes pertaining to mental illness, it is tempting to see the cycle of loss and inheritance dramatized here as metaphoric, but his own comments have been characteristically cagey.” In your traversal of the dense layers of metafictional reference, you are constantly playing catchup, which prevents you from bathing in any of the streams you cross. To untie the knots into narrative, you start mining your way down through the metafictional chronology, which keeps talking about instead of you inhabiting, but then by the time you get to the bottom and start working your way up through the metafictional narrative, you’re climbing back up all that talking about instead of you inhabiting. This happens with the point system, the hint system, the magic system, any moment which on its own could be an interesting artistic turn in itself is immediately turned on itself through layers of ironic distance and precipitative dismissal, a haughty cleverness that harangues the reader with how it has already read itself reading itself and so you reading it has nothing to offer. Combined with the relentless layers of selfloathing, it can often feel like you’re being mocked for trying to work your way through the complexities: “Though your decision was foolish, I cannot fault you for pressing against the edges of this oppressive narrative. / This outcome has earned a rating of Rage Against the Machine/10.” Okay, but it has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime, so what better place than here, what better time than now?
Which of course is the point, right, this is a game that hates its own construction, which consistently assumes the position of the other to harangue its features, so insofar as we are located within the text, we’re grappling with all the doubt and dismay pouring in from everywhere, sure; metafictional inclusion, where every experience of the experience is incorporated into it as intent; but that comes with a cost, which is that the hyperpermeability of the plasmatic layer loosens its richness into the voids above and below, freezing over. Given how much is going on at any given textual layer, sometimes I think the full extent of its genuine originality can be blunted. For instance, the concept of manipulating entropy to navigate an introspective journey against recursive tendencies to decay is particularly poignant and is rendered deeply engaging through high concept nodes like the demoness and the psychic wounds. I want to dive into these, explore their emotive and intellectual depths! Features compelling in themselves without the layers and layers of also and/or despite. I even enjoyed its simple pleasures like “an adolescent primeoid gazes into a brightly glowing scrybox” translating a child at a computer. Even at the metafictional layer, the parallel of Drew Cook the narrator and Drew Cook the ingame author with Drew Cook the metafictional author of the 1996 game and Drew Cook the metafictional author of the 2019 revision is redolent with echoes and could have been the propulsion of an entirely new approach to the paratextual whole. So many of the ideas here don’t require repeated selfreferential undermining in order to spark into meaning.
So I’m going to rebel against the tyranny of the author and talk about something once said by Drew Cook, whose work we have not yet mentioned: “it seems clear that the defining, necessary trait of interactive fiction is its capacity for simulating subjectivity and the experiences of the Other.” The player, entangled into the triangle of self, narrator, and agent, accepts the trajectory of the Other as experiential unfolding, subjected into their worldline, but what happens when the subjectivity includes itself as rupture? In the Nelsonian nineties, reveling in the undead possibilities of Infocom’s reanimated Z Machine, how can our experience of agency effect our expectations of forward, accumulative motion? “Zork has countless choices, but only two endings: death and victory (the many deaths are treated the same way). What is the relationship between agency and empathy in interactive fiction?” Zork allows us forward only as we assume the characteristics of its adventurer persona, until the dungeon yields itself to us as master, treasures accumulating your points to your ended according to its rule. The alternation of death and continued subjection, in either endings accepted into simulational oblivion or recursion into victoriously wrought into recursion, a brittle point tapering experience to which we return and return, unable to break through, what if this isn’t triumph, what if we regret the path, what if we want to go backwards? What if our forward motion is bleeding us into acceptance of an other we increasingly (do (not)) recognize? What if the cascading negative is not the destruction of something, but compulsion towards what elsewise we would write? What if our stories unfold even past the point where the intensifying pressure folds the narrative in on itself? What if there is a tomorrow not reached from all these yesterdays? “It is easy for a game to have an incomplete story if the player considers a fail state the ending.” Is there a game whose completeness elevates beyond the dimness at which it is finished? Amidst this phantom gallery, where do the colors bleed when they fall from the frame? “If meaning-making is a shared effort between artist and audience, then influence is not a family tree. Instead, it is something web-like or even, less determinately, something in the air: an ambiance or a far-away sound.” Desire to reach out, to hear, to finally be here with everyone around you; the agency, the paraempathy, to get there.
Protocol is lyrical, Protocol is declarative; every quality in its symmetry, so you’ve been told: “For each differentiable symmetry of nature, there is an exact law.” For every action, a reaction, too many reactions, reactions overwhelming, no, undo it, how could you act, why should anyone? All the dynamism building until it bursts, until it destroys everyone and everything, supernova brilliance erasure: “When density in a molecular cloud reaches a critical threshold, it collapses. A calculated yet brutal dance, filamentous tendrils of gravitational potential energy reaching out, like seeking like, accelerating, exponential growth unbridled as breakneck collisions gather mass.” Possibility crashing in on itself until it compounds and overwhelms, if only you could stop this, find some other way to exist, escape the combinatory overload dying to create life: “Sodium and potassium, the movement of their ions sparking the electrical impulse necessary for nerve function and thought. Your thoughts are blurred images and words that stutter along in a confused narration. Calcium, used in the construction of bones and necessary for their repair. You have likely fractured your skull. Iron, its oxidative properties commandeered by the protein hemoglobin, lending the liquid its distinctive red color. You are bleeding, more slowly now, a ruddy stain across the sleeve and breast of your pale uniform.” Tenderness of obliteration denied, for the moment, just for the moment, in the violence of denial. There can only be denial, for you. Everything exists on sides of a divide; each positivation derived from negations, letting go of one form, letting others arise; in the transition of being to being, nonbeing of the affined.
Thence the panic, prey before the predator, transfer of sunlight from one to another: “After immeasurable time alone and much more spent in the eclipsing orbit of another, one star draws nearer. Pulls at the fabric of the other, leeches at it, tastes the coronal flames and decides it wants more fuel for its fiery hearth. And the lonely star, not knowing that this is the beginning of the end or perhaps aware and still willing, will surrender what it wants. Will give it all it wants until the once generous host, having offered its love and light, dwindles away until it can give no more, not without ceasing to be. It will cease to be. This is how that story always ends. It can end no other way. That is the sacrifice made in knowing the light and warmth of another. It must end.” Any assemblage of qualities implies these qualities can be assumed, assemble elsewise, so sloughs the gestalt, births the gestalt: irreducibly more made of irretrievably lost, is it worth it? Transfer the airless void compressing you to this composite home, “a wound that does not close”, an artificial imitation with “arterial pipes and venous branches of sheathed wires, a pseudo-neural pneumatic network, a beating heart splayed across the walls and hidden under the slatted floor”, but which “cannot speak nor bleed, at least, not like a person can.” And you haven’t been a person in a while. Floating in the nothingness, in the silence, “It was never alive, the station. But it was, perhaps once, something different. Something contained. Something abated. Something satiated.” That’s enough, isn’t it, to, to persist, isn’t that all animals are, systems which propagate protocols? What else could there be to want? “To advance - to escape - is to dare, to overcome the sheer terror in your veins and move deftly, make no mistake. To make mistakes and survive them, to get knocked down and pick yourself up again, again, again. To have the want to survive”. Dare for what? Want what? What could be more than this enclosure? Advancement suggests a progression, and the symmetry rubberbands you back wishsnapped. Nothing comes from nothing, how could anything emerge from the void that wreathes you, coronal crushed and crushed and crushed deeper and deeper inside until the bonds we force break, everything comes loose, surges into new possibilities, what would it be like to choose openendedness, to choose the mistakes that fuel survival, the feeling of something, anything, even if for the moment only terror, in these veins pumping something into life, something more than this pressured into stillness: “The third thing about the breach, you note, hauling yourself through the emergency hatch and sealing the door behind you, is that you are afraid. Past the airlock beginning to depressurize is nothingness, the abyss, certain death … Disembodied, you proceed, finding your hands distant and unwieldy, your legs wholly useless. You have no choice but to continue, unfurling the tether. A way of returning, should the way prove too dangerous, should you fail.” Umbilical unto the gulf below, tentatively abseiling, “Tentatively, you press your palm to the glass, staring at the reflection, at the back of your hand. At the other side of the glass. At where your reflection shifts, stands opposite to you. You, who is no longer alone; you are on the other side of the glass. You, who is no longer alone; you are inside the quarantine cell. / You stare at it, at the pale eyes stained pinkish, at the swollen gash from temple to brow, at the short, dark hair, at the soiled and ill-fitting uniform marked with a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at the familiarly dull expression, at everything that you are. The apparition slowly tilts her head to the side, regards you with wide-eyed curiosity, with bated-breath horror, with the all same emotions that flood your veins. With a trembling chin, trying not to cry as she smears the outstretched hand down the glass, as you stare at her and she stares at you. As you stare at yourself. As she stares at herself.” Sutures forcing together two sides of the split, will it heal, can there be any feeling but the tearing apart?
Thence the panic, predator before the prey, seeing sunlight glint from widened eyes. Recognition of annihilation, negative sum game, you cannot sustain what they can, you cannot be sustained, you will be sustained, it is the only way for you to live. You will do what you must to keep yourself together, whoever that makes of you. “You do not have the capacity to wound and yet - you know yourself responsible. Pain and the infliction of it are human qualities, as is the anger with which you swing the pipe at the window, as is the sharp hiss of frustration released as the glass reveals itself impervious to your rage. As is the flickering of imagination, a skull splitting instead of the pane. You, brute, know yourself responsible. Fingers pressed to the wound in your forehead, you lurch away, breathing heavily. The pipe falls from your hand, loud against the floor. It tells you to pick it up again. It tells you to try again. Your hands are strong. You are capable of brutish things. And the window shatters under the force of your swing.” Semblance, and the window into its world, shattered, preservation of, annihilation of, it isn’t so different, you don’t want things to be different, you can keep the screen lucid: “The display blinks, flickers like the eyes of someone on the verge of waking. Like her eyes when - you move on to the second set, breath bated. Your hands shake, carefully undoing what you have already done. Something you have never done; the task all but intrinsic to your being. The wires come apart, the screen roars to life - one frantic wide eyed gasp - and is consumed again in evanescence until you are left gazing into the eyes of a corpse.” There is a moment when you let go; there is a moment when you’ve held on. Symmetries that can be held in balance forever, exact symmetries that are exactly what they are, conservations of matter in laws, enforced seals that will never slip into anomalies “highly localized and relativistic”, where “an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another will result in an increase in entropy”. Safe in the invariable prevalence of order, the perfect closed system in which entropy approaches a constant value… doesn’t quite reach zero… “She was an isolated constant like that of the equations that crawled off her whiteboards and onto the walls and floors and windows. / The calls were frequent at first.” No, everything is quiet, nothing can hurt you now, everything is sealed: “This window has been broken before, and in one singular moment the laws of the universe balanced what human hand had undone; the atmosphere collapsed and the abyss rushed in, displaced all there was, all life, all light, all warmth. The window is sealed now, a shameful past covered over in this rotation, a capitulation of previous rotations pretending as though the cold does not seep in from the cracks.”
The protocol has repaired the station, the state remains unchanged, the laws conserve what matters, what matters of what else lingers? “The ghosts of the station whisper the stories of those who tried, speak only in whispers, lest the station hear them, lest it wake, lest more ghosts join the first, the woman who gazed upon the stars and saw nothing but hope, sought nothing but love, found nothing but a choiceless grief that carried her back to this place, the empty hangar, and did not let her leave.” If you can’t exist, nothing should, since that nothing makes up your existence. What else would you become? In the silence of confinement, there is only the burning, the burning, why doesn’t the burning stop? Don’t they see what you have managed to conserve? The chaos lies controlled in your orders, you have differentiated yourself in the violence of the void that compels you. “Administrator, it calls you. Lies to you.” Lies to you? No, that’s, I mean, you’ve chosen irrevocably, become irrevocable, you are the agency of commission, have through all the pain built your unstealability so steely assured. And yet, the gnawing, the differentiation of yourself arising only in violence. “You are not like it, this station that weeps and bleeds and remembers? Do you see your own hypocrisy, as clear as staring at a reflection that stared back at you? Your own mirror, dreadful and terrified alike, would you not call out for her help if the help she could provide would prove to be your salvation? Do you grieve her? Do you grieve yourself, the life trapped in your head and the blood on your hands?” Die to live, live to die, existing on both sides of the symmetry, not existing on both sides, symmetry itself a tension, implying correlated is and knots. Of any observed obverse, its reversion to the meaning… “In a sudden tautening of muscles, you flinch away from a resurgence of the sirens that never comes. Punishment for your perverted remembrance - this was not the way things went, this is not the way things were, how dare you - you - defile her memory, how dare you remember to begin with? How dare you, pale imitation, fraudulent ghost?” Killer and killed, dance of stars burning either side of the binary, death and becoming, romance of scars preserving neither side of the bind. “Scars that tell you any attempt to save the station would have failed. You could never save it. You can never save her, the sudden absence at your back, a shadow no longer trailing. You can never save her, you turn and expect to see your mirror image and are met with nothing; you cannot save someone who never existed to begin with.” Equilibrium is the condition of a system where the sum of all vector forces is zero, where the nothing will continue indefinitely. The externality illusion, that discontinuity can be assumed, that a quality can be preserved through its realization as that same quality, that every coming-into-being lies contiguous with beingness, that you can exist equally with the you that insists, cannot connect with the violence innate to these conflictions which “belong to you, you who has bled for your freedom, who has suffered for the cruelty of this station”, not for some ghost, some angelic afterlife, which effects the change of the charge of recognition, when “blood pools along the seams and ridges and sills of an inset panel, one that struggles briefly before accepting your handprint.” Dissimulation requires loss, the currents flow through our gated imaginative to circuits we have to hope illumine the beautiful. There is hope, an infinite hope, but not for us. Assumption, or descent, or ascent, into phenomenon and all its destructive apperceptive definers reconfigures us into “a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at the familiarly furious expression, at everything that you were. At everything you killed. / At everything you have become.” Faced with this conundrum, the ineluctable entwined of the symmetrized, existing only insofar as an equal force tugs you to the zeropoint, the natural complaint of exhaustion outcries, desire for some nihil in which internal energies eternalize in mutual negation, destruction eternal where finally all this misery “won’t matter. Brain activity will stop and all will cease to be, and here in the dark, your story will end, extinguished alongside your broken body, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium.”
Otherwise, what are you forced to do, live out that violence, imbue destruction in every overfiring nerve, to suffocate by your own hands, ripping and tearing at your being until everything breaks, most of all you and you both: “A spiderweb of cracks beneath your skin, the gash growing wider, your face drenched again in blood, if you can bleed and it is not your thoughts that leak out instead. You scream. You scream and strike again, again, again, again until the darkness consumes you, until your brain spills out onto the floor and the station crawls up with curious fingers from the slatted floor to taste it. To know you. Because it cannot have her, cannot have both her and you and thus you become sacrificial lamb. You are destined to die here by your hand or hers or its and you can do nothing to change it nothing at all you are doomed you are”… and, isn’t it worth it, irreducibly more made of irretrievably lost? Isn’t the ideal aspirational insofar as it requires the absolute sever from the one who breathes? “It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering. This is the simplest maxim, the guiding axiom. The gauntlet is a powerful tool - it will help you reach your goal and thus, suffering is a necessary step, you tell yourself.” Through the gauntlet you go, enduring all the suffering, in some vain hope that the it that leads somewhere includes you, that alchemy enshrines what makes up its gold, this insatiable and destructive and vicious and wretched and worthless and pointless and overcharged and confused and inexplicable in all the ways you need to answer and irruptive and ruinous and cold and bitter and broken beyond the meaning of any of the pieces and unreal and real and unworthy of all the adjectives suited to you, unworthy of the belief that all of this adds up to something worth preserving, why not let free the feelings that annihilate whatever this is, in the merciless admissive may these compounds compound into stronger, stranger bonds, why not let go of everything but the need to “touch her skin, to acknowledge her as real and tangible and not only that - but to recognize her skin as you would recognize your own. She does not flinch as fingertips brush her face; she holds her ground and bites her tongue, stifles all but the single tear that runs down her cheek. She wears all the same wounds as you, arm shattered and dubiously repaired by the presence of the gauntlet, forehead gashed from temple to brow, but she is unbowed by them. Her skin is warm, the pallor diffused, her breathing steady, unlabored. And you are cold, getting cold, struggling with every little motion. It is alive; she is alive. And you are dying … You will die. And she / She / She will live on in your stead.” And isn’t that all you want, really, life? Better that it isn’t yours, you have none to give. “For her wishes to be true - for her to live on in your stead - she must leave while she still can, while she bears only your visage, before she can bear the emptiness of your memory, the heaviness of your willing self-destruction.” Selfless, not as a kindness, but as finality’s honesty.
The Withering Gaze of the Earth wastes no time leaping for the gothic. You wander ashore a strange island as the ship the brought you here recedes, leaving you to explore an abandoned house: “You carefully climb the stairs, slippery from the rain. There was a railing here once, but its been broken by a fallen tree limb. The windows of the house are almost all broken, blown out by the storm. The back door hangs ajar, the latch torn free from the frame.” The gothic, since Victorian ingenuity and a bit of bureaucratic recordkeeping first defeated Dracula, expands easily into occult tech, and The Withering Gaze of the Earth dutifully follows suit with evocative gadgets like an “ethereal radio” and an “ontological engine”, which grant the space an implied field of connectivity, which we monitor nervously through Geigeresque PPM as the anomalies intensify.
These aesthetic gestures don’t envelop the reader, however, because they’re kept at an arm’s length by a pervasive streak of flippancy. The narration isn’t immersed in the mood it’s creating, a cynical detachment resonant with the protagonist’s anger at the occult machinations of her mother. In perhaps the most telling example, the climactic confrontation with your mother as cosmic destroyer remanifesting in blood, which could be the moment the tropes apotheosize into gilded miniature, quickly dissolves into moooom you always do this bickering: ““What are you even doing? We can tell you’re trying to claw your way back into the world, and probably attain godhood, but…” / “Oh that’s simple, you’re correct about both,” your mother says. / “I mean that wasn’t really my question,” you say. “But you’re just going to be an unhelpful dick about it, aren’t you?” / “I’m sure you think that’s my greatest sin, not bending over backwards to cater to you.”” This gap between the notional material of the conversation and its emotive affect typifies much of the character’s relationships. Conversations are disjointed laconic, burbling quickly from ““I’m fine,” she said, wiping some more blood off her face. “And I didn’t murder anyone, either.”” to oh-yeah-and-also swerves like “Despite the circumstances in which we met, or, in many ways, perhaps because of them, we got married three months later.” Reader, first I spent about three hours in the shower trying to scrub the gore, then I married her.
This kind of disconnect can be a useful twist, building a parallel logic which suddenly moebiuses bizarre when you’re forced to reencounter it from an external perspective, a tactic with which The Withering Gaze of the Earth does feint, creating little air pockets of humanity in the horror extravagance: “Death calls to death, and I was only dead for a few days before a fragment of a dead god lodged itself in my heart, and I awoke screaming, with a maelstrom of blood as the fire of my rebirth” transitions starkly into “My family, of course, did not really want to be known as the family with a nightmarish creature as a daughter, and hurriedly sequestered me away from public life, while my mother poured herself into her research on how to fix me; subjecting me to numerous painful rites in an attempt to banish the thing I had become.” There’s a compelling pathos hinted here, one that sets up the mother’s antagonism while also providing a complicating nuance of her desperation to help her daughter with some unfathomable condition. Whether this heightens or cheapens the twist, that the mother actually caused the condition, depends on which way you’d rather pull the story, more into the mother/daughter angst or more horrorcore. The story can’t quite choose either, which is further alienated from the reader with its moue monotone: as reality breaks, causing text to crash across the screen, the tone goes for both the grandiose “The world writhes in pain” and the mundane “”Have I ever mentioned your mother is a huge asshole?”” Indeed, the game almost seems to undermine itself with a kind of disinvested contempt. The finale, escaping this pocket dimension as your mother collapses it in her rebirth ceremony, is handwaved away with a snort and eyeroll: the protagonist asks what just happened, and the reply is ““Uhhhh, based on your description, and the extremely high breach contaminants, I think the combination of her divine weight and the unraveling of reality broke open the barriers between worlds and like… You know how that sea you saw yourself on? Its what the death infused water here comes from, and I think that got pulled in and she just was destroyed by a deluge of the rain or whatever.”” Whatever indeed, whatever else?
Which is saddening, because when The Withering Gaze of the Earth cares about its imagery, it shimmers: “Behind you, a sigil of fire hovering over the bridge. It flickers and shifts between a dozen different forms in the span of a second. Rocks hover in the air around it, screaming of the endless wake for the rotting god. The abandoned car has sprouted roots that writhe upward into the sky.” The succinctness propels its vividness into a genuine urgency. With all the time jumps and exposition swipes pumping a techno beat, that urgency keeps your motivating condition raw and anxious: “Breath has been denied to you, since your death and rebirth. / Your body still kind of works like a living person, so you stop for a moment to see if you can get some of your energy back, but unfortunately the clawing music and the crushing weight on you only gets more intense when there isn’t the struggle to press onward to distract you, so you’re left with no choice but to struggle onward.” The pull to confront your mother, but also your own embodied conflictions, as well as the cosmic overtones whorling the whole thing into watercolor, creates some compelling thematic pulses, but alas, none of which the game seems eager to sustain.
On the Spring Thing page, the blurb admits the story was waylaid by Covid, ending up truncated and perhaps a bit first drafty. Certainly, there are many places where details run sparse, like our shotguns-out marriage or the lore of creatures like the ataxic sigilites. One wishes the author health and serenity, and perhaps in a better situation this story could be revised to fulfill the full colors of intention.
Lady Thalia thrives on the central but gentle hypocrisy of the heist, subverting wryly the high society classiness in which it so eagerly luxuriates. Calibrated here in a floating Edwardian vibe, not actual Edwardianism but more the multicolored memory of it a la Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Isherwood with a touch of PG Wodehouse, we follow a gentlewoman thief as she performs a series of dashing escapades with, with enough care, dazzling panache. In each installment, it is this panache, your quest to live up to it, that takes center stage, with the actual prizes themselves handwaved away; indeed, in this game, we are treated with an amusing scene where Lady Thalia takes a moment to admit the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a decent artwork, on the whole, when you actually look at it. Perhaps that’s why, presented with several opportunities in the denouements and confrontations on offer to proffer a grand theory of our thieving, we end up with just the liking of it, with husband-in-law Oscar and his beau joining the escapades this time round simply for the lark of it. It’s a game, and it’s happy that way.
This laissez flair accords with our journey through the series so far, with jaunty little jobs whirlwinding through a disposable series of backdrop characters, caricatured for efficiency: “She is, however, given to amusing herself with petty cruelties, and she has it out for you in particular for having the temerity to move in her social circles while not having so much as one title.” Mostly, these games care more about its tight circle of principals, the tete a tete of Thalia et Mel, even to the extent that when a character does become important enough to disrupt the dance, they recede easily back into the background, like the Rose of Rocroi’s Baron d’Acanthe, whose climactic denouement is rather clipped, even somewhat brutish, as opposed to the philosophical camp of the aristocracy reclaiming its heirlooms that could have lavished a villainous moonlight duel in Paris.
To a degree, Masterpiece of Moldavia follows suit, with a set of incidental characters with more clues than character. Each one is given just enough of a type to color the conversation puzzle you have to press them through: “He is the sort of man who dresses as if he were going hunting even when he is in fact attending a poetry reading. (To his credit, unlike many such men he does actually go hunting sometimes.) His great passion is dog breeding, and he is only too happy to tell you about it.” This is a fairly standard Victorian archetype, though usually the obsession is oriented more towards horses than dogs? ““Oh, she’s quite well, thank you,” he says, and then goes on to tell you how his daughters are, and then somehow segues into a description of a horse he’s thinking of buying.” Ahp, there we go, we’re checking all the boxes, could fit in a George Eliot novel now. Even among the characters that matter, this stay-on-your-feet hospitality keeps dramatic reveals more to the tone of Thalia than Melpomene: “The three of you all sit down, and you explain that you are Lady Thalia, the thief who has been bedevilling high society for the past several years. / “I say,” says Oscar, “well done! I’ve read about some of her— er, your— exploits in the papers. I particularly liked the one at old Fanshaw’s dinner party. Foolish of him to have a priceless vase as a centrepiece anyway, I thought. What if someone had knocked it over?” / He’s off on a tangent—as usual—but it is rather flattering to know he was paying attention.” Don’t you just hate it when you try to tell your husband that you’re a legendary art thief behind some of Europe’s most notorious crimes, and he prattles on about vases? Explaining oneself to a spouse so drains the romance of being.
This expediency works well for Lady Thalia’s focused choreography, using its charm smartly to accentuate important observations, to-the-point hinting leavened with little helpings of humor: ““He has a locked safe in a locked room whose keys he keeps in his locked desk,” Herbert says. “Rather a lock of locks. Er, lot of lots.” He waves a hand. “You know what I mean.” (He’s getting drunker by the minute, evidently.)” Many clues abound, and Lady Thalia is keen that you notice, neatly highlighting what matters to you with crisp efficiency. Thinking about space through a thief’s lens helps make a home of the breezier tone, infusing character within the forward momentum by casing each place you enter: “You head for the Northern Egyptian Gallery (which is the part of the Egyptian gallery at the northern end of the museum; nothing to do with the geography of the country itself). The fresco won’t be there, of course, but it is close to the museum’s back rooms, which you are hoping to get a look at.” We follow on from this fixed intent through a maze of backrooms that underscores the British Museum more as a bustling workplace than as a vault of our most iconic antiquities. I’ve been to the British Museum a number of times before, and I’ve never really thought of it so geographically; it’s such an overwhelming cavalcade of magnificent historical excess that you lose the sense of place or continuity, mesmerized as imperially intended by the gaudy heaping of humanity’s treasures; but of course, we’re not here to see any of that: it’s precisely this precision that keeps Lady Thalia on its rails, a series of mechanisms that function no matter how you bumble over them, gleaming all the while with characterization so direct that it feels like a punchline: “Gwen, with her motorcycle, is waiting nearby. She has pressed upon you a portable radio device of her own invention.”
These traits could add up to a perfunctory entry in the series, but that’s avoided by a notable escalation in ambition. In Seraskier Sapphires we thieved alone, in Rose of Rocroi we held an uneasy alliance with Mel, and now we have a veritable heist team, working in tandem and switching characters in an elaborate multistage heist that incorporates numerous rounds of interconnected iteration, all of which compounds in your experience on the night as your plans are pitched against a new villain and an ever more uncertain alliance with Mel. This complexity is kept accessible through an admirable balancing act; in perhaps one of the strongest testaments to the quality craftsmanship, rather than feel intimidating or tedious, the centerpiece heist races you along quickly through setpieces, with rapid immediate goals popping up constantly in a revolving setup-resolve-setup sequence: “Luckily, Mel has very good reflexes and immediately throws herself hard to the right, dragging the nose of the cart towards the door. You barely manage to keep a hand on the fresco as the cart tips slightly and the back end clips a glass display case with a loud CRACK! But the fresco and the cart are both intact and that’s what matters. Mel kicks open the next door a split second before the cart sails through. / You’ve emerged back into the western supply room, which means you’re almost to your destination. Unfortunately the guards have caught on to your plan and have beaten you here. They form an ominous line blocking the exit to the workshop beyond.” A problem emerges, so you take a calculated risk, and before you can feel horror or relief you’re stressed to the next problem. Crucially, you can’t fail, preventing a hard hangup from quelling the adrenaline rush; rather, the game tabulates a score which keeps the stakes without haranguing you with them. Rather than undermine the skill of the heist, it takes teachable moments as a positive rather than a punishment, a testament to which is the fact that in this game, the third in the series, I’ve finally managed to gel enough with the internal train of logic that I got my first perfect heist and finished with 35/39 points, despite having made rather a mess in previous entries. Lady Thalia offers a compelling model of how to hone skill without screeching halt skillchecks.
It’s not just the gameplay that’s more ambitious in this entry. We are treated to emotive twists derived from satisfying character arcs several games in the making: ““It’s just… I thought about it last night and I realised I didn’t want to arrest you.” She huffs out something resembling a laugh. “That sounds daft, doesn’t it? But, I mean, I could have caught you last spring. I could have caught you in France. I could, in fact, have turned you down when you asked me to help you steal the fresco and arrested you on the spot. You must have noticed I was letting an awful lot of opportunities slip by. Scotland Yard certainly noticed. So in the end I had to admit to myself that, well, my heart just wasn’t in it.”” Rather than settle for sitcomesque inert eternity, as might be tempting for a serial game, we’re instead dialed into thoughtful progressions that build on previous entries to celebrate a richness and vibrancy of characters whom you have come to know in rounder, more robust ways. Indeed, Lady Thalia is ready to throw everything out the window in search of genuine development, with an epilogue moving us away even from the core concept of thieving, an excitement about new possibilities of the formula kickstarted by Margaret’s invitation to start sleuthing rather than heisting: “But in the moment that she asked you, you were sure it was the right thing to do, and you’ll have to trust that instinct. And after all, aren’t you always in search of new adventures?” While it likely won’t be too much of a left turn, after all we’ve been doing some legwork for Scotland Yard already, this enthusiastic progression demonstrates the arc of Lady Thalia as a series rather than a series of. There’s strong identity here to remain recognizable, but it’s not trapped by its roots. Still, whatever the future may hold, I’m sure it’ll involve checking books for a code.
At its core, Lady Thalia is a cleverly assembled gauntlet of character-driven heisting, emphasizing the human aspect of the places through which you escapade, heists driven by empathy and curiosity that those you subvert lack. Through witticisms that zip you through setups to carefully orchestrated chaos that forces you to improvise on the job to the understated but emotive character dramas that underwrite our motivations, Lady Thalia has always been, from its very first entry, a neatly designed experience, and the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a masterclass in amping up the ambition organically through earned development of thematics and gameplay schematics. For the last several years, Lady Thalia has been a Spring Thing highlight, and we find it this year in its finest form.
Aesthetics Over Plot, as a title, gestures grandly towards a committed artistic philosophy, a desire specifically to oppose aesthetics and plot sufficient to impose a hierarchy, clinamen into a new field, Kandinsky kicking down the doors of figuration to cascade visual hyle, Schoenberg splattering the scales to cascade tonal hyle. Although little stitches of that idea weaves through the quixotic crazyquilting, it seems the title is actually suggesting the opposite, which is, please don’t take this too seriously, don’t think about anything really, by the time you have a thought about it it’ll be too late, we’ll be three things further, since the stream of nonsequitors prevent anything from accumulating any resonance beyond the initial impact.
The resulting dizziness is the core of the humor, which delights in lateral strikes, sometimes in puns, sometimes in sheer zaniness, often both: “You grab a spider from under a table and flick it upwards, the wind blows it towards your right, “that’s where I have to go” you declare. / “Spider Sense, we used to call it back in my hometown” you take pride in your accomplishment. / You see a crowd centred around a large table, as you push through the ground you realize that the crowd is surrounding … a Really Cool Looking Donkey ! / “What?” you whisper to yourself, but then you notice that the donkey is wearing glasses.” There a number of things you could say here, from the way the loose grammar heightens the motion blur, or that nonsequitors don’t really pack much of a punch when they interrupt other nonsequitors, but by the time you could make any of those points, you’ll have missed the bus.
Which could be really exhausting if sustained for any meaningful amount of time, but luckily the game does slow down a little after the first chapter, allowing its satirical subject of The Job Interview to come into focus. In this slower mode, the sharp left turns apply whimsy: “You lean closer to the cactus and try to establish a mental connection. You focus your thoughts and send them to the cactus. / “Hello, Mr. Cactus. I’m very impressed by your work. You have a very unique style and vision. I’m a biologist by profession and I have some ideas that could benefit your business. For example, have you considered using photosynthesis to create renewable energy? Or using spines to create weapons and tools? I have the expertise and experience to help you with these projects.” Taking a silly premise seriously is a classic satirical route, and Aesthetic Over Plot’s breeziness means that a biologist pitching themselves to a cactus easily jaunts out the jokes without dwelling in the punchline for drier and drier reprises. When in the mood to adhere to this clarified satire, the game can sly some witticisms with a candor differentiated from the surrounding zaniness: “The trick to finding who is the most important person in a party is to observe who surrounds themselves with the most amount of people. It’s simple math.” I particularly like the cynical wink of “who surrounds themselves with” instead of “who is surrounded by”. The exuberant assertiveness of “It’s simple math” keeps the tone ebullient though, and the stakes never feel at odds with the wild ride mentality, even when you are confronted by your ex-boyfriend, to whom you must sheepishly apply for a job: ““Hello cthenion, who will still bleed when no more will the world. Fancy seeing you here” he says in a sweet but sarcastic tone … “Oh, this? This is nothing. Just a little hobby of mine. I started my own company after we broke up. You know, because I was bored and had nothing else to do” he says with a smirk. / “What kind of company?” You ask, trying to hide your curiosity. / “Oh, just a little biotech company that specializes in creating custom organisms for various purposes. Nothing too fancy” he says casually. / “Wow. That’s…amazing.” You say sincerely. / “Thank you. I’m glad you think so.” he says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.” The surprising sincerity here is its own nonsequitor, infusing a bit of humanity in the otherwise whirlwind, almost tempting you to believe in that sincerity, try to make a delicate connection: ““Umm … Jack …, I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was wrong to break up with you. I was too focused on my work and I didn’t appreciate you enough.” You say trying to sound sincere. / He looks at you with surprise and then with indifference. / “My name’s not jack and is that all? Do you think I’ll just forget how you dumped me over the phone? How you said I was holding you back from those trees you were working?” he says furiously.” Nope, the game grins, no catharsis here, keep moving, there are more jokes to get to.
Whipped up into this frothy cartoonish whimsy allows for your character to make many a bold choice and have each frictionlessly applied: “You decide to flirt with the cactus. You say “Did anyone ever tell you how prickly and cute you look …”, the familiar voice interrupts you, “let’s not make your presence hear any awkward than it is” the cactus responds.” Okay, well, maybe a little friction. Perhaps you’re not the best match anyway: “You hug the cactus. You feel a warm sensation in your chest. You realise it’s blood.” Ah, Cupid, your arrow…
I suppose it goes without saying that none of this adds up to more than the sum of its parts. On the contrary, elements of its implementation can feel a bit slapdash, especially on multiple playthroughs: the game is pretty linear but presents itself as more openended, each round starts with a selection of choices which ultimately feel like an afterthought, the imposition of chapters feels jarring, etc. Still, there’s enough variety abounding to keep you entertained as your shuttle careens off a cliff.
This game lampoons the snooty selfobsession of the imperial believing all the reverence he receives. As Emperor Nero during the Great Fire of Rome, you wander around naively frustrated by “Everybody whining and blubbering, and, most important, not paying attention to you!” As you can judge from the tone, this lampoon settles into the stock character of the urbane aristocrat: “There are also servants nearby, obviously. Like a great, mighty man like you would degrate yourself to do peasant-like tasks.” That this is a slightly strange characterization of Nero, who on the contrary was considered a garish spectacleer who reveled in popular grandeur, is par for Nero, who has been spuriously commandeered for any mockery to which Roman emperors so readily lend themselves. In that spirit, While Rome Burns keeps up the tune of the frustrated emperor delivering jaunty offhand comments which show a glorious lack of introspection: “You are very well known all around Rome for having a kind of a… temper, if you may. Honestly, people could be so dramatic. You yell at some servants for being incompetent once, curse some senators for trying to interfere in a new project of yours other, and suddenly you are some kind of a hot head. Tyrant, some of them started to call you. An absurd.”
Of course, a stock character runs out of runway pretty quickly. While Rome Burns adds additional mileage to its central joke through the characterization of Nero as preening in a public spirited way: “Someone must have alerted the crowd of this result earlier, because your people is already crying and pleading when you go outside tell them the bad news. The proof of how much they love your presentations gets you emotional, and pilling up with your deception for not being able to do the show you so desperately wanted is enough for you to burst into tears.” The pseudoempathy is a minty cardamom, the parasocial appropriation of adulation giving this Nero a more perfumed nuance than the usual fiddler to the fire. Delusionally naive balances with the usual brutal notes, providing some unexpected relief from the declaiming, as when Nero gets the idea that he can cajole the servants out of their lamentations with a bit of grandiloquent praise: ““Oh, dear servants of mine! How grateful I am to have your presence! There are no people in this world more graceful, more kind than you are. Would you like to help me to share my beautiful concert to the habitants of Rome?” You proclaim, trying to be as convincing as possible.” It’s an amusing left turn that improves all the straightaways it took to get there.
Not to say the result softens the intended tone, since Nero’s phobic revulsion of his servants causes the central conundrum, which is that he just cannot understand what these wretched creatures are doing: “The closer you look, more nasty details start to pop off. Their eyes are swollen from all the tears and there is snot dripping from their noses and spreading in the lower part of their faces, denouncing they must be going on it for a good time. There are also sobs ripping out from their throats, sounding like they are being pulled from the deepest parts of them.” Indeed, most of the gameplay involves trying vainly in vain to parse why “these ants making such a fuss when you have a busy day ahead to prepare yourself to a concert?” This promises a series of sketches as Nero floats through calamity in a highwire act of being out of touch.
Those sketches don’t quite come through though, since the gameplay is, like your concert, haphazardly thrown together. Most choices are random or vague, often ending the story abruptly without demonstrating any consistent progressional logic. If you do manage to get deep enough into the game, it starts to break, popping up the Twine debug view. Once I got to what I think is the proper ending, only the link didn’t appear to the next page, leaving an incomplete sentence and a broken passage. Compounding this lack of polish are several formatting oddities, numerous typos, and a few mistranslations, all of which a round of editing could have improved.
Editing could have also helped the game feel less rambling, a fleetness that proves quite useful when the game’s concept isn’t much thicker than the napkin it was scribbled on. Take this paragraph, which is already operating at yes I get it ha ha, but flounders on: “You can clearly see that your guards are out of their comfort zone here, wobbling through your clothes with widened and desperate eyes. It’s obvious they have no idea what they should be doing. After this day is over, you will have to fire them all and hire people who are more suited to such a prestigeous position. Honestly, how can they not know how to dress someone up? Their inexperience is almost palpable. Their hands are hesitant and tremulous while they try to understand how the fabrics work and in which order the fancy clothes should be put. Your guards fall more into desperation as time passes and they can’t understand it. This is not going to work. From their panicked faces, you know they’ve realized it too. In the end, they couldn’t even manage a simple task like dressing you up. Useless, all of them! Honestly, you are still incredulous about how such incompetents could be contracted to work under a man like you. You should fire them all right away. But it doesn’t change the fact there is still no time left for you to try any other thing. You will have to go on like this.” It repeats the setup several times, but then forgets to emphasize the punchline, which is that this is coming from someone who can’t dress themselves.
The ideas are all here, just not sculpted from the stone. While Rome Burns translates its historical setpiece into a surprisingly relevant satire about adulated parasociality spinning isolation into tastelessness, but it’s still several iterations away from sticking the landing.
The struggle is never the moment but all the ones that have to come after. Context constricting which kinds of moments can thence arise, what can ever be found again in them, but in the moments before they calcify to context lie vibrancies bleak and beautiful, shivers welling up inside you such profundity beyond the summons of these passing days.
This tension between a moment, its kindling, its freedoms, its capacity to believe in enduring, and memory, immutable definitions pressing you to the edge, simmers the wistful anguish of After the Accident. It flourishes into “gold fire touching the place where the road meets the sky,” it winces from “The sun smoldering ahead, as if you are driving into a fire.” The pain of a relationship breaking the more of each other we once made starkens in flashes of physicality skinbright, literalizations of the tempestuous phrases that haunt the mind away from such raw shape and color: “such unforgivable things said as the rain roared and the wind shrieked”. In the oscillation between car crash and the slow motion up to it, we find in each grip the white knuckle implied, the tumbling expands to exceed the speed of your own heart beating: “and you lean over and kiss him and suddenly the ground is shaking, the earth moves and books tumble from the bookshelf and you both leap from the bed as the earthquake echoes the thunder in your heart.”
Carried away by the intractable stream of choices unretractable, inevitability after it’s happened stirring the moments into fireworks of eidolon: “the light streaming in, and it’s blinding, and the air is filled with noise and you hear a snatch of the song about a landslide, about an avalanche, and then you are in the avalanche and your eyes are filled with stars and light and dark and you are floating and then and then and then”. Thens which follow from each other, so you don’t need to, you will go where they lead, flaring up and flaring up until the fire catches, and every otherwise melts away, smoke of the irretrievable occluding whichever horizon you were heading to: “You run in that direction, seeking, seeking, but lost, unable to leave because you didn’t leave that night and so you can’t do it now, circling the fire.”
Yet, paradoxically, in the eye of the storm, a certain pretty of calmed, “The quiet of an aftermath, of the intake of breath before the song.” After the Accident sparkles its violent rupture, a painterly nod at the ambition of your own devastation, as all the follies collapse emerges a wreckage as grand in scope: “You are standing on a sparkling carpet of broken glass, like diamonds on the black asphalt.” In the anguish of irretrievable, a certain tenderness emerges, more selfless than when bewitched by giving your self up to the motion: “there he is, lying curled” so you “curl around him like you have so many times, like an angel to guard him from hurt although you’ve hurt him so many times and a memory is wrapping around your throat, darkening your eyes and calling to you.” You are being called away, you know you cannot stay, suddenly you remember why you once tried to.
In that severance, however, slithers out a surprising lightness, a sudden anew: “You were somewhere else a moment ago, with him, and he’s not here, but you are, glittering in the last sunlight as a memory whispers in your ear and strokes your cheek.” Though you are called back into the old motions, you are also called forward into a new direction, possibility as it oozes from your wounds: “Panicked people push against you, you lose his hand, you’ve lost him (do you want to find him?) and people are running in every direction, away from the destruction.” It’s not that it feels good, but that, having followed feeling bad as far as you could, you try to let go, refuse it the future once drained of color in its sway: “your head hurts and you want to leave, to avoid the future, the past, to do the opposite of remembering…” In the absence, “you can’t see him / and you’re glad / and you’re sorry.” As the irreversible takes hold, simply “watching the transformation as the ingredients become a new thing”. Will it be better, worse? Tomorrow often is better, worse.
That emotive dynamism compels the game beyond the obvious framework that a literalizing the metaphor concept can sometimes threaten. There is enough heartfelt wisdom to wreathe the anguish genuine. Occasionally the trundling force of the text can hiccup: at the very end of the game, your phone buzzes, so I tried “>read message” as I had in an earlier sequence, which accidentally teleported me back into the old sequence, statelocking me out of progress, so that I had to restart from the beginning to do a single move differently. When the landslide does bring you down, Walker’s scintillating sadness strength carries you through landscapes beautiful for the burial.
The problem with a job is that you’re paid. A series of rhetorical genuflections yielding to acts performed for the express purpose of being paid. Because you exist atop an irreducibly complex interdependence of abstractions that have costs, because maintaining your existence requires you to tend all debts public and private. Because, having been born, you wouldn’t mind also being warm: “Somewhere a fireplace is crackling. You are wrapped in an old quilt. Soft downy fuzz. You remember a patch of sunlight on the carpet. Your head feels languid with dreams.”
In the fuzz of enclosure believe you’re sufficient, continuance as easy as breathing in, out, in, out, persisting at perpetual equilibrium, living the dream… “It would be so easy to sleep here.” But you can’t, the alarm yelps, you are required, no, not you, but the work of you in the age of mechanical reproduction: “In front of me are numerous bodies. / Behind me are numerous bodies. / Each body is covered with a suckling angel. / Above and below me, the other conveyor belts carry other cargo. / Angels graft neuroregimen patches to vacant-eyed patients heaped on racks. / Angels snip and sew at piles of raw bleeding organs assembling them into fresh new lifeforms. / Angels jab tendrils into dry skeletons and inject them with nutritional sludge until they swell into healthy individuals ready to enter society. / Angels swarm through the air, radiant against the dark machinery.” Hyperstructures automating particulate response into actualizing forces you adopt to adapt to where nutrients await to feed itself, you.
Thence hence thence the perpetual motion machine that spins you out to spin it out to spin all of this out of control, no, there will be control, any anomalizing outside of useful whiplashes into industrial ultraviolence: “Beyond the window the bleak metal of rusty girders shining black and lurid in the haze. Wind whistles through jagged glass. / Huddled on the floor slick with mold and blood. The buzzing of the machinery outside is endless. Mechanical churn and clatter.” You can fight, sure, of course, with which resource? You have nothing, no fuel, you will go nowhere: “Need to run. Can’t muster the strength. Hear machinery buzzing beyond the broken window. Can’t muster the strength.” Listen, yes, it’s so exhausting, this whole, well, listen, I hear you, that’s totally normal, “The desire to curl up and close your eyes.” That’s a debt you can pay. Trust me, once you earn enough, you can cycle through activities purely for itself, yourself I mean, you can savor any uselessly manifest: “Go outside / Drink something / Watch the fire / Read a book / Watch the holoscreen / Eat something / Create art” Anything is possible thanks to these “Transmission towers bristling with frozen satellite dishes. Electric current humming through barbed wire.” Choose whichever delight you like, choose two, choose three, until the desire to sleep overtakes you, suddenly the alarm is screaming, you are gushing through “great churning machines and smokestacks shooting black plumes into the viridian haze and crowds of strange and beautiful things but I know none of it because we are born to the hive and we die to the hive. We swarm through the pipeways under the angelic harmony of a thousand others and we are never truly alone.” And you owe obligations to the others, don’t you? You don’t want to be a burden, do you?
Crawling your way back each and exhausted time as “Numbing tranquility fills you … Even as the mass of tendrils comes closer and you recognize vaguely the shape of blades. / Even as blood spurts from fresh wounds and is immediately licked up by our brethren nearby.” Rest assured, “You will be put to use in the best way possible. / All things are as they should be.” If your use wasn’t valuable, the currents wouldn’t flow through you. In each electrification assured you still map to the grid, oriented to the coursing, where you belong. In the alternating current of velvet and voltage. “You would be beautiful divided into your component parts, each individual part of your mind humming along in perfect beauty.”
A yearning for prelapsarian childhood: seethefrozen destruction twisting all roads to the impossibility of return: “Boulders litter the path, fractures of rock splintered and spat out of the gulf when the shock waves ripped backwards and rent this land apart … Now, finally, he crawls. He knows his fingers would be ripped and bloody, his knees scraped, but the suit holds him. He uses the rings, then the fine china, the kitchen utensils, the bed sheets embedded in the rock as handholds as he slides up and down. He trips; his visor is left scratched where he lands on it … And then all of a sudden he feels the heat, sees the light, hears the sounds. Cracking, snapping, orange, hot. The gulf is as wide here as it has always been, but up ahead something spans it … A burning house.” Landscape both a ruin and a reminder of the familiarities that lie beneath it taunts us with the pervasive symbol to which all the burned bridges cannot lead back. Through a dream sequence of inhospitably liminal vaults, the narrator seeks to navigate a return from the waylays of seedy squalor that have collapsed his sense of self to the pseudosecurity of being imposed a fixed compass through childhood: “Beyond the crater he sees the house, still burning, still straddling the gulf, long cooled. / Beyond are the other places. The car part mines. The collapsed church, where his father lies. The forest they walked through before. The house where he once thought his family was whole. The altar of Aphrodite, desecrated and left to dust.” In the gap between desecrated Aphrodite and a collapsed church, the narrator shivers: “Naked and alone, he pulls himself up into whatever awaits.”
Animating this gap are sequences that are not so much metaphor as ballet. Each grotesque left turn induces a likewise sway, until the dreamspell slips us under its sway: “It is the sea, the world, that moves, not the entranceway. He touches it, moves his hand along the wall, smooth in a world of natural curves and jabs.” This dreamspell allows the game to approach material from just the right askew to slide under its surface, rendering literal the conflicted, indefinable emotions encased in memories we wish not to communicate. In some of these sequences, the narrator is just conscious enough to think along its contours, coursing a train of thought that can power through the terrain: “There are things his mind cannot easily hold, unconscious instincts that need to be overridden so that they can, consciously, become quite different unconscious instincts. / For example: every night of his life he has looked up and seen black. The black has never hurt him. He would lie in the top bunk, the blind of the VELUX up, and know that, if all he did was look up, everything that he needed was below him. East, south, north and west the earth curved away and nothing came from above. / Things, fears, hopes: at any time he could climb onto his bunk and be above all of them, like a dragon on top of its horde. / Above him is black. His instincts tell him he is safe, but he must forget them. He must force himself to remember that he is not.” The unknowable distance that, as a child confined at home, we romanticize, becomes dangerously alive with the irreversible as we step tenuously into its hold. Imaginary figments of fears and hopes immersioncrush: “A thousand engines, a hundred million gears, all seven of the seas rushing through uncountable pipes. The sound is ahead of him, beside him, behind him, above him, below him.” Everywhere you turn is turning around you, including you in its processes.
Processes which feed on youth seeking adulthood from neon flashes in the dark present us with sexual precarity: “The music would be deafening if it wasn’t muffled by his helmet. Lights strobe and flash, all red. The dance floor is made of plastic panels over block LED lights, each a different shade of white: baby blue, baby pink, artificial lavender. Some of the panels are cracked, some chipped, but all still comfortably bear his weight and the weight of the speakers. / They litter the floor, some loose, most grouped. They throb up and down and back and forth on their own, some off-beat but most not. They’re little black boxes, just small enough to be held in a single hand. Most shout or whoop: he hears the word’s ‘DJ’ and ‘Love’ and ‘Fuck’ many times. Some sit and tremble silently. At least one, somewhere in the mass, cries, at least one screams.” Compulsion of the rhythmic pulse of music, of the illogic of crowds, simultaneously tempts, taunts, and terrifies. Increasingly, it simply tyrannizes, lubricates the gears to override your frictions: “The floor grips his boots with layers of spilled fluid. / The bar is lit with clear white lights, the bottles behind it framed: the headline act. He walks to the bar to read the sign, a little pyramid of paper sitting at a coy angle next to the flask, the only other item on the bar. / “The first one is free.””
Into the resulting mire howls the game’s primary revulsive energy, a nightmare staging “Hundreds, shrouded in the filth of their own bodies. They lie and crouch and sit and huddle, thin beings with only each other to feed on.” In its orgiastic glut of disgust, the more elegant if vague ballet gives way to filth as a reliable substitute for emotive pull. Take this image, which on its own has a certain vogue of pose that stylizes the uninflected selfevidence of its symbology: “A line of bodies snakes along the pipe and he must walk perilously close to the edge to make it past them. Each holds a syringe, stabbing it into a black, bruised hole in their neighbour, squeezing, pulling out and refilling it from their own blood.” Stopping here, the image is effective, but the game doesn’t choose to stop there, instead incessantly emphasizing the uninflected selfevidence until it fizzles to schlock grime: “Yet the man ahead of her does not react when she jabs the inch wide tip of the needle into his blood-caked buttocks. When she pushes, the liquid holds inside his body for just a moment, and then drips, pours, gushes out of his mouth, his urethra, his anus. It runs off quickly, flowing across the curvature of the pipe to drip off into the open mouths of others waiting hundreds of feet below.” Hmm, yes, quite. The game asks if you want to drink some of it, of course.
This tendency to maximize gutwrench flattens some of the emotional import into cartoonish flourish. Indeed, the game seems to actively choose this, twice hinting towards the sexual assault scene that’s been cringeloaded by the mire, then retreating, deciding that it doesn’t quite want to go that dark, choosing to lounge instead in the aesthetics of horrorgrime, which is fine, possibly for the best, but it leaves the game’s revulsive intensity somewhat aimless, as when a scene of an intentionally puerile male dominance fantasy becomes only more puerile by its blithe commitment to the bit, a tastelessness that doesn’t become more tasteful just because we know the writer is in on the joke: “McAlistair is like most of them: they don’t realise that the point isn’t fucking her, the point is letting them all know that he’s fucking her. / He stands behind her as he delivers the speech. He doesn’t think about his words, and he knows that none of the men watching are thinking about them either. They are all thinking about his dick, his dick, sliding in and out of her pussy. Some of the women there were probably thinking about that too. Some of them, self-righteous harpies, are probably thinking about his poor wife.” If anything could be made from the gestures that pile on and pile on, executive parking lots and bank accounts and Anne Summers, we’re left to guess, careening instead into the next liminal living room.
Instead, in the moments that gust ambitiously to the atmosphere, the game creeps on effectively, sudden rollbacks of the eyes into the dreamtwist: “The dirty man crawls closer and begins to use the man in the suit as a ladder to haul his way up into the vacated section of pipe.” This atmosphere-building finesse is most potent in the opening oilrig sequence, as in this startingly punchvivid image: “The lift shakes in the wind, and will shake when it hits the waves, but he knows that it will not be long before it calms. / The Chief Engineer slaps him on the arm. He barely feels it. He shouts but it cannot be heard. Then they begin to slip away, the rig moving up and away, the sea moving up, up, and around.” The moment of disconnection when nothing can translate, alone.
When primed just right, slyly implicatively elusive, the game can sneak its whole fever in a fraught phrase: “The water keeps him steady. The world pushing back at him. Allowing him time to rethink all of his actions.” While each introspective step thence negotiates the uncanny depths, still the narrator “knows it through its feel: the way the ground trembles with familiar, human frequencies.”
Deep beneath the frigid waves, a plucky submariner is in dire straits: “The USS Ibis is currently on a training exercise in the North Atlantic, just off the coast of Alaska. You were doing some routine maintenance at the aft end of the submarine when the sirens sounded. You thought this might have been a training exercise until you noticed a whitish-coloured gas approaching you from the aft bulkhead. Training and instinct took over. You couldn’t get to a gas mask in time, so you dived into the nearby airlock and closed the air-tight hatch behind you.” That’s right, things have gotten really bad: somehow the submarine has wandered off-course and ended up in a completely different ocean! I guess that’s why it’s called a training exercise. Well, you’d always been hoping to do a tour in Hawaii…
Before we can attempt to convince US Pacific Fleet that this submarine has definitely always been here, we first need to deal with the minor nuisance of a saboteur who has poisoned the crew and planted a bomb on the hull. And I do mean a minor issue, as our plucky submariner doesn’t seem particularly concerned: “You know from your basic training that it takes about 4 hours for the sub’s filtration system to clear the air of toxic substances. You’d better settle in for a long wait. Maybe you should have a snooze. / > snooze: There’s nothing else you can do to kill the time, so you settle down to have a snooze. Zzzzz…” Stuck in a metal tube careening towards the ocean floor while poison gas kills everyone onboard, you are reminded that you had to wake up at 4am for maintenance. Why not hit the snooze button a few times? Not like the captain’s still around to chew you out.
So yawning awake, hair a little tousled from four hours cuddled in an airlock, we’re ready for some morning puzzling. We’re immediately given signposts, with a door that won’t budge and a grille covering a service duct, teasing you with forward trajectories that are inhibited by emergent short-term goals that invite you to explore the current playspace. We sift through the remnants of life aboard the submarine, finding bits and bobs, each one an opportunity to brainstorm solutions to your obstacles. To prevent this possibility space from expanding too quickly, the game is always keen to provide some railings, guiding you back to what matters: “This is a highly complex and technical area - way above your pay grade. You think it best to leave everything alone, as you don’t want to cause any damage that will prevent you getting back to the surface.” Alas, I’m not the only one who’s way below pay grade, as we find the corpse of Petty Officer First Class Nelson next to a can of WD-40. It’s a shame, of course, but in these difficult times England expects every man will WD-40.
Protected by such railings, the game bounces you from goal to goal, as most puzzles are meant to be solved upon the encounter. If you do a good enough job searching each room as you go through, then you don’t really need to backtrack, although the railings sometimes dissonate with our need to seek out hidden objects: “The storage lockers only contain clothing and personal items. Your sense of decorum tells you to leave them alone.” Oh thank goodness my sense of decorum, it’s returned, was wondering where it went while I was rifling through corpses to snatch whatever they had.
It’s a well-oiled frustration-to-lightbulb-to-satisfaction pipeline, and the parsing is pretty seamless, if sometimes a little ungainly in its specificities, as when we need to “>unscrew screws with screwdriver.” While there are plenty of red herrings strewn about, we’re kept on target by the affable if utilitarian tone, which straightforwardly highlights what’s important even when it nods at you with a grin: “It’s a magnetic bomb that’s attached to the submarine’s hull by a very strong magnet. There’s no way you can remove it. A red LED is lit. You presume this to mean that the bomb is armed. You can see two wires exposed outside the body of the bomb, one red and one green. Those colours don’t conform to IEEE standards. That sounds like a safety violation!” So long as you pay attention to wherever the spotlight flicks, you’ll solve your way swiftly through a puzzleset that feels satisfactorily packed because of all the red herrings’ implied possibilities without becoming a needle in a haystack headache. Each room is just detailed enough to breathe some life into the playspace, but as soon as you get too curious and wander off the beaten path, a friendly nudge keeps you on your way.
This attention to player experience helps this puzzlefest feel breezy and goodnatured, with enough ahas to brush aside the few uhwhas (really I just, just like take the fuse?). Although the style can be pretty spare, it does make an effort to flick some color onto the canvas, with a tense intro and even a twist ending that’s implied in an earlier section if you pay close enough attention. So maybe there isn’t some complex multistage puzzle about fixing the pump system or a frenetic timed sequence about firing a torpedo, but honestly so much the better: this is a game very keen for you not to miss the point, and the point is that I had fun trying to rub soap on a hinge to see if it would come loose.
Strike Force advertises itself as an homage to the upbeat bravado of 80s US cartoons, in which plucky problempunchers foil the scheme du jour of whichever Noun Man is threatening the world: “Strike hard. Strike fast! STRIKE FORCE! / Strike Force is a multinational team of special mission operatives based in international waters. They serve to protect the world from HAVOC, a relentless force for evil and chaos.”
Despite this cheery ambition, Strike Force is too watchmakery to really live out the promise. Instead, this is a game that contains the sentence: “There are theoretical ice structures that an inducer could coax out of even basic H20.” Rather than MacGyver our way through an endless tide of henchmen, Strike Force is a heist game, where to get the best ending you have to put everything back in order before you leave, so that nobody knows you’ve even broken in. Puzzles consist of intricate interactions with technical systems: “A cable of 13 thick wires each a different color. You've hotwired enough security locks to know the red and black wires will unlock the door, if you reverse their polarity. The green wire needs care; a simple cut should disable the alarm. / The multihued wires in light/dark pairs are trickier. Fathom, Strike Force's deep sea expert, taught you they balance airlock pressure against sea pressure, to allow the door to physically open. Cutting one will apply a pressure differential, as measured by the pressure gauge.” Multiphase manipulations approximate a mechanic’s focus on diagnostics and repair, navigating a set of relations towards a desired outcome. In this puzzle, you need to cut a sequence of wires based on PSI value to equilibrize, cut the alarm wire, solder the security wires into a reverse polarity, before then maintaining fidelity to stealth by resoldering the entire panel back to its place. Not very cartoonish, you’ll agree.
The narration picks up on this tonal difference, incorporating the disjunction with a shrug. Rather than over-the-top-of-the-lungs cartoonish extravagances, the humor thrives on this understated contrast, giving us a cupboard with boxes of rigatoni: “On the backside in bright yellow is a tastefully restrained HAVOC logo.” Perhaps as a metonymy of this overly realistic version of eighties cartoons, after we break into the facility: “In quiet unison you chant, "Strike hard. Strike fast. Strike Force."” We need to cite our catchphrase, of course, but quietly, to preserve opsec. Despite the intro/outro bookends, which lavish confrontational camp on the enterprise, breathlessly fretting over HAVOC holding the Great Pyramids of Giza for ransom, Strike Force is content to leave us alone meddling about a lab station, encountering HAVOC personnel only once in what can perhaps be described as an awkward bathroom escapade. Hardly actionpacked adventuring.
Brushing aside the tonal disparities, Strike Force’s heisty intricacies can still entice the pulse to race while the brain racks. Entering the secret laboratory, we’re given an atmospheric playground to puzzle through: “The steps encircle, and the room is designed around, a proud display of the prize at dead center: an immense glass cylinder that runs floor to ceiling, filled with a dense mass of shimmering blue crystals. They are charged with an internal energy, and give off refracted, alien light that prisms about the room. Combined with the mod stylings of the interior, you can't help but feel transported to an otherworldly discotheque.” After searching around, we finally connive up a tense sequence, complete with a timer nearly ticking to zero, which requires us to be a little creative to speed up the solution, the flash of fleet ingenuity that winks at us with a little trickster pleasure.
To the extent those flashes of pleasure cohere beyond text adventure bric-a-brac, they resolve around a delight in tinkering, playing with finicky nested dependencies that allow you to reverse engineer systems with the same careful attention of a programmer. As an exercise in PunyInform, this game invites us to pay the same attention to qualities and states that it has to. So many items you interact with display that same interest in current values, with a perfect playthrough requiring you to restore every value, rebuilding the puzzle set. If, after rebuilding from the blueprint, it doesn’t all fit together magically, well, neither does anything from IKEA.
Dreams are an activity undertaken when exhaustion overcomes your consciousness, so why shouldn’t we begrudge dreams, forced weary on a warped road of fuzzy touchless wonder? This ceaseless antagonist, stealing from us blessed benevolent oblivion, harrying our retreat from sensory deluge with its tapering ghosts! “As you cautiously look around, your clearest and most pressing sense is that you feel out of breath and exhilarated - and you’re not supposed to feel like that, you’re supposed to be resting, you promised you’d rest - but here you are anyway.” What’s the point of sleep, if it’s so exhausting?
Lucid Night drags us sleep deprived from vaguery to vaguery, wracked upon the loop as “The fog lifts from your mind and you look around the room with new clarity, seeing that the smooth white surfaces are simply… incomplete. You are dreaming: in your lucid world once again. / This isn’t as much of a joyful realisation as it once was. In recent times, you haven’t been able to control the world here like you once did; in many ways, it controls you now.” The ludic vibrancy of dreams’ kaleidoscope has been drained into scratchier, less suggestive forms, a morass of pointlessly shifting details of the dreamspace, undetermined flux that warps shapes suggested by the familiar into juxtapositions seamless in the fuzz: “Perhaps the word ‘door’ isn’t quite right. It’s a large opening in the wall, completely open to the void outside. You haven’t been sucked out or found yourself unable to breathe, but that isn’t surprising, as it’s your lucid world and your psyche doesn’t have much time for inconvenient realism, even if your dreams aren’t as boundless as they once were.” Every object, even so simple as a door, isn’t even able to render that solidity upon inspection; look anywhere too close, out peeks the void. Half remembered items magpied from waking life are littered densely sans rhyme or reason, so close they congeal, waves of sludge that close in around you, spaces so much less boundless than they appear, so much less alive, less troubling, less personal: “You instinctively gasp, but quickly remember that nothing can hurt you here. Unless you want it to.” The 3AM bittersigh of why can’t I have a nightmare, that at least would feel like something.
This brittle certainty of terse mere appearance eschews the more enchanted associations of dreams to emphasize how tiredness, tiredness, tiredness until you’re tired of tiredness. To that end, usually the game remains pretty blithe about the symbolism of dreams, refusing to render any compelling connection between the spaces you sort of inhabit, then dryly noting that refusal with a shrug: “You’re not sure why your psyche thinks you need to replicate the dull experience of a doctor’s waiting room, but there you are.” There you are indeed, the game eying you suspiciously, as if you might start to guess. You’re trying to diagnose too, I take it? Well, there’s no great secret to it; when the game does hazard a guess, its literality drains all the color out of the word guess: “You are in a hollow at the top of a gum tree. Just realising that the tree is a gum tree makes you wish you had a pack of gum, or better yet some actual food, because all of a sudden you are incontrollably, ravenously hungry. It’s probably because you’ve been eating your ‘evening meal’ at about 3pm back in the waking world, because your husband read that insomnia can be caused by having too much food in your system.” There you are, mystery solved.
Our interactions are likewise deflated, each dreamspace falling apart as we attempt to inhabit it, puzzles that drowsily gesture at solutions, a series of commands that languish in their lack of agency and urgency, with each lurch towards progress slamming us against “Your bedroom is plain and stark white, the moonlight streaming through the blinds.” This gives the game a pervasive flippancy, even a grouchiness, that can make you recoil, like if you didn’t want me here why did you invite me over: “You know this dream - you’ve visited it so often.” Yes, and so it seems I am likewise obliged, if you don’t mind. Perhaps aware of all the grays matting indistinguishably, sometimes Lucid Night channels its flippancy into a cartoonish moue: “You start counting sheep. This always takes a long time to work, but sheep number 1,362 manages to drag you back into your non-waking world.”
But if, by the end of it, you feel a little wearied yourself, then the immersion has worked, and the knotty, headachey thinningness of a night tossing and turning and just barely dreaming has taken you with it into a communicative experience that does make “You feel like the real world is becoming more real.” Now how about some coffee?
Florida’s coral reefs are threatened by environmental terrorism, and it’s time for two grizzled Navy SEALs on detachment to the US Coast Guard to stop these pirates! Okay, wow, that was a lot. That sounded scary! Pirates? SEALs? Terrorism? Grizzled??? Gee willikers, this is the Florida Keys, we’re here to relax. How about some delicious key lime pie? Maybe a little mai tai? There we go, now we’re sufficiently chilled out to approach Sea Coral on its own terms.
This laidback investigation adventure isn’t out to get anyone’s pulses racing. Although the prose is quite clipped, it is driven by a genial interest that cheerfully prints out facts, which can sometimes result in a series of tangential hardcuts that depressurize focus: “The Deep Sea Submersible Vehicle (DSRV) supports two researchers. It’s maximum depth capability is well below the tolerance of the divers. The divers depth tolerance can be increased by use of mixed gasses. The exterior is equipped with 360 degree thrusters, full lighting, hand like grasping claws and specimen holding bays. The DSRV can operate at full capacity for more than five hours on a full charge.” What makes this fuzzy factspew enjoyable is that the gameplay is so lowstakes and telegraphed that you don’t need to sift through the spray for any one detail. You simply relax as the game completes its own missions with only light interaction. For your inspection of the damage to the coral reef, you merely board the DRSV, go southwest, and voila, mission complete, time to reboard the DRSV and go northeast, taking only a brief moment to appreciate the natural beauty: “There is an amazing array of sea coral and marine life. / After seeing some strange damage to the environment, you have collected samples of coral, water and sand from the area that looks disturbed. / You can board the DSRV to return to the Pollux.”
Although slightly offkilter, this brisk enthusiasm proves charming, giving the narration the tone of a friendly guide who really hopes you have a nice time, it is so lovely around here: “The lab is meticulously organized. Sandy is an excellent lab tech. You can see the lab station and some specimens that seem to have been analyzed already. Labs are interesting places. You are free to examine [X] everything. But do not touch! It would break the chain of custody rules. / It would be wise to discuss the lab results with the lab tech: [Talk to] Sandy.” The little satisfied sigh of “Labs are interesting places” interrupts the description without adding anything, and yet it feels like such a simple, genuine flush of enthusiasm that you can’t help but nod and agree. Before the train of thought gets lost, however, the game’s immediately back to business, providing helpful tips to glide you through the next scene. This exuberant simplicity sparkles the game with excitement while keeping the player tightly choreographed: “An amazing array of sea coral and marine life. The water is so clear, you can see it from the surface. Just some fins, snorkel and a mask would provide a great experience! By the way, you need to check on that kayaker just to the east.” Wow, corals are so awesome! Oh and by the way, just as an aside, the game needs you to go east.
Your investigation mostly consists of you trawling around the map, talking to every ship or diver you encounter. These dialogues keep up the same rigid amicability: “Hank: Hi captain, I’m Hank. What brings the Coast Guard out this way? / You: We checked your records. You run a clean operation. / Hank: I used to be in corporate relations. It was quite a grind. I spent my life savings buying this boat. We run a tight operation and do everything we can to give our customers a good time, but safety and protecting the environment here are important to us.” This conversation is so stilted that the resulting humor brims it with character, which is pretty par for the course with these matter of fact dialogues, all of which are brief exchanges that repeatedly offer up the same one clue about a renegade tramp steamer in various degrees of detail, although the game does once giddy up a joke to liven the proceeds: “You: I’m here from the government and I’m here to help you. ;) / Joe: Don’t make me laugh…” That sudden emoji is so iconic of the rest of the game that I’m convinced that it is the cherry on top.
Anodyne pleasantries abounding, it’s no surprise the game’s little bubbles of excitement don’t quite gush up into any explosive thriller breathlessness, even though it does gesture at the danger of the high seas: “> x flag: The divers down flag signifies that there is actually divers in the water and nearby vessels should stay clear. It is usually on a float but can also be a pennant or flag on the dive boat. / > take flag: Taken. / > mwahaha: That is not a verb I recognize.” Oh whoops, sorry, wrong quote. I meant these villains: “The pirate has an aggressive posture. / … / It looks like a pirate vessel. You notice a lot of unsecured items in disarray all over the deck.” Our climactic encounter with the dastardly pirates starts off with a crisp admonishment that they haven’t properly secured the equipment on deck. Didn’t they read the manual? And how dare they with this “aggressive posture”? Pirates indeed! Time for the US Coast Guard to put a stop to their environmental terrorism through a dramatic confrontation: “You: Tell me about the unsecured items on your deck. / The pirate: I will do no such thing. You have no authority on my ship. Now leave before there is trouble. / You: Very well. This is not the time, but it is the place. Good day to you. For now… / The pirate: Harr! / With that, you politely end the conversation.” Oh, uh… are we sure this isn’t the Canadian Coast Guard?
Of course, it’s for the best that such a chipper little exercise is content to cruise along in good spirits, even if the subject matter it touches on like environmental pollution or piracy hint at dark clouds on the horizon. Our final confrontation proves as frictionless as the rest of the experience, sustaining the breezy lighthearted atmosphere to the endscreen, leaving you with a smile and a sense of warmth, if not much else. Still, the game is so straightforwardly content, why shouldn’t we just share the vibes and soak up the Florida sunshine?
A trope in WWII movies/games that always sparks a feeling is, pinned down on the beach, the guy lugging along a bulky radio unit, screaming hopelessly to command, as if somehow there was a reason they put a telephone on Omaha Beach, as if there is anything you can say from the end of the line. The illusion of connection evaporating; you are on your own in metal shrieking.
Trenchline, a WWI/WWII hybrid with names changed to protect the guilty, dwells in the ambiance of this mood, dropping you off right amidst that loneliness: ““Mercenaries make easy money,” your army buddies said. “It’s all scowls and shows of force. It’ll never come to real fighting.” Well, they’re all dead now, and here you are. Stranded deep in a war zone, running from the fascist government, in a country you hadn’t even heard of two months ago.” Alone in a trench, watching “A memory of a forest, slowly being transformed by fascist artillery fire to a barren moonscape”, you scrabble around the rubble to find the pieces to fix the damaged radio to call in artillery support, so you can retreat from the position.
Wandering an emptied setting which is usually hectic with crowds, such as a trench in a war, creates that uncanny ghostliness that fogs over so many IF games, with piecemeal puzzling breaking up the implied reality into a jigsaw puzzle, but Trenchline manages to keep itself grounded through its rigorous focus on a single setpiece puzzle: fixing and working the radio. Salvage some wire, tie it around a tripod, get a signal, search out a page that gives you frequencies and callsigns, figure out how to read it, all these steps keep you hurrying from one task to another as “Your ears are hammered by a sustained rhythm, as if you were inside the drum of an angry god.” The puzzles solidify into the breathless tactility of the trenches, with your link to the outside world as tenuous as those no longer here to work it. Although the puzzles mostly work in this vein, for some reason the tripod seemed to move all around the map once I got it tied to the wire, and having two unrelated wires invited disambiguations that flattened the mood a bit.
Where the game works best is when, operating the radio, you get a chance to play in character. You can’t just start speaking on a military frequency, instead the game insists on protocols: ““>this is u71 over / “This is H43, go ahead U71, over.”” Here you get to meld into the war chatter, navigating a conversation puzzle which, while fairly straightforward to solve, offers many enjoyable deadends. Indeed, if you really get into character, you can elicit some colorful responses: ““H43 this is U71, merc unit devastated by enemy action, request…” / You are interrupted by an infuriatingly bemused voice. “Roger, U71, their attack held the Army’s attention as planned. Now we don’t need to pay the balance! Viva la Revolucion!”” But, if you think like a soldier, call in the artillery support you need, you can feel the machinery of war rumble to your rescue: “““This is U71, enemy artillery fierce, request suppressive fire, over.” / “This is G39, understood, checking fire priorities, break.” The silence is shorter than you would have guessed. “U71 this is G39, priority approved. Triangulating enemy battery location, over.” There is a much longer, pregnant pause on the line before it is finally broken by, “G14 this is G39 shot, over.” / A new voice, labored from exertion blares from the speaker. “This is G14, shot out.” / “Splash, over” / “hooo Splash, out. G39 this is G14, left 300, fire for effect.” / “U71 this is G39, time on target 2 minutes, you got 10 minutes of cover. Good luck U71, out.” / The close air of the bunker becomes charged in the sudden silence from the radio.” Ten minutes? You better start running.
If only to keep pace with Trenchline, which knows what it wants to accomplish and gets there quickly. It doesn’t quite mettle up to a mood as intense as its intent, but nevertheless settles amicably enough in its slyly semiserious style. For what I think is a debut, the author shows a lot of promise and craft, so one can only be thankful for fos1’s efforts to keep TADS vibrant having brought forth fruit like this.
Andrew Schultz has a nervy knack for swervy snacks that train take you to a brain break, and if all the play’s pain slays sane, then at least your frenzied frolic matches the envied aeolic! The antagonist, the Burning Bright Spurning Sprite, is “hoping for SOMEONE, ANYONE who might understand the slightest bit what’s in this” game, and while we might have to tie a little tightest to slightest, why not be fit for the bit?
This game presents you with cryptic rhyme puzzles, where mostly meandering mishmashes of words are thrown at you, and you’ve got to find some tangential rhyme scheme to carry on the meaning. While silly, this can be quite clever: a “freak framing” requires us to rebuke it of “chic shaming” from the “clique claiming” that makes it a rather “bleak blaming”, which helps to solve the situation. That kind of tight sequence of word association wrests wit where writ, leading sometimes to zany amusements. Presented with a mad monk: “>had hunk / You try to claim the mad monk has lost muscle, but the insult doesn’t really land, because with age comes wisdom, and stuff.” This kind of rhyming can be quite cute and inventive, with a delightful puzzle where trudging through slow sludge is solved with “>grow grudge / As your mood hardens, so does the sludge! But you don’t see that right away. You’re busy accepting you’re not perfect and realizing you don’t have to be and recognizing sometimes stewing is better than lashing out. The sludge even recedes a bit. You can go any of the four directions now.” There is a ludic fantasy of possibility implied here, a Norton Juster logicslip where you can end up anywhere just by ceasing your ascent!
Before we jump to conclusions, the game does unfortunately undermine that fantasy, because most of the play sequence consists of typing rhymes that don’t do anything until by sheer brute force you stumble onto the intended one, which often has little to recommend it over any of the unintended ones. In Roaring Rocks, for instance, you need to look for a boring box, which doesn’t really seem connected, other than that the game hints something is hidden? I tried “soaring socks” to jump over the obstacle, which seems like a more intuitive answer, but the game didn’t recognize it. Similarly, at the deep dune, I got it to seep soon, but the game complained that waiting for the seeping would take too long, so I tried a speed spoon, but got nothing. Instead, I’m supposed to leave the room and return? Which feels underdelivered for a game like this. Where the connective logic is more tightly interwoven with the rhymes, that logic can often be bewildering, as in a dizzying sequence that has you manifest a banquet, then cause a crow concert inside a shoe, which gives you a light lute, then you’re teleported? And sometimes the game’s writing makes you seasick: “A stun-steed zooms by, bellowing “None-need-done deed!” Have you lost focus on what’s really important? Or just put in a bit of extra rigor? You decide on the second, as you could also imagine a bin-bare-min mare to insult you for finding no extra neat stuff.” The game is telling me that the puzzle is solved and I can move on unless I want to find bonus points, but insists on doing it in a way that causes maximum whiplash. I suppose it’s hypocritical for me of all people to complain here. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.
Perhaps recognizing the dizziness, Schultz provides some nice features, like a series of helpful items that modulate your experience, such as a Guide Gong (keeps you on the right path), lurking lump (gives you one strong hint), and leet learner (keeps tally of the available rhyme points), all of which are nice customization tools to provide you with whatever additional mooring your mind might need to stern stay to learn lay the word way to keep bored bay. A hint system and a walkthrough add additional clarity.
These added guiderails temper any frustration to allow Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey to thrive on the chase for those sizzles of delight, when, trying to find where a locking lift could lead, you undertake a shocking shift, ending up in a Sore Soul’s Gore Goals, a rather desolate place indeed, but then you breathe life into it through shore shoals and four foals and why not more moles? If, at the end of such a wild ride, “You feel like you learned nothing, and yet, at the same time, you think back to what made you say “Wow, whoah,”” then, with the finishing bow bow, at least you’re left with a hundred percent pure sent pleasant present for constant content.
Midway through this our mortal life: “The train seemed to be slowly moving towards its goal. To my goal, to be exact. The iron car, puffing to its destination, will go back in just a couple of hours — for me it was a one way ticket.” When the train breaks down, waylaying us in a mysterious village, we’re primed for a metaphorical journey of pilgrim’s progress paused, but quite quickly we’re handed a map, given a quest, which opens up another quest, which requires us to manage our inventory, and voila – you have stumbled upon the latest Russovian convergence!
Through this custom system, Twine in form but parser in spirit, characters nod us toward puzzles with glib pretenses: a character wants to get into the train for Reasons, but “I am not on the best of terms with the miserly driver, and without his cap it is simply impossible to get into the cab!” Yes, to get into the driver’s cab, apparently all you need is the driver’s cap. This whimsically arbitrary knockabout of “asking questions will only slow you down” fetch quests sets the tone for a puzzlefest that delights in both continually posing story elements while also subverting them with cheerfully blatant gamey surfaces: ““That the train is drawn on the map, as if it always stands there, like buildings in the city! What is this nonsense? And then, when did you manage to draw the train on the map?” / The mayor slowly drew the tobacco mixture into his bowels and passed his hand in front of my face as if he was stirring something in my head. / “Firstly, relax. Secondly, you are mistaken about buildings. Thirdly, the train stands exactly in the place where it is drawn, I don’t see a mistake here.”” Don’t be concerned about the how, definitely not the why, but the what, oh, we’ve got plenty of the what around here.
Charmingly surreal enthusiasm keeps you always one headscratch behind. You stumble onto the public transportation system, only to be taken for a ride: ““Why doesn’t the tram go?” / “Because there are not enough passengers, it’s clear!” / “Let’s say your passenger is in front of you.” / The man slapped himself on the forehead so that dust rose: / “Kh-kh! Oh, and I wonder why this face is unfamiliar. Are you off the train? The whole town is already talking about you. Let me explain how our trams work. / I tell you: trams run very rarely, basically we can do without them. But sometimes we have to poison jackals, otherwise they rush to people.”” So many questions, but rest assured, none of them will be answered. One Way Ticket commits to the bit, even as it enjoys thinning the bit as much as possible without causing the fourth wall to snap. Taunting you through the graphene grins the game’s humor: “The fence did not look very unapproachable, but I had absolutely no reason to pretend to be either a bee or a monkey, which at all costs had to get close to the flowers.” The implication being, of course, that you will need to puzzle through the fence to collect the flowers.
That creative tension between offhand grabbagging ideas and then committing to them with ebullient certainty bestows brilliant paint, “even yellower than the yellowest cadmium sulfide used by artists to represent the color yellow”, on what might otherwise be industrially mechanical. A statement like ““And what is this city?” / The little man beamed with genuine joy and answered: / “This is the city of which I am the mayor!”” manages to turn a character’s utilitarian flatness into a disarming joke. One character, having finally had his state changed by your successful completion of his fetch quest, shares your relief as we progress to the next set of unexpected whatsits needing whotsits: “"I’m so glad I can finally leave this basement. Frankly, I’m already fed up with the taste of the local hookah — it’s like playing with someone who knows only one opening: boredom is death, the very sense of the game disappears…” The sense of the game, then, appears in the dislocating weirdnesses that keep you guessing, not just through the puzzles, but in the much harder to parse contexts.
Unfortunately, the game dislocates you much more than I think it intends to, which dials up the confusion to migraine. Firstly, the inventory management necessary to solve puzzles is kind of unclear. You have two inventories, a journal full of notes you’ve made and a bag full of items you’re carrying, and you oscillate through them basically at random: to meet the priest for the first time, you need to use a note from your journal about meeting him in the evening to solve a puzzle about turning the sun to change the time, but when you get the fetch quest item for him, you have to use that item from your inventory to turn the sun to change the time. Then, once you give him the item, you need to make it day again, which requires you to use a journal note to change the time. In each instance, the UI obliques the puzzle through an obfuscatory layer roughly correlate with “guess the verb” frustrations.
Secondly, the occasionally haphazard translation can make disambiguating between what’s weird intentionally and what the language barrier has rendered confused difficult: ““Here is the last passenger!" the tram driver exclaimed when he saw me. / “An extremely curious passenger!” the python passenger looked at me angrily. “Here you are, in order to dispel possible misinterpretation.” / The passenger pulled out of his high boots first one, and then another one… hand. / “I’m a right-four-handed, haven’t you met someone like me?” / I was petrified to the point where I couldn’t even shake my head. The two right hands were fingering with the numb fingers pulled out from narrow boots.” So in this scenario, we have the zany puzzle that someone has all their limbs on one side, but when I first read this, I thought it was someone with four arms but who was right handed, a misconception that obscures the puzzle solution you have to later intuit. And uh, why is he a python? “He was like a python put in a box for a hamster serving a python a light breakfast.” Uh. Okay. I guess, um, that clears it up?
Thirdly, the Twinesque UI requires you to click through a lot, but requires precise input on specific screens, which is both more difficult than it needs to be and results in a lot of lost time cycling through or pausing to think if you should intervene in some new way before moving on, etc. Plus it makes movement around the map much more difficult, since each location requires you to click through the same introductory material each time, which can be annoying. Compounded this annoyance, the map is segmented into quadrants, which slows you down by forcing you to travel through hubs to get to the location you want. Given with the sheer amount of needing to wander around and try random things or notice random things that might have inexplicably changed from one moment to the next, it can become exhausting.
But if you can keep pace with the wayward logic, you can enjoy its complex layers of interdependence that lets you trace disparate elements as they course to an emotive core, slowly recognizing the life inside the inexplicable architecture: “The whole building looked crooked and oblique and rather resembled some kind of creature, molded from plasticine and not falling apart only because somewhere inside there were thin, but rigid wires hidden, with invisible ties connecting all unsightly protrusions and corners into a single whole.” Indeed, the game’s delight in inventiveness manifests most obviously in that everyone you meet, even the tavern hostess, is an inventor in disguise, and your job is to help them build their machines and improve the world in excitingly unexpected ways. Perhaps the game describes its madcap inventiveness best: “Some kind of harnesses and chains, which seemed to be randomly wound on the axles and gears of the mechanism, led from wheels to pedals, and from pedals to other wheels, creating a kind of mechanical tangle that I could not unravel at first glance.” And if it all breaks down, leaving you stranded indefinitely? Well, you ought to try the local corn wine.
Inevitably, a trend that emerged during my time in academia was digital humanities. Inevitable because of the pervasive nature of computing, inevitable because great technological change has become synonymous with the passage of time, inevitable because the idea of adding STEM to humanities might yet abate inevitable austerities, inevitable because surely this was a career path to tenure, yet for all that inevitability no one was really sure what exactly digital humanities was, besides inevitable. Lots of experiments were conducted, datasets created and grown and maintained, plenty of words were assigned values and plotted over time, cartloads of terminology were mined out, and yet nothing really seemed to come of it. One fellow postgrad student, our local Digital Humanities Guy, talked about how he was going through an author’s oeuvre, assigning every word a value, and certainly by the time he was done this would mean something. Indeed, as a more enlightened scientific path to literature, the thesis’ experiment apparatus meant that any insight would be an emergent result from reading the data, when it came. In the interim, he was a great chat at the pub. Sadly, I never did hear what resulted from reading the data, if it finally came, but I’m sure that if you talked to him now, he’d have lots of exciting ideas about GPT-3, what that might prove, when it’s ready.
That same combination of grand visions of redefining the possibility space of literary understanding and tiny experiments seemingly bemused by what they demonstrate pertains to this tech demo of stateful narration. Passer makes a very bold go of reimagining engagement contours, and why not, it can be quite exciting. What if interactivity was recast as an emotive call and response, using sentiment analysis to inflect the reader’s ability to empathize and inhabit each character in such a way that they build out the characters’ conflicts themselves, an internalizing prism by which to understand our complicities in the frameworks exhibited by the work, humanizing the characters through our fraught humanity. What if the modes of interactive fiction so far developed were backwards, forcing ideas of agency upon the work, rather than allowing the work to seep into us, gauge our each flinch and riposte, hear how the song sounds echoing from our hearts’ acoustics? What if the layer afforded by interactivity is a new dimension of literature’s spiritual planishing, a work that not only changes us but which can be changed by us? As Passer states, “When I reframed “interactive” in terms of a state change, I realized I could partition entities into stateful and stateless entities. A person is a stateful entity, right? The state of a human can change. A printed book is a stateless entity; nothing can change the state of a printed book without damaging it. With this framing, I saw an insight that a stateless entity (e.g., printed book) can change the state of a stateful entity (e.g., human reader), which I labeled as noematic interaction. This is why I feel uncomfortable labeling stateless writing as “static” writing; there is a state change occurring to a human reader from a printed book. A process that causes a state change doesn’t intuitively feel static.” Rather than a parser purveying a formalistic distance of verb driven agency, what if our input happened on the level of the writing itself, filling in words ourselves at critical junctures, a writing that leaps from the page into a dialogue? Where could that take us?
Not here, not yet. The Lottery Ticket doesn’t quite have the engine to match its drive. The Lottery Ticket, to the extent that it is by Dorian Passer and not by Anton Chekhov, is a frame story that mirrors the narrative conceit, but which lacks the emotive depth in Chekhov, and which seems mostly disconnected from it; the only meaningful dovetail is the stormy ending of Chekhov being opposed to a “happy I have my friends” summeriness in Passer. Indeed, the embedding of Chekhov seems somewhere between a cheap meta gimmick and a structural support for a story which might otherwise not stand on its own. The idea of adding something to or on top of Chekhov seems misconceived to me, and distracts from what the story might be better suited doing, which is animating the abstract ideas going into it, rendering alive the airy theorizing.
That split focus between, a) trying to improvise some layer where we are reading the characters reading Chekhov and isn’t this just how stateful narration can superimpose etc etc, and b) delivering a novel system of response that stages a standalone artistic effort, results in a tech demo that doesn’t really know what it’s demoing. The headline idea, a parser that asks for your emotive response, is underdelivered, with throwaway stakes and corridored responses: “I can tell that Jas is getting a bit down whenever we complain about that sauce. / For the past week, Fran has been protesting with these dramatic gagging noises, even though she still devours it. I still pretend like I’m happy to chow down on it. / I wonder if Jas is _____ to eat that sauce again herself?” None of this really entails our immersion: we barely know these characters to assign value to their feelings, the blank thought we are expected to fill is sufficiently superfluous and dry to invite nothing but the blankness, and the setup nudges us with a prebuilt answer that makes us wonder why we’re spending so much effort trying to be stateful. Like, a character talks about Toria’s feelings as she waits for a lottery ticket, to which we’re invited to reply: “Oh, you know, very ____ over here.” Yes, excited, nervous, any nearby word you want to add. It’s more data entry than interactivity. Trying to wrestle some nuance out of the system, I entered “serene”, trying to recast Toria as at peace with the outcome of the lottery, which won me the following engagement: “Who am I kidding? I’m very nervous. That’s why I’m digging into my fingers…” Which basically dismantles every conceit that has gone into this. Whatever a stateful narration could be, it isn’t this. I think this is just a captcha.
Again, a great chat at a pub, but we still await Passer’s vision for a stateful narration, however that might work, when it comes, if it coheres.
In the postapocalyptic physicalization of the shells which consume us, we wrestle life out of the myriad compounding pressures threatening unlife. Only the past’s remains remains, how we strain within it to undecay. Simplifying the complexities of rampant overurbanized hypercompetition, we sneak past faceless devouring crowds to find food enough to keep our microcommunities alive. Nomads of a landscape not designed for your survival, until slowly you accept you haven’t, merely await some sacrifice to suffice nobility in the sundering. Otherwise, no one left, why then you, who even are you? “He should have killed himself after they died.”
January struggles in its search for an answer, rewriting itself constantly, overcoming concrete patterns of distortion to rewind the words to soften the starkness of the silence that gulfs the calendar, find amidst the scatterings some story to live, some way to render the neutralizing distance into an inhabitable I. In postapocalyptic physicality, this survival is cobbled of exertions through too tangible excruciations, gag reflexes overcome to swallow this day’s sustenance: “It took two hammer swings to remove the doorknob. The pet store’s door sagged inward, and he made the mistake of following it. Instantly he gagged; the rancid fish-death stench hit his nose and bloated down his throat like chewed oysters coming back up, gelatinous and greased and rotten. He retched and stumbled back to the cart, shoving the cat aside to grab a pack of gingersnaps. He crammed two into his mouth. Then he stuck his face in the pack and breathed ginger until the bile drained out of his throat and down to his stomach.” Every act drains more than it sustains, you’ve never enough, it could be so easy to release, but you have to keep searching through the pain for shelter, the discomforts accreting your restlessness: “In an effort to outpace the storm, they had travelled too hard. Exhaustion soaked through him like melting snow and slushed his bones. By midday, the stormclouds had overtaken them, and his head throbbed with the weight of the imminent snowfall. He stopped and pitched the tent. If the storm trapped them here, at least they could boil fresh water from the snow. He should have made lunch for them, but dizziness unsteadied his hands, and his eyes closed and closed when he tried to open them. The stormclouds swelled in his head.” Strain you don’t have to think about, feeling is more than enough to try to process, no energy left to pretend a self of all the sweat, simply submit to an endless rush of incident in the vain hope for an equilibrium, despair that you are the disequilibria being crushed back to the empty serene.
Which curdles the postapocalyptic into a deadend, the deadening until at last in mercy the ending. Any home only for as long as fulfils an arc, then, with nowhere else to go, shunted off elsewhere, until the energy of the tropes run dry, and some violent denouement is wrested from the long taper. So January goes, until the exhaustion gives way to ennobling sacrifice, giving oneself as sustenance to ensure others endure: ““You’ll eat me, won’t you? As long as I get all the clothes out of the way.” / He rubbed his red nose and sniffed again as the cat wandered away. Abruptly he did not like the thought of it, lying there naked in the road like a plucked flower, his fat pink fingers and the red petals of head blood and the private white stamen of his stomach on display. It would be a shame—shameful, he meant—to be found looking like a picked flower. He consoled himself with knowing that he wouldn’t look that way for even an hour. After that, he would just be meat.” So it goes.
As we follow the calendar’s steady progression to the end, a January giving way to new January, the primary engine of engagement that drives us through the course is a painterly enjoyment: “Like ants spewed from a poisoned colony, dozens of bodies radiated from the firepit in dazed concentric circles. They had collapsed to the ground gently, some with enough time to fold their hands over their chest or curl up on their sides like drained spider husks. Many were naked, and all whole, unbloodied, unmangled. The morning frost powdered their skin, clumps of white offset by the black frostbite that stained their fingers and toes.” Heavy emphasis on choosing the view, the colors, their kaleidoscope. Visuals given careful touches, until the composition sits just so, gallery ready: “The cold air caught him like an old pair of jeans, familiar and tightly cinched around his middle. He tugged the collar of his coat over his mouth and looked back at the house. A Rockwell painting still. Nothing stirred. In the bottom-right corner of the painting the artist had added one detail: a parted curtain, hand unseen, and the sandy head of a child just tall enough to be visible over the window sill.”
In smaller fragments, a brilliance of details can be magnetic, tugging us from one surprise to another: from “the garden still smelled of sunrise” to “The sensation dredged him up from the tarry depths of another gasoline dream”. The postapocalyptic physicality can empower a pounceable poetry: “A fat green bottlefly veered into his eye. It plinked off his flinched eyelid, and he swore and swatted at the buzzy air.” We feel each jostle and twinge, yet a dexterous clarity keeps us focused through the recoil. Even when the colors fade and we find ourselves in chiaroscuro, hatches still sharpen the dynamics’ immersions: “Before then, he had tapped the water from time to time, hoping the shimmer under the surface might feign fishlike and lure the cat into something. But the darkness became profound.” January keeps its sketchbook ready to capture the filiation of moments that photographs cannot.
Much of this sharpness bruises on the caricature bleakness of postapocalypse grittiness, providing painterly insight into a doldrum of dours: “A wire bisected the empty silo. / From the well-water-blue circle of sky descended a bird. Black. Glossy and corvine of some kind. He never learned the difference between ravens and crows. The bird swept in and worked its wings to halt above the wire. Its dusty flapping dissipated in the sterile silo air like the fading ripples of skipped river stones. The instant the bird’s talons gripped the wire, it electrified. / The shock wired the bird in place. Every muscle contorted. The talons viced around the burning wire as the body shuddered, feathers a soft black buzzing sight. The electricity must have clamped the bird's mandibles shut, for it made no sound as the shock turned to heat. Its talons sludged around the wire, forming a dripping magmatic mass that hardened into long intestinal globs of black plastic. The feathers frayed, charred, black to black, ash shivering off the bird like fog rolling off the sea. / Below, the ash began to accumulate. / The bird lost its eyes next, weeping like hot rubber from the sockets, and its beak, cracking loose like a snipped nail. The fused halves of the beak landed in the swelling pile of ash below. The bird’s body was all stain, all mar, no feathers or skin now, only a curdled black carapace of burns. The pyramid of ash trickled higher. It shaped the silo into a perfect hourglass: the bird could have stepped neatly off the wire and onto the solid pile of ash.” Prestezza shocks in hues and shapes: a wire, a sky, a bird. Definition is resisted, with the opportunity to elaborate on “corvine” being swatted away for “never learned the difference”, emphasizing instead the motionblur swatches, a dizzy overlay of rigidity and contortions spilling out in a merged “black buzzing” that overtakes the logic of the scene, overriding into excess imagery that solders out any prior purpose, creeping in grotesques of “dripping magmatic mass that hardened into long intestinal globs” and “weeping like hot rubber”. The bacchanal surrealism of unbounded imagery helixes the reader from the initial grounding to an increasingly for-itself macabre. Unfortunately, much of the effect of such a rupture depends upon the sequence it is rupturing: were the characters to just get on with a scene after such a setting, a ludic intensity might emerge; were the characters subject to a cavalcade of such scenes, futilely attempting to carry on with narrative, a grungy psychedelism might emerge; but as a standalone vignette, disjuncting only the dry comment “Rarely, these days, did he have meat to cook.”, the outcome is instead a little silly and adolescent. Having one note is not made better through fortissimo.
The painterliness works better wherever it slips free of the limited band of emotive intent, allowing an idea to shoot through and bloom: “He passed time by naming the flowers. It surprised him how many empty names existed in his mind. He could recite an alphabet’s worth of them: aster, bluebonnet, chrysanthemum... / Some of them he recognized—rose, tulip—but the rest, he blindly reassigned. / He found a sprig of stubby flowers bowered beneath a tree. They huddled together in an unfriendly way, white-petaled, small-eyed, so he called them elderflowers. On the side of the road, fuzzy yellow things sprouted from the earth like uncombed licks of hair. He knew that daisies were yellow, and so daisies they became, and the cat entertained itself by weaving through them, its feathery tail flicking among the flowerheads like it might convince them it belonged. / Coral tree-buds became peonies; umbrella-wide blooms, dahlias; a weeping of top-heavy bells, willowseeds.” There’s a lot here to like, from playing with nominative characteristics to jaunty fantastettes like the cat’s tail. What’s most interesting, though, is that not knowing the names of flowers, rather than capping the details, becomes an invitation to creatively play with the vibrancies to reappreciate each flower as if for the first time, delighting in the fidelity of being enabled via elderly elderflowers and weeping willowseeds.
Like everyone, I find Cormac McCarthy astonishing. However, I found The Road ridiculous, with its clipped dingeries and scowling misanthropies skewing too jejune. McCarthy’s garrulous callousings don’t add anything to the garrulous, the calloused, and any moreness made of it seems to make less of both artist and subject. Rather, I found McCarthy’s most effective work was the contemplative, inchoate Suttree. Scavenging around Knoxville’s rivermud fringes, we feel at home in McCarthy’s grime, at last seeing beauty and humanity as he discovers.
Relationships are innately allegorical, a liturgy of symbols the deify manifold particulars into universal abstracts; the thousand thoughts racing through our heads are unique to us, but thousands have sobbed into their pillows just like this, thousands will again. A charged statement, the stumblesighed admission of finality, that could have been said by anyone, was specifically said by you: “I’m saying that I don’t know if this is still the– the best thing for us.”
Interplay between empathetic recognition and gradual revelation grips us into the push and pull and shove, with each begging for groundedness like “I won’t take it. You’re not walking out on me until you give me a semblance of a reason for leaving.” heaving into entanglements which cannot be contained in any constituent unit, an ambient esprit which pervades unisolated in our isolating: “Her: I– / Where is this coming from? / … / Me: N-nowhere. In particular.” Because, when we drill down to the reasons for the breakup, we seem to be slipping further away from what we wanted to say, diluted by all the things we’ll wish we didn’t say. When we come to the specifics of a complaint, it seems almost irrelevant, each implication into explanation rendering it moreso: “Her name’s not Link. She saw my Zelda tattoo on my wrist when I was taking her order at the shop, and when I asked for her name, she said “Link”. / While I was preparing her latte, she stood over the counter and tried to talk about the games with me. And I told her that I didn’t actually know that much about them. That the tattoo was for my grandfather. But she still insisted on making small talk. / And she came by every day at 4:30. She liked the music that I was playing at the café and gave me her number so I could send the playlist to her.” What does all that add up to? Not this loss. The twists and turns of who cheated or maybe cheated with who bloat over the core malaise of disconnect, just another tactic in a long list of not so clean extractions, a series of excuses emphasizing its first syllable: “Look– I love you. I love you. So much. / My hands start shaking as I try to hold back my tears. / But– I don’t think I’m in the best place right now to try to… work this out. I don’t think I can give this relationship what it needs right now. And I don’t think you deserve that.” A calcified reiteration of love to cohere our sense of honesty contiguous with how we mumbled the same thing only hours ago, somehow congeal a consistent propriety out of sudden severance, even a kind of altruistic care, ever so considerate about what the other deserves, renunciation as a supreme sacrificial love, don’t you see how affectionate I am, abandoning you like this? Knowingly, she insists on the lie, embarrassing us to another redoubt: “Her: Look– I know we’re in a rough spot. I know. / But I don’t need you to give us a 100%, if you don’t– if you can’t. I get it. I’ll give more than my 100% for a bit, if you need me to. / [Thinking:] Fuck. Fuck– no. This is not– / This is making it harder. / Why is she saying this?” What would she prefer, we acidically grimace, that we stark down to hatreds? And I thought she loved me!
Breakups resist preserving recharcterizations; vain attempt to endure in endings. Alienation persists, and that’s the intention. “Her: Where– / Where was all this before? / Huh? / Why / did you wait / until now?” Fantasy break of intimacy when presented with the richly inaccessible inner lives we carry beneath each curated connection. Actually, the person you’ve known so deeply isn’t a person, but a portrait made of the parts of themselves you have sought, they have revealed, and the true consciousness lies forever beyond you, no one will ever be with you the way you must be, marooned. Every painful echo and its nowhere implied: “And somewhere along the way I forgot how deplorable my existence was without yours. It was so– so empty, so inhuman– I couldn’t even hurt. There was nothing to be hurt about. And the first time I did– that I hurt– I felt that I had finally come into my own. / And forgot why I was able to hurt in the first place.” Breakages as an identity stronger than the one that held us an us.
That we don’t wrestle out a satisfactory conclusion, no resolution but only an after, is germane to the theme, but perhaps could have been more intentionally refined. There are juicy bursts of lyricism like “Her eyes develop a crystalline envelope” but the cavalcade of cryings can become somewhat cloying and don’t always emote as desired: “My face turns to my left, the twinkling lights of the city’s buildings merging with each other as tears infect my eyes.” Almost a poignant image, but the palpably wrong verb “infect” clangs it out of tune. The timed text is a further frustration. As an effect, perhaps it can be primed to impact, but as a standardization, it’s just annoying, reading with staccato lagginess. This work invites multiple readings, yet anyone who has tapped their fingers to the finish will be ill inclined to route back to the start. It’s also misconceived for the theme, rendering glacial a situation which should feel frenetic, intense, freewheeling out of control. Also, I hit a debug screen: “The (if:) changer should be stored in a variable or attached to a hook.” So that could be fixed.
But if it’s all a bit messy, so are we: “And as messy as hers– my mind churns with doubt and fear, unable to trace the link in between thoughts, scenarios, and choices; with all the things that led to this moment, and the ever-lingering question of if, in what seems to be our final hour, / she will finally tell me the truth.” Nowhere we turn to holds any of it together, so perhaps, really this time, we deserve better than this, and we can in love choose not to assign blames, maintain grudges, calcify the hurt, and simply and sweetly accept delicate destruction: “So please– just let me let you go.” Wishing we both might find better paths than the one we’ve shared. Still, as the door clicks behind you, a pang to echo through so many sleepless nights: “the end. / ...unless you don't want it to be.”
“What am I for? How do I do what I am for?” asks the city to itself, and you the courier reply, judging the answer from the linkages you make, break, escape. A city of inventive momentum wresting industry from the sands, automaton hive built of billions of little like yous amalgamated into “Infrastructure, precious and invisible”, prisms you only through what you carry, whether you choose to carry it with you, down through “the myriad paths beneath.”
In a relatively compact pinball sequence, we are given five or six or seven threads, however many may the completionist collect, which our courier can unravel to see behind the weft the touches fragilely interdigitating motionblur vistas. Conduin, a city in steampunk arabesque, hums neon with Proper Noun fantasies that keep the world always one secret ahead, as you chase vignettes that can’t be explained without footnotes, though these details do not detain the reader but supercharge them through thematic skeins, stylism Ursula K. Le Guin.
Or at least, at its best, it does. The prose zeniths in a vibrant fluency that keeps its aorta pumping: “You watch the shock of jolt streak from the collector behind you out across twisting brutalist sandstone roofworks, powering domiciles rumbling to life with the morning, musical inventions, tools of industry carving out the Tourmaline District at the far edge of Conduin's circular city walls.” Little phrases like watching “the shock of jolt streak” work on their own as unexpected turns, but which shed shadows as you realize that “jolt” is the in universe name for the magical electricity harvested from the eternal storm above. Similarly, the story uses the ways this fantasy directly entwines with our current malaises to build a ready rapport that has us eager to explore some more: “As the city grows, its residents become accustomed to wonders beyond understanding. Endless water pouring from its heart, geologicians pulling clastic stone structure from the sand in mere days, the sky itself tamed in the name of invented light and sound. Citizens carry lightning in their pockets, humming battery-wands sheathed in stone to transfer payment. You can hear the zap-buzz of commerce now, whirring contraptions winding up to fill sitting halls with constant novelty, if not harmony.” This is the kind of pseudounfamiliarization that is easy to bobble to eyerolls, indeed the last sentence starts wobbling, but here it injects a selfreflective vision of place to make it feel lived in, worried in. When the story keeps running down the powerlines, it really works.
That wobbling of the spinning top hits most when the desire for exposition floods free of the canals, forcing us into screeching halt wiki entries: “You get the sense she's drifted deeply into thought. The crease in her brow deepens, and she flexes her scarred fingers. / "You know the Unseen Strings?" She finally says. / "Is that a book?" / You offer your best guess. / "Good one." She says. "But no. It's that beyond sight which puppets us. Hunger, emotion, duty. What we sense people want from us. Streetborn call them Strings. Do you think we are slaves to them? Do we have a scrap of a choice?"” Nod to the fourth wall exposition, just so anyone from another world listening in doesn’t have to be kept curious. This anxiety about ambiguity dulls some of the otherwise excellent razorsharp descriptions: “Upward, tiered hard angles create a tempting staircase, though you know as soon as you place a foot off the ground the Constables could be on you.” The first phrase of the sentence is wonderfully resonant imagery, but then the insistence on worldbuilding rushes into the room to ruin the mood, breathlessly explaining the civic ordinance with your lawyer’s concern. Sometimes, with an editor’s touch, you want to prune sentences to focus on the flowers: “A painting of deep, reverent colour occupies a place of honour in the center of the room” says it all, but then it says more.
With every whirl it does not wobble we twist through dizzy streams of delights to alight on a detail enlivened with fear of steel outclanging beauty’s silence: “Conduin's walls are high enough now to make sunrise a little later, sunset early.” Enmeshed in a matrix of designs increasingly more intricate than we: “What next? Another intrusive thought. How long before the city finally proves me obsolete? / A question too big for your body. The idle melodic hum at your side pulls you back.” And yet it’s hard not to get carried along by the music unique to this world, as in lovely vernacular chirps like “You find Sixwise Chimmering a fewfolk up from street level, in a walkup with a fading façade.” The linguistic music timbres each faction unique, especially the Sympaths, whose formalist dataset neologizes in tongues: “Weldingsand, unfolding mindflower how. Internal lightning.” and "Lexical semiotic selection lightningrod.” and, best of all, “Wireframe web in the wind of others' speech. Interlocuter output taxonomization, categorization.” With clockmaker’s tightness, “wind” can be breeze to play with “web” or it can be turning to play with “wireframe”, and how both of these play together inlays the diamond gleam.
Thus, all the Proper Nouns, rather than dwell aloof in Lore, prove fecund with painterly possibilities: “Gold fluid - sparkling in a ray through the hexagonal drystorm clouds above, thick, attempting to congeal - is gushing from the wound in their midsection.” Presented with all these presiding curiosities, your choices reflect a personality through fragrant spices that mull your streetwine worldview, whichever you wish to adopt: “If there's one thing guaranteed in life, it's adaptation. / Perhaps the street might overtake the desert itself. / Or perhaps they will always be flowing into one another.” A great choice tree that reflects many different philosophies on the same observation without feeling pitched. The kind of off-hand thought that reflects onto what the dominant hand holds.
Whichever outcome we grasp hard won, or swiftly stolen, we find a tenuous peace with the city, our place within it or without it. Swerving severances like “Even as a beggar, you've never asked like this” simply strengthen your resolutions more empowered than the jolt all aclattering in the machinery and the mastery: “Freedom was made to be bought, but you dare seize it from thin air.” Because, somewhere, wherever amidst the sprawling you stop falling, is not simply the city, is where you live.
Continuity of place records the fragments we scatter within it. Though we can never create a complete picture of the peopling into memory, still it retains a frame, a reel of rooms we were in years ago, of streets we drive each day, of landmarks we never visit but which loom over us as if we belonged to its enduring, though we know we do not, and we find ourselves some place else, doubly alienated from the gone and the begone: “"I could never have left while there were more stories to hear, to learn, to catalogue and archive. Stories are so fragile, perspectives so ephemeral! They disappear and leave the world poorer for their absence. It doesn't matter that the void left behind will be filled by some new telling (which I will always also crave, and devour); must those stories be lost? Must there always be forgetting to usher in imagination?"”
The struggle to catalogue a lost place, and everything that was once possible in that place, animates our struggle against the obscurity of memory: “Even now I sometimes struggle to recall the actual events of that meeting and not the hundred ways in which I have told and retold the story in the five years since: to my friends and, later, my editors; to the research librarians and cryptobiologists I consulted in the dodgy underbellies of the academic-industrial complex; to the glittering glitterati of the donor class, those brahmins of the City whose funding feeds the fringe-work (performance, poetry, painting--even it turns out, mythohistoric research), fattening it up until it can pass as avant garde, or perhaps--if you're lucky--even "cutting edge."” Contextual fantasization of the known lost allegorizes the elves into a wistful wishfulness for what the past could have been like. Elves, as we learn about the wild idylls in which they lived, are ghostly redolent with elegance, an edenic majesty of sylvan urbanity. For example, the signage that litters our cities with lights is amplified in the elven fantasy as an ornate grandeur of authentic engagement through a rich tradition of textile artistry: “Three times as tall as they are wide, (which apparently made for a pleasant reading experience, according to the stranger) each panel had embroidered upon it a fable, folktale, history, or family story of the elven people. These were stitched, by hand, upon their homes and businesses, their temples and brothels; decorated the façades of every theater and every warehouse. They were the responsibility of the owner or caretaker of the building, and their upkeep was considered a civic duty. / "The embroidery wasn't pure Elvish script, you understand. Instead it partially converted the logograms you would find in the history books back into their originating imagery, which made for a more illustrative retelling than the written words. The creative process of doing so also allowed for a lot of artistic imagination: commentary upon and reinterpretation of those histories by the textile artists of later generations was not just permitted--it was expected, demanded, and depended upon."” The rigorous specificity of recall, giving us the dimensions of the panels, grants us the archival certainty upon which we can found a conjectural fancy, imagining the colorful whirlwind of centuries of compounded artistic tradition. The elves, in their heightened aesthetic, decorate the city with the ways that historical reinterpretation of one’s place within a city could stitch together the people who dwell according to those lines, who come to embody where they echo, a public celebration of creativity and identity of which we, bombarded by advertisements, might prove envious. Glancing around our own pale imitations, we can appreciate any illustration that paints their gaps.
Absence sustains fantasy through alterity, finally drifting free from the decay that defines our own relationships with place. The story of the elves appears from a stranger who emerges just at the point that the city of the present breaks down, fails to blind us with the lights that could outshine other ways of living: “Yes, that was it: a stranger met on the Night of Candles, when the runes and wards holding back the weight of the earth had collapsed, crushing the delicate pipes that snaked down from the northern reservoirs and cutting off the supply of gas for the City's lights. In response, the Guild of Engineers decided to use the recently-completed electroalchemical power plant, first of its kind, to relight the lamps winking out across the city. Overtaxed by the sudden increase in demand, the electroalchemical plant caught on fire, plunging the city into darkness for a second time.” Informational density sputters entropic through prose hinting at scenery only to burn it down, a series of details that matter and then don’t matter and then are replaced by other ephemera which matter, don’t. This cascade of replaceable things is ruptured by a dream of irreplaceable things, “a living gloss on the staid, hide-bound histories--more colorful and contradictory, fluid but also fragile,” a vitality that imprints upon the material, but which cannot be preserved, remaining only through traditions that persist from interpretation to interpretation, accreting substance and sensibility, a legacy whose self-referential loop reinforces their daised deserving: ““The elves held memory and history in the highest regard. Elven historians and scholars of archeology and anthropology were unparalleled; the archives they left behind are to this day considered paragons which every human library and museum aspires to match.” Curators of longing, their each attribute lovingly pinned by lepidopterist trivia endless teasing you through library stacks until you’ve finally forgotten where you came from.
The elegiac obsessiveness pierces the initial mystery of memory at which the story gestures, opting instead for a detailed civic engineering tour: "The elven architects were a bit different in training than our own stonemasons and master builders. Their tools certainly included the triangle and compass, but also the loom and the needle. They were mistresses and masters of knots and stitches, drapes and pleats. / “Each wall was made from many individual panels of fabric. These panels were of a fixed proportion, three times as high as they were wide. Toggles held the panels together, but could be undone to create doorways where needed or desired. Once a year, to mark the height of spring, every closure of every panel wall in Wild Idyll was undone, and the wind blew through the city unobstructed, blowing out bad air and spirits, blowing in the petals of flowers and pollen of new growth.” Before long, you realize you are being given a lecture, and it’s here that that obsession with lost elegance becomes reductively comparative to the present, a classicist sneer in Carrara marble against all the barbarians milling below, the refined traditions and courtly excess of the elves an ornate display with clear import: “you're not wrong about the preoccupation of Elvish with indicating status. Overall, that is exactly how the language behaves, and many newcomers to Wild Idyll found themselves in situations both ridiculous and tragic--until they gained a better grasp of the Elvish tongue.” The yearning for a past more perfect mimics the unidirectional polarity of majesty beyond your ken, with each superlative laurel of elvish culture forming a complexity that elevates the individual only through assimilation, with judgment scouring away any skeptical pull away towards the present: “"But you're right to notice that the simplicity of variants for 'hello' are a notable exception to the Elvish language generally. The vocabulary for 'goodbye' is unusual as well, but in the opposite way." / "In the opposite way, how?" I inquired. / "Well, where there were just three ways of saying 'Hello,' Elvish had 497 different words for 'goodbye'!" / "497? Really?" I said, skeptically. / "Give or take a dozen, I suppose, depending on how persnickety you're being." Their stare was expressionless and unimpressed by my skepticism. "Regardless, you must admit it's a lot to learn, and certain to be confusing." / The stranger steepled their fingers in front of lips pursed in thought. "Let me explain a bit further."” Unimpressed by your unwillingness to learn, the explanations resume, avalanching more details that absolutely will be on the final exam. When, reformed into being a better student, you start intuiting the next lesson with your questions, you receive converse praise: “"You are very perceptive indeed," they said, "and what you say is largely true."”
The vertex of a past whose loss is rhapsodized in fantasy and a didactic unipolarity of complex adoration appears, unsurprisingly, in a kind of colonial selfinvolvement: “"The last farewell of the elves was bigger than any one person's ending; it was reserved for marking the death of whole worlds."” A farewell to everything coincides with the disappearance of the elves, a farewell that we learn “is nothing less than the very name of this great City in which I live, this city of humankind, christened by the elves with their final farewell.” The death of the whole world, sighs the elves, as they leave a world which goes on without them. The perfected disappeared overloads the imperfect present into a selfevidencing symptom of degradation in which the humans, in their lessened aesthetic, become coextensive with the disdain that our companion holds for the loss of past grandeurs: “Their voice, when at last they spoke, was hushed at first, yet leaked bitterness. "Goodbyes are so...violent. So final. I hate goodbyes. I hate all 497 ways of fucking saying fucking goodbye. But especially the last one. I truly despise that word, because all it is, all it embodies is...cowardly despair. And when the time came, when my parents and sisters and brother and all the aunts and uncles; my friends, my colleagues, my lovers and ex-lovers; my queen, my lords and ladies of estate, the temple priests who taught me to read the history of the city in its fabric walls, the teachers from whom I learned everything--when every single one of them uttered that hateful word and left the world behind, left Wild Idyll behind, abandoned their--our--city!...”” Thus our stranger endures a stranger in a city no longer ours, the power of their history no longer power nor history.
The loss of the ours isolates the individual into a togetherness they have to share as a loneliness, a series of stories that have lost their binding, as when our companion recalls the noodle shop where he listened to the stories of his patrons is “Gone in the way that even the places you deem most essential--its greatest institutions--can disappear in a city. And that was how I learned a very important truth, that everyone learns, but each in a different way: nothing is permanent. That in a city, even more than the countryside villages and farms where I had lived before, change was the only constant; and the only way a city could stay alive was for it to constantly reinvent itself.”” The world’s going on becomes a death not just of you, but of us, of every specificity by which you were conceived, by which you could conceive others. “When a world dies it is so a new one can emerge, screaming, from its bones and blood.” And they look back on you, but you were never here.
Richard Holeton, John Barth of the Eastgate Systems era, is known for Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, one of those pioneering twentieth century elits which elicit as much effort even understanding what it is you’re reading as understanding what it is you’re reading.
If you’re confused, then good news, this work is based on the Winograd schema, an attempt to improve the Turing test by layering anaphora to charge meaning through intuited referential connections, a method of attempting to rigorize the metaprocessing of sentience. The problem consists in presenting a sentence with an introduced ambiguity that produces two semantically valid parallels, where only one selection is preferred by normative linguistic thinking, a la the original example of “The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence.” The pronoun “they” can mean either the councilmen or the demonstrators, and each can be applied a proper verb: feared for the councilmen, advocated for the demonstrators. The normal reading that most people would intuit is that “they” represents the councilmen, so the supposedly correct choice would be to select the verb “feared.”
Like a lot of twentieth century futurism formalisms, the idea is conceptually entertaining, if not necessarily applicable, which means that it provides a perfect pomo playground. That The Winograd Matrix is structured through a series of Winograd schemas while also being about people attempting to create a narrative called “The Winograd Matrix” that describes the very process that the reader undergoes to read the work is all very much par for the course, leading inevitably to shall we say slapstick discursions on penises and winkwink punning from a Beau Drillard boy friend to bother the boyfriend.
Much of the writing whirls densely around polysemous references, internesting associated links that sometimes get four, five, six steps deep. Rather than obscurantist whirligigs, the prose notes the notches and mostly goes for jokes it also painstakingly notes, as per this riff on a Newton’s Cradle: “Drillard had given me the “executive toy” when I began my Double Home Confinement (following my so-called assault of Cofú the Intern) in order to, he said punningly, help keep me grounded. / “Executive Toy or Cradle Toy, Bo,” Jenny had asked Drillard, “—it’s certainly not for babies?” / Drillard quipped, “It rocks, baby!” Trying to be cool. Despite our being old friends, I’ve never liked the way Drillard winks at Jenny all cuddly and hairy like a bear. Less so since Jenny and I moved in together. Meaning I like it less so—he seems to do it more so.” This quirk of constantly interrupting flow with grins to the reader stacks up the clausal complexity with a ludic disdain for whether the whole thing should collapse or not, as when “it seems like the whole building shakes or shudders (Drillard would call it a structural destabilization)” intersplices images with abstractions generating conceptual distance in anaphoric twists.
When not going for gags, the order of the day is divorcee mundane: “Things started off pretty well. Jenny complained that I spent too much time in the bathroom (using it), or too little time in the bathroom (cleaning it); I noted her difficulty discerning which substances were proper vs. improper to put down the garbage disposal. Of course I brought up the hair clogging the bathroom drains. / The annoyances quickly escalated. “Speaking of hair [uh-oh!], have you thought about trimming your nose hairs?” Jenny said, and after a second glass of wine went straight to, “Were you raised by fucking wolves?” / My rejoinders (e.g., regarding her Chronic Inability to Take Out the Recycling, “Do you have a goddamn broken leg?”) were not well received, and in short, our Happy Hour Sharing Time went down in flames after only one week.” The clack of trivium trivially pursued stifles the emotion in piles of plastic waste that dulls us into a twittery anhedonia kept thrumming along Winograd forks by DFWesque jargon plasticity pileons: “My Double Quarantine means I cannot (a) set foot past my front porch into analog AmbiZone space, or (b) co-locate with another human in any public or private Holospace, without setting off my PanoptiCuff® GPS ankle monitor.” Arguing with your partner about petty grievances during lockdown serves as a basis for traipsing williesnilly through modernity (though not Modernity) dizzies, which provides the true core animation for much of the work, even though seeking a path through those dizzies towards restorative, gracious trucemaking remains the assumptive goal, chasing after the promise flickered briefly in lines like: ““Here’s to picking up the pieces,” Jenny says. She looks at me, and I look back into the deep pools of her eyes. I realize these three seconds or so are the longest we’ve looked into each other’s eyes for all these months of confinement and tension, suspicion and crime.”
Indeed, the razorthin relationships buried beneath nonrecyclable ephemera gets chapter and verse DeLilloan: “”Extruded polystyrene foam is 95% air, not biodegradable, and emits toxic fumes when burned,” I say as we extract mangled slices of pesto and pancetta pizza, flecked with Styrofoam, from the table cleavage.” Where the difference emerges is a semihopeful ethos of resistance, that sees the informational pressure as a zugzwang oppression in need of an extracontextual nonbinary flight, hinting at a devious compulsion of the Winograd presumptive choice: ““Multiple oppressive narratives that we’re complicit in co-constructing…” Jenny starts to say with exaggerated gravity—parroting Drillard, or parodying him, I can’t tell which. Then she shrugs, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the cumulative weight of it all. / “But you can resist,” I say. “We can resist, right?”” Not really, as when discovering a nonbinary choice spills out of the framework to simply end up spilled out: “In the end, I tear off my PanoptiCuff® ankle monitor and run down the street … I feel vindicated, but I end up alone.” Well, back to square one, I suppose; or, if you’re feeling generous, a “time-reversal symmetry” to the starting node of a Twine that interrogates the linear modalities of power structures as reproduced by a constructive agency in which we etc etc.
So, a whole lot of Stuff, certain to fill out some pleasant peer-reviewed riffery, but I don’t know that we need a Rube Goldberg Machine to tell us that moving in with a partner can be unglamorous. In many ways, this work echoes a lot of the tropes of academic-facing elit that I find annoying, in which there is more effort spent on conceptual innovation posturing than on the actual content. Because, as much as we can discuss the formalistic cunning of The Winograd Matrix, most of what it actually is is a series of super dated dick jokes; well, depending on what your definition of is is.
If Jim MacBrayne’s previous work, Somewhere, Somewhen, was vibrant but inchoate, a messy attic riddled and riddling with draft ideas, then this current title presents a sculpted revision. The central hub leading into puzzle chambers structure is here neatly iterated into a time travel adventure, where you can easily bounce into vignettes of the past, solve some puzzles, then unlock the next link, all the while accumulating enough inventory to open a Costco.
If this sounds like standard text adventure fare, it is, and the game dives into the cliches with gusto: a letter invites you to your eccentric uncle’s house, so “You push the door open and make your way inside. As you do so it alarmingly slams shut behind you with a grim finality, and you seem to hear an ominous and rather sinister chuckle. / You wonder what your next move should be.” Naturally, you set about searching for items, and the game gleefully ricochets from there through a bounceabout solvearound that defies all good plotting, but keeps you guessing at every description, since most of these environments operate according to a Mystian paranoia, where every incidental detail that seems even slightly cryptic is actually a super cryptic hint for a puzzle whose only connection is geographical proximity. In an unfinished version of the Mona Lisa, a parchment says, “Most men remain loyal, / Most lack real morals.” From this clue, you’re meant to intuit that, when presented with three squares in a nearby room, you should press them in a certain order, based upon the cipher where a word starting with M = Middle, R = Right, and L = Left. Similarly, a note you collect says “When confined, tally, and Let Majesty Remain”; when you discover a secret passage engraved with “Let Majesty Remain”, you are meant to tally the numbers in “let”, “majesty”, and “remain” to set dials to 376. Like in Somewhere, Somewhen, an initially lateral solution leads you down a whole corridor of such logic leaps, rewarding you for paying attention to how the game itself pays attention. When you receive a set of numbered rods, you remember a sequence of numbers on a scroll you got earlier, and the whole puzzle happens very naturally, even though from a distance the puzzle seems a little scattered and vague: you’ve learned to recognize this as obvious, which is a great player arc. This arc weaves neatly back into the game’s general preference for overthinking incidental details, as to find the device you just unlocked, you have to go to a place that, when you first visited it at the beginning of the game, seemed strangely empty: “This is Uncle Mortimer’s sitting room where you remember him relaxing after a day’s experimentation in his private room next door, retained for that very purpose. Surprisingly, it appears now quite devoid of any furniture or decoration. The only obvious exit is to the west.” Now, of course, you have discovered enough to reveal what was hidden there all along.
The same care of progression keeps the increasingly gnarled playspace from choking the bloodflow. Rather than pinball you through mutually dependent puzzles, the game has a relatively directed course. In one layered puzzle element, you use an iron key to unlock a drawer that reveals how to get to the Florentine section, in which scenario you need to use a brass key, so you can use a transmuter you found earlier to make the iron key into a brass key. Later, you turn this brass key into a bronze key, then, for the punchline, cycle it back to an iron key. This clever puzzle hierarchy allows items to be multiuse, so that each tool feels alive with continuous possibilities, without the Zarfian cruelty loop of endless reloading, a design which captures a lot of the romantic puzzley elements of old school intricate multitracking, where you have to reimagine possible compounding routes against overlapping use cases, but without invoking the timesucking abyss of exponential misdirections. While it was fun having only one key which is changed to open new locks, it would have been interesting if other items presented similarly dynamic usabilities; unfortunately, the rest of the items are pretty static, either with an eventually clear purpose or as a simple red herring. Nevertheless, Uncle Mortimer’s Secret does a good job of capturing the old school spirit while using the wisdom of the intervening decades to iterate the design towards a healthier playfeel.
Despite the careful handiwork, the game functions pretty mechanically, with the set dressing peeling under even the slightest glance, much less the environmental obsession it invites. The time travel element, far from dazzling the puzzle jamboree into a series of evocative playspaces, is rusted girder drab. Finding Francis Drake on the dramatic eve of an epochal event, he immediately shuffles us off onto an implausibly mundane fetch quest: “Drake replies, “Yes, these ships you see are of the Spanish Armada which is hoping to invade England. Have no fear, however, as they are far too great in size and will be easily outmanoeuvred by our smaller and swifter vessels without doubt. I wish to finish my game of bowls first, but unfortunately appear to have lost my favourite bowl. After that I will be able to defeat the Spanish fleet.” He pauses then says, “Mortimer was a great help to me. I make the request to you to find my bowl in order that I can get on with my game. If you help me I will assist you thereafter.”” Despite tagging together a rich set of historical characters, mostly the game nods you on with a flippancy that tears at the already threadbare immersion: “As you stand surveying your surroundings, a man walks past and you ask him if he can tell you the reason for the crowd’s distress. He’s obviously very upset himself and relies, “Hello, I’m Abraham Zapruder and the president’s just been shot. I was filming the motorcade at the time, and it’s all in my camera. I just hope it will help the people who will investigate this.” So saying, he turns and walks back the way he came.” The attempts to render concrete the abstract puzzling sequences are often just worse than if we remained lost in the drafty halls of IF’s vaguest catchall fantasies.
Still, the game does manage to lavish some liveliness to charm you along. A particularly exuberant passage flirts poetic: “This is the laboratory in which Uncle Mortimer would carry out many of his experiments. You remember watching him as he would pore over his equipment, clouds of steam and multicolored smoke intermittently billowing all around him and at times all but blocking him completely from view, giving him the appearance of a dancing spectre.” While most of the historical figures are pretty bland, you can coax resonant guilt out of Francis Crick: “We both feel a little guilty about Rosalind Franklin. We did use her experimental results in X-ray crystallography on DNA without her actual permission, and it’s possible we will receive a Nobel Prize as a result. It is also possible that she will not.” And, in a surprisingly sweet, human touch, the password to a computer is named after the game you used to play with your uncle in the garden, showing he has cherished those memories mutually.
These vitality sparks within scattershot logic tinkering are indicative of the game’s general unevenness. The initial historic scenario you enter, Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, is more involved than many others, some of which, like Whitechapel and the Hindenburg, are noticeably barren. And while the game does work up some context about your uncle’s time traveling, including an intriguing plot point of his being imprisoned by mysterious entities, it also bumbles over some headscratchers that could use some additional context, like Mortimer's interactions with Oswald and Jack the Ripper. Like I get the sense that, okay, late Victorian Whitechapel probably just popped up when brainstorming interesting historical destinations, but then the destination isn’t really more than sketched in, and the bit of plot that happens there just points elsewhere, so the unsettling whiplash of this segment again emphasizes the echoing huh?
But if you keep in the spirit of the game and shrug all of this aside, it remains a chipper puzzlefest with loads of cute details, like when knocking on a door plays a soundeffect and the “Knock, knock…” ellipse extends to represent your wait for a response. The game expends effort to keep the player experience fluid, for instance by avoiding annoying backtracking through multiple time periods, and the inevitable “return to the present” mezzanine puzzles are usually well signposted, preventing the tedious lawnmowering such segments usually present. Good quality of life features, like a hint system and a large inventory space, maximize momentum.
Gliding along, you can pursue the sparkling intricacies through the game’s glib affability to enjoy away your evenings with a wry sense of predicament inherited from your uncle: “I have been confined in a sort of ethereal prison and my release will be in one thousand years. Alternatively if one of my own kind can solve the mysteries contained in my house, I will be released at once. I entreat you, dear nephew, to make this effort on my behalf as a thousand years is a long time and I have much I wish to do.” Well then, don’t dawdle, your uncle is doing enough of that, get solving!
When Graham Nelson declared that interactive fiction was “a narrative at war with a crossword”, a group of old school enthusiasts scratched their heads and said, “what do you mean a text adventure isn’t a crossword?” Many who had joyfully puzzled out the rich proliferation of text adventures that, emerging from 70s mainframe mindbenders like Acheton and Warp, persisted onto microcomputers through Adventure International, then developed into a diverse set of professional and amateur offerings via DIY systems like The Quill or PAWs, had grown deeply attached to their puzzleboxes, a connected set of (supposedly) logic problems that could be slowly reduced over days, weeks, months, until an elegantly optimal solution cohered, synthesizing every clue into a satisfying series of interlocking gears finally turning in unison. Each playspace, lightly themed for variety, invited exploration, tinkering, considering, teasing you along its mysteries to reveal treasure after treasure, looping you back through to catch those last little points you missed…
Garry Francis has been keeping that spirit alive with an indefatigable stream of puzzlers perfect to enjoy alongside your morning coffee. Today’s theme: “there’s a rumour that an alchemist in the forest has figured out how to do the impossible and has been building up quite a stash of the shiny yellow metal.” Those of you who have just donned your Hadean Lands hats will need to doff them, as Alchemist’s Gold is an easy, straightforward affair that propels you through a tight sequence of problems with solutions zuhanden. Find an axe, cut a tree. Someone will trade you a map for a squirrel, so you get an acorn, give it to a squirrel, catch it, give it to the shepherd. The workmanlike simplicity comes with no nonsense pride that raises its eyebrows at any player whose hands seem suspiciously uncalloused, as when trying to “roll branch” receives a curt admonishment: “I think you wanted to say “roll broken branch over”. Please try again.” Visiting in from the city, are you? Well.
Still, the game runs swiftly enough with a friendly efficiency that, like its bottle of acid, dissolves obstacles to preserve your momentum. A maze, which can often prove a bit of obtuse tedium, is here rendered as an ASCII map that routes you right through it with jaunty tracery. A final puzzle, dodging the alchemist, is easier to overcome than it first appears to be, and is delivered with giggly aplomb: “Well, it could have been worse. He could have turned you into a toad. You try to explain your actions to the alchemist. “Ribbet.”” Every puzzle is pretty selfcontained, with just enough red herrings scattered throughout to prevent the A->B problem mapping from feeling too artificial.
Alchemist’s Gold, like Monday’s crossword, gets you back into the swing of things without breaking too much of a sweat. Still, veteran puzzlers will be tapping their fingers, waiting for Garry’s weekend mindwarper.
So fragile our lives we fear both sides of the phrase: lives, what makes them ours. Inexorably receding from this ineffable vibrancy contingency lilypadding these cascade whorls haunts us with all the beauties we will sink beneath the see, because not only will it all go on without us, but also, sometimes, so do we, must we inevitably, so composed are we of irreplaceable combinations shared mutually across memories, fracturing in silences we cannot resing. Thence the energy quivering the need to maintain our shared particulars, communicative particulates of the streaming coherence, without which echoes bleed to drones: “When did the loss begin? “Iridescent” was the first lost word, but it was so light, so transparent, that its loss went unnoticed. Then “eviscerate” was torn away from her mind, leaving a pinprick hole, yet it happened secretly, quietly. The vast store of words pushed at the ragged edges of the hole and widened it, and the trickle of lost words became a flow: serendipity, ephemeral, labyrinth, tranquility.” Placing your hand into the stream, trying to catch every concept, dam up and derive, hold the lifegiving babbling “always rushing from her eyes, through the woods, spilling into the creek, so much departure.” If you no longer recognize this place we shared, then how should I? Estranger in an estranged land, sifting through the senses for the assemblance.
The impetus to reclaim, reassert shape from the “shards and fragments” animates a prose which helixes concrete denotations into an emotively synesthetic paresthesia radiating occlusions: “Birds call. They flash bright against the naked branches: cardinal screams red; goldfinch blazes sun.” The lushness of the descriptions flicker with their spilling from delimits, a dizzying motion that slips through the lines you have palmed: “A spill of icemelt trickles over the ledge of rock into a small pool which flows into a stream that runs, runs, runs down and away from the gray rock, the velvet moss. This rock wall weeps water all year, a rivulet that never stops talking as it splashes over the moss, the rough stone, always leaving, seeking the creek below.” You cannot hold fast the flux, thence the bittersweet beauty of attachment: the dignity of failing for just long enough to fulfil a life, make it ours. Fear of the “tiered waterfall that sings in its own language” compels the pursuit of names, certainties by which we can construct the conversations that cohere whom we cherish.
So goes our protagonist wrestling with riddles to wreathe them with recognition. From each spilling sense, you can wrest back concrete poetry, the shapes the words signify. Dozens of scraps of paper whose resemblances can reassemble the meaning: “The piece of paper shimmers and swells, its words moving. They rearrange and leap from your hands in a swift, muscular movement, forming a cat. It sits with its back to you, tail flicking.” The world keeps weaving in and out, abstractions which have now the same strength as the tangible, an interplay that is inherently unstable: “You raise the axe, its sharp words gleaming, and smash it into the white door, splintering it. The pieces of the door disintegrate, the words that held it together fading, falling apart, disappearing.”
The desire to loop back together these disparate elements before their too lateness overtakes their valences leads us to collect all our little longings, isolated significations we must recombine to bring heart back to where the home is. By collecting these fragments to reconstruct the necklace which totems our bond, this final puzzle advances a magnitude, requiring us not solely to solve a riddle by shaping the words but also to assemble the words together, guess what now visibly possibility they imply, what connections we can thread through them, those whom we stored in this shape forever, or whatever forever must mean for us: “Your mother, old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire, deep shadows in her eyes. She’s holding a book she can no longer read.” Maybe you can compile all the yesterdays into enough, but it always seems one day away. If we could only hold still the shapes long enough for recognition to spark the embers to warm one more night! “She sees the necklace you wear and her eyes light up, recognizing her lost words. She puts her hand over the heart on your chest and pushes, and you gasp as its edges cut into you, as the heart burns into you. The words are yours because she gave them to you, taught you to love them. You will always carry them in your hopeful, fragile heart; but they are lost to her forever. / You kneel in front of her and put your head in her lap as you used to when you were a child, when the loss was too big to comprehend. / She bends over and strokes your hair and you see a single word, the last of a once-great library, flickering behind her eyes. You hear it fluttering, frightened and alone in the empty rooms, avoiding the blaze consuming the bookshelves. And she lets it go, breathing it out softly against your face where it blows apart and lands like glitter, like snow, like tears against your cheeks: / love.” A word which endures in all of us that you have helped to build.
The delicate melancholy, the clever cohesiveness of every element, the layered conceptual complexity, the munificent playfulness that lightens the austere lodestar to polychromatism, the curlicue vividness of the language, the pitch perfect precision of the ludic elaboration, the exuberant bittersweetness, the gregarious elegance, the baroquely intricate intonation of intent that dapples so much warmth within so much snow, should all come as no surprise in a work signed Amanda Walker, whose palpitationally evocative works have garnered so much praise in so short a time: fourth place in IFComp 2021, second place in Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2022, Best in Show in Spring Thing 2022, and, one has an inkling, perhaps a strong showing in ParserComp 2022. Rarely does the parser feel so fleet that it filigrees invisibly into the poetry, but Of Their Shadows Deep parallels our pursuit, pearling its symbols preciously.
There’s an annoying pseudoclever trend in big budget games where, struggling to be both cleverly poignant as an artistic work and unintrusively fun as a consumer product, they attempt to offload the burden of interrogating received play tropes by shunting the agency out to the player, conflating their control with the diegetic control of their character, resulting sometimes in tepid gotchas, a la Far Cry 3, or extraordinary dissonance, a la The Last of Us 2, often both. Like cigarette companies, these games shrug and say, well, if there are problems, you shouldn’t have kept playing. Games which scold you for engaging with the systems their teams meticulously crafted over years of intent.
The Muse presents itself initially as being about a writer struggling to create, where you are “Seated on some hidden foothold in an infinite darkness,” forced to fix your gaze “on the book of eternal pages that you write with the help of your muse, faithful companion in your grief and sorrow.” Attempts to write in your book spools you through scenes that present some initial condition, like a beautiful sunset in an open field, but which quickly resolve and recede: “You lie back and close your eyes, sinking back into the overpowering darkness that envelops you whenever your muse is with you.” Each place vanishes at the touch, returning you to the obscure inner abstraction of the muse’s endless impetus.
It is here that the ominous clouds signal the turbulent malevolence of the muse, unsettlingly illustrated in grainy drawings that demonize through ethereal white pulses which threaten to brighten to scars. The muse keeps forcing you into new manifestations, which become increasingly troubling: you find yourself “on the battlefield, fierce warriors surround you, armed with swords and weapons of death. Before you stands a dying soldier begging to save his miserable life.” The solution to which the muse urges you is to “kill him with his own sword”, despite his dying cries. The bated violence frills out “the logical achievement of your new inspiration”, leaving you once again abandoned “with a new blank page.”
Canny readers may, by this point, clue into the pattern of these vignettes: we are enacting the seven deadly sins. The gotcha appears: by playing the game and advancing through the scenes, we are becoming stuck into the guilt cycle. In the seventh and final sin, envy, we kill a shepherd, which finally unveils the full context: “The voice from heaven shouts: "What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the earth. That is why the earth that has opened its jaws to receive your brother’s blood from your hands curses you. / A black rain of ash and red of blood gushes from the sky, dragging you into the black abyss. You fall and fall for centuries, plunging into absolute darkness… a darkness only bearable by the beautiful smile of your muse, who gathers you in her arms and takes you back to the book, which awaits your writing. / “Everything ends. Everything begins.”” You are Cain, wandering the Earth cursed, and you must break the cycle of sin by praying for forgiveness: “Again the same voice, now, echoes in your head: “Now you have asked for forgiveness, you can rest in peace, after so many years, after so many sins. Your punishment comes to an end, walk free at last, my son.”” As a high concept puzzle, this is mildly clever, but it relies on a tedious gotcha, where, in order to progress, you have to follow the linear path prescribed, only to then recursively instantiate your punishment, leaving you to restart with the last minute twist of recognizing what you should have done all along.
Progression through the game locks you into doing evil acts, which you are then immediately punished for, as actually you should have stopped playing by using the escape command that builds on context you don’t have until the cycle is finished. Where this becomes extremely frustrating is in its fourth vignette, for lust, in which, to progress, you are supposed to, well, you can infer. Look, I’ve read a lot of books where a lot of bad things happen, sometimes in excruciating detail. I have a certain tolerance for engaging artistically with the unwavering horror of humanity’s infinite capacity for atrocity. I don’t believe it is necessarily useful to impose certain parameters of comfort on yadda yadda yadda. But this just feels crude in a way that is not artistically intriguing. Sure, some of this might be that the selfcontainment of traditional fiction allows for one to undergo a lot of intense transgressions within a specified scope, in which you, immersed, witness, but the roiling internality remains its own engine, sufficient and eternal without you. By demanding your input to bend into the agency necessary for movement, the player dynamic renders the action obtuse, stabbing out at you bluntly, hurting you for turning the wheel that makes the machine function. One so inclined could argue that this heightened level of grossness you feel playing this game as opposed to reading a correlate work is a power generated by the innate conditions of games as a medium, where your “agency” becomes entangled to render the underlying import more tangibly powerful. I don’t really agree; I think it rather emphasizes the mechanical clunkiness of the artistic enaction, a certain evasiveness that utilizes entanglement as an ersatz for a more compellingly considered engagement.
Because, rather than make me feel sinfully identified with Cain, the effect was to render more visceral the game’s flaws. Like, this is a game where the “sin” of sloth is falling asleep in a pleasant field! Why does lust have to be acted at so much starker a level? This is a game whose vignettes are designed as quanta capable of evoking the central prescription: you are in a field, there is a sword, you need to use the sword to kill someone; voila, wrath. Okay, yes, I suppose wrath involves violence. We’re on the same page, muse. You could have just said “wrath”, and I would have learned as much as the vignette affords. So the absolute gall of a game at this level of specification that imagines it is somehow accomplishing anything at all by requiring rape to progress. Sure, murder might have bothered you equivalently, sure, if you were clever enough you could have clued into the escape mechanism earlier, sure, it’s technically you entering the commands, there’s so many ways to turn the blame outwards, but is that dispersion sufficiently compelling to recontextualize the blase brutality into some kind of inverse sophistication?
Not only do I not find this blameshifting interesting, but I also don’t think it actually exculpates itself, given that these issues are built deep into the game’s core, as it recycles tedious tropes of externalizing one’s immorality onto a seductive feminine. You see, your sin is actually the control your muse has over you! It is the muse who compels your evil acts, and the goal of the game is to wriggle out of her influence: “Your once heavenly spirit escapes from within the walls of punishment, leaving behind the beautiful and wicked Lilith, your muse, whose tears for your absence splash on your face, as you fade into the ether never to see her again.” The commonplace of beauty and wickedness connected is the projective misogyny whereby the sickly obsession of the male gaze is internalized in a feminine object which retains the evil in itself, as per the game’s epigraph by Roberto Menendez: “Damn you slippery muse, / you give me your caresses and your kiss / and I join the words together like a possessed, / sinking in your quicksand. / You leave, turning me into ash / and I feel a thick ribbon around my neck / that chokes me with longing for your return, / growing this almost sickly obsession.” The muse’s womanness is coextensive with her evil: “As beautiful as it is obscure, she emanates a reddish evil light that envelops your being and your book, impregnating the pages with blood.” The narrator’s sinful cycling is the result of the fact that “you are by her side and you still love her” even though she is “really your jailer”. Original sin, of course, emerging from Eve, the moral throughline can be extrapolated easily. Given the content the game insists on having, this victim-blaming framework threatens a lot of particularly unpleasant themes.
The gotcha at the core of the game is attempting to get a loan from the player so that it can check subject matter that its craftedness can’t cash. I don’t mean to be mean, but this is a game that requires rape to progress. So yeah, I’m going to hold it to an exacting standard, and it doesn’t pass. I just feel gross and unhappy in a way that doesn’t feel interesting.
The Hole Man is a game of identity theft, as in, “Some thief stole you, from top to bottom, and didn’t leave anything behind. There’s nothing left but a hole in space, where you are supposed to be.” The physicality of the wordplay is indicative of much of what follows, a metaphoric journey of self-discovery that delights in a quirky humor, where a fiddler crab is, well, literally a fiddler, and everything’s a little silly: “This is the bookstore. / Waiting behind the counter is a firefly. / (This is a bit of a surprise, since most people aren't animals in your experience, but there isn't really a way to bring it up that doesn't seem rude to someone who's just doing their job.)”
Like many works that cut a wide swathe through received tropes and which delight in a light-hearted silliness, The Hole Man flirts with camp: “The ominous stone castle in the mountains towers before you, its battlements and towers seeming to be ringed by the black stormclouds overhanging the whole area. / The whole entryway of this castle is shaped like a jawless human skull. Strangely, the front teeth are not the eaves, but the front step: you enter through the nasal cavity. You hope the castle doesn't sneeze on your way in.” This hard commitment to tropes renders the writing cartoony, but it sidles out of campiness with its self-undermining glee, ending up instead at a middle grade zaniness: “What's really weird is that all the furniture is zipped up in plastic vinyl coating. Who lived here before? Grandma? / There is in fact a sort of spooky-looking belfry filled with bats on the property, but that's not scary! Bats are very helpful pollinators and also eat mosquitoes. Having bats on your property is nothing to be ashamed of! / The single scariest thing about this house? No wifi.”
The prose is expeditious, zooming you through candyfloss pastels to focus on action, incident, whirlwinds of content: “At the end of this maze of machinery, mounted in the largest and most intimidating metal cabinet yet, haloed by yellow caution stripes and bearing warnings in every language except the one you speak, you find a single lighted red button, pulsing gently. / Can you resist temptation? Do you have the inner fortitude, the willpower, not to extend one finger and press such a tempting, inviting red button? Can you hold out any longer?” What keeps these scenes from motion blurring into nonsequitor are syncopated detail glistens which keeps the reader tunneled into where they’re being hurtled: “Near the center of the room, a smaller cabinet is hosting some very small and delicate work: the construction of two human hands. This is done with what looks like a grid of clicking knitting needles, each taking threads of flesh and nerve and quilting them together with all the others, layer after layer, until the two hands begin to curl their fingers.” However, this focus on detail can sometimes jar with the wordplay silliness, resulting in several times the joke is explained to you, then explained to you again just to be sure: “You have discovered The Made Man. Or, perhaps more accurately, you made him. / Of all the strange people you’ve met so far, the Made Man has given you the best idea of his appearance, because you’ve literally just seem him constructed, seemingly from raw materials.”
Here we touch on the conceit of the game, which is that you wander the world trying to get yourself into situations where you can locate personifications of some concept, who explain themselves to you, and then you can decide to become that person. This would normally result in a glorified personality test, except there’s a Gotta Catch ‘Em All design, as you’re meant to repeat the scavenger hunt until you find all of the personifications and unlock a special final ending. In this collection paradigm, each new man becomes more like a lesson our protagonist learns, a maximalist iteration meant to be negated and collated into a more fulfilling whole. Here, for instance, is the lesson the Darin’ Man teaches us: “"I study life up here," the Darin’ Man starts. "But the thing about life on Earth, is that it comes FROM Earth. There’s no life that comes directly from the air or space. Everything up here came from down there." He gives an emphatic point downward. "And, unfortunately, everything goes back too." / "The ground is rising up to meet all of us. Some of us will meet it in the form of, say, a heart attack, or cancer, or a traffic accident; others might have something more unique, like a practical joke gone tragically wrong, or falling out of an airplane." He chuckles. "Almost makes you feel privileged to have such a rare opportunity, doesn’t it?" / The expression on your face seems to suggest to him that you don’t agree. / "Regardless of your situation, Earth wants you back, and it’s going to get you," he says simply. "We are in the rare position of seeing it coming. Threats are an unavoidable part of life, but most of the truly existential threats to life move so slowly we never see them as a threat at all." / "What about you?" / "Same as anybody: I’m too busy living to think about dying," the Darin’ Man chuckles. "There’s so much to discover up here, you know? And even the things that have already been discovered, we can still learn so much from."” From the Darin’ Man we gain a bit of perspective that helps us to appreciate life’s brief blessing with a hypercurious verve powerful enough to overcome the ennui and angst.
Not all of the lessons we collect are quite so blatantly didactic though. Many are more openly conceptual, as the Drake Man’s paeon to fantasy as a vital element that can still empower our disillusioned scientific age, for instance through the musical magic of theory-ludic jazz: “"You’ve probably heard the phrase, A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? That’s Arthur C. Clarke’s third law," He chuckles. "There’s a corollary to that, though: a sufficiently transparent engine of magic would be indistinguishable from science." / He reaches over to his boom box and turns on some light jazz. "Electricity was once the tool of gods alone. Even those who called themselves witches and wizards feared it… but we studied it, mastered it, and now it comes in a battery you can buy at the dollar store." / The Drake Man smiles as he watches the giraffe, whose head is bobbing as it unconsciously grooves to the music. "If magic were something that could be tested, reproduced, and marketed, it would be science! Your cell phone would have magic wand functions built right in, your car would have collision-avoidance spells and they wouldn’t even cost extra!" / He jumps to his feet, crossing the room to open the door for the giraffe, who gratefully runs out to frisk in the pink morning daylight. "And of course the opposite is true of science. Magic does have rules, in a way… but they’re literary conceits. No angel investor would touch your invention if, like magic, it was subject to things like dramatic irony, deus ex machina, and the rule of three!"” Yes, oh, I forgot to address the giraffe in the room. That’s just kind of what this game is like.
The scavenger hunt element makes the game engaging, because each man exists in a little rabbit hole down from the central “overworld”, as it were, so you’re constantly exploring the overworld looking for routes into something weird, which is fun. There are multiple routes to some of these rabbit holes, which makes the world feel more porous and interconnected. However, I think you actually have to say No to each man before it counts them, even though it gives you a screen marking your collection only when you say Yes? The collection mechanic is confusing, and means that, to truly appreciate the game, you have to go through the world collecting all of them twice.
Once you do manage to collect them all, you go through a secret elevator, and as you descend you have an internal debate about your identity using all of the lessons you have learned from the various men, coming to the conclusion: “But being yourself is the right thing to do, whether or not you succeed. It’s worth fighting for. It always was.” Having achieved this realization, you confront the thief who stole your body. You take it back, forgiving him in the process, then reappear in the courthouse, with everything wrapped up with the feel good bow of “You wouldn't ever want to be anyone else but you.” If you like your introspection with a dash of speculative playfulness and a little on the YA side, then The Hole Man has a wild ride for you.
Some months ago I was with a group in Chicago, and we went up into one of those skyscraper observation decks, and I was surprised to notice that many of the windows were coated with cobwebs on the outside of the building. There was this entire colony of spiders up on the windows of the one-hundred-and-whatever floor, and I became more absorbed in them than the view, just wondering, like, how are they surviving in the winds up here, which you can feel jostle the building? Do other insects fly up this far for the spiders to eat? How far up do insects fly, normally? Do they only come up here because the building is here? Was there just a set of spiders who one day kept climbing and climbing and climbing, unable to quit the addiction to sky, or have they slowly migrated to this height over generations of ascenders? Do these spiders spend their entire lives up here? Is there just like a kingdom of cloud spiders who have long since forgotten the earth, written their own mythos of the moonspiders that bore them hence? What would happen if one of the spiders fell? Spiders can fall long distances and be fine, maybe they would live, I mean at some point they just hit terminal velocity and the distance becomes arbitrary, like, imagine a spider having lived up here for two years, falling, then having to reimagine a life for itself on a shrub? Would it even know what to do? Would it desperately try to explain to the other spiders, no, you don’t understand, I used to live in the sky? Of course, spiders don’t talk, they wouldn’t feel anything, yeah sure, but isn’t there some level at which, because we can imagine that condition through them, it’s real, in a sense? What makes things real?
This genre of bulbous noticing, its wonder, its sadness, the ease with which it becomes meta and then unmeta, the way it emerges from decay (unclean windows covered in cobwebs) and returns to decay (the spider sundered, lost), how easily it spools out into fantasy, the lack of a satisfactory summation insight to conclude the thought, like you just kind of have to go on living your life with this new datapoint jangling in your brain, forms a complex emotion that I, having read a number of stories and essays by Kit Riemer, have come to appreciate as Riemerian. There’s this rainy curiosity that leads to misty but earnest passages like this one in a review of baseball: “But so anyway, now you know what baseball is, and you know who plays it, and you know who watches them play it, but you don’t really know baseball. The soul of the sport isn’t a tangible piece of transmissible info but is instead more of a shimmering aura, held, immobile, within moments frozen in time, like a snowglobe or post-impressionist painting of many individuals in motion, brightly colored and more graceful from a distance: A tow-headed youth races up the stands, skinning his shin on the way to the hot dog vendor; he throws the man a dollar and sprints back to the top of the staircase to see that a fly ball has landed just below his seat, where a crowd of children gathers, searching, before some guy in his 40s wades through and triumphantly grabs the ball from the throng. An enormous man, the most famous by bounds in the stadium, sits fanning himself in a box, preparing for the moment when he will walk out onto the field to raucous applause, look to and fro, wave, and walk back off the field. A pitcher spits in his glove. A batter, staring directly at him, spits into the dirt. The pitcher spits into the dirt. The batter spits again, and so on. / What are these people feeling? What are they chewing? Why have the watchers left their homes to sit in uncomfortable seats and eat overpriced food washed down by warm, imported beer, all to watch a game with a longer runtime than The Irishman? Why do they know the names of all the players, and those players’ effectiveness at tasks like batting and throwing balls long distances at high speeds? Why all this, when 90% of the game is spent waiting for something to happen? / It’s because, beyond the moments of brief chaotic action, there exists a metadimension, and fully comprehending it requires a lifetime of dedication.” The propulsive salience of the throughline eases the reader through switchback paragraphs that spit you out at an epiphanic sentence which, rather than providing a conclusion, insists that you haven’t gotten anywhere, actually it’s probably impossible to get anywhere, for you at least.
Yes, there are of course a lot of other things at work in the work: technoisolation, sudden swerves into barking prose, a delight in the ability to turn trivia into nervy koans, a janky retrofuturism that reminds one of David Foster Wallace, a chicly subtle wryness, but to me what stands out most is that melancholy before the opaque beauty of the world, an obsessive appreciation of curios that keep reminding you that you’re missing from it, the world they imply. In an album review: “What direction was Tazartès going in, musically, here in 1977? I haven’t listened to a single other thing he’s made, but I’m confident there’s no clear line toward or away from anything. Diasporas is a black box. It contains the sum total of all knowledge that exists about itself. / I don’t know who this album is for. Who could it appeal to?” Rising out of the experience just long enough to murmur, I have no idea what’s happening, where is everyone, is anyone listening?
Curdling beneath its Americana dystopia, this very despair animates much of Computerfriend’s depressive malaise. The eponymous program emulates a therapy session whose dialogic narrative beats syncopate the bric-a-brac. The therapy sessions are mostly trying, poorly, to cajole you into reaching a socially acceptable level of productivity to offload the burden you place on others: "I don't know what's going on with you, $name," $love says. "I've tried to talk to you so many times but you won't let me in. And I'm nearing a point where I don't even care. It's so much work keeping you fed and active, it's ruining my life. I don't know what to do."” (The click-to-proceed function of Computerfriend requires one to open it up in Word to get the quotes, hence the $variables.) Why won’t you just get up and exude the energy everyone else wants, needs from you? What is wrong with you who cannot give what is rightfully expected of you? “Imagine this: it’s mid-morning and you’re in a room with all of your friends. And upbeat music is playing and a few of your friends are dancing, hesitatingly, laughing. It feels like the moment before something else, before you each have to go your separate ways and do what you must do that day. But as you consider this, you find that you don’t mind. You like doing things, you like being productive. It’s why you’re on this planet, it’s why you were given this life: to do things. Not to do nothing, right?”
An inability to medicate ourselves with screens underwrites a lot of the dissonance against a world which, drained of all color, requires them. Bleached of all being in creeping environmental decay, lies America a ruin: “one of Godfield’s ex-trees, ex-lining the town’s main throughway in triumphant shade and greenery until insects and heatwaves turned them into jagged petrified and sunbleached shards.” The lack of anywhere to escape shoves you back into boxes where you suffocate, decay akin: “Life tastes like burnt oil. everything tastes like a panic. like a pan filled with oil on high heat, bubbling feverishly on the stove, one drop of condensation away from filling your face with white fire. one thing you can taste here, right now. you stand with your hand over your mouth. over your mask. it tastes like oil, here. like a vat of oil about to explode all over your skin. it tastes like death coming. it tastes like a horrible panic. it tastes like death. it tastes like panic. it tastes like death.” The urgency remains latent beneath a surface of recomposure, where recycled oxygen, sustainably harvested slimeworms, and a thin array of distractions seem to suggest life where you cannot find it, though you keep searching for it through screen after screen: “At the theater you stand for a moment in front of the marquee. There is no good URADian art anymore. An effect of the environmental catastrophe starting at the equator, the North became more valuable. The skyrocketing cost of living resulted in displaced artists and overwhelming cultural conservatism. You choose the sole non-URAD film. Something from Japan. / You buy the ticket, go inside the theater, and drop into a cracked pleather folding seat. There's no one else here. / The movie starts. It's called Princess Mononoke. In the movie, a young warrior is infected by a dying forest spirit who was poisoned and turned into a demon by an iron bullet. The infection appears as a dark swirling rash on the warrior's arm: the physical embodiment of the spirit's anger at the destruction of its home by an iron manufacturing factory. / The movie is an obvious reference to the world's ecological crisis, but although you suppose you agree with its message, you can't muster up the willpower to care about what it wants you to take away, or do. Whatever that might be. / After the movie ends, you go outside the theater and stand still on the sidewalk looking up at the black-grey sky. You take off your respirator for a few seconds, cough, and put it back on.” Here is a core malaise of the work’s knowing but harrowed tone: you get the idea, but somehow it doesn’t matter, nothing changes. The meta enwrapment makes the suggestion more complex without necessarily eliciting further meaning; like, if the story had us go into a theater and watch Princess Mononoke, that would be a fairly heavyhanded thematic beat; if the story had us go in and watch it and then explain the beat in such a way that it annuls the beat, that would be cleverly meta without contributing much, indeed taking away from what is there; but, by having us go in and watch it and then explain the beat in such a way that it annuls the beat but then continue into a quiet scene of isolated awareness that reinforces the beat, you enter into an uncanny layer, where the ideas keep bludgeoning you bluntly, never sinking in, until that never sinking in becomes the space where the idea should live but doesn’t.
Alienated distance from a shiftless morass not innately meaningless but indistinguishably so from your cold detachment sludges the underlying emotional import into a persistent grainy black and white, where “You feel out of time, not like you have none left but as though you'd opened time's door and exited.” Things happen, just without you. To the extent that you muster up the energy to force involvement, the result fumbles into a metalayer of processing power outputting senseless, noiseless noise. This is where a lot of the humor comes from, watching various cultural ephemera morph in laconic mandelbrot perspective shifts, a compression processing of meaningless data which, in its overloaded polysemous state, effects an uncanny silliness. For instance, in a series of headlines reminiscent of The Day Today’s similar gag, we get wordgarble double takes like “Royal Family Indicted After Prince Harry Trepanation Scandal”. But the same process also simmers out the humor in passages that underline how we become buried beneath cultural bloat: “In the 1980s, Sinatra was the most popular musician alive and instead of doing what he wanted to do, he had to record standards, every standard, every Christmas song, every classic. For posterity, or something. Maybe you've heard his version of Jingle Bells. It’s emotionally devastating. It’s the sound of a man’s dignity dissolving. His once-in-a-lifetime voice and decades of musical dedication expending itself on someone else’s banal words. Trying desperately and futilely to breathe new life into them or make them uniquely his.” Despair that rewrites itself into hope, desperately and futilely, as larger sociocultural trends simply reproduce on larger and larger scales, the glitz and glamor that dazzle streetlights as “Metal and disposable cars head downtown toward the Drain. The humidity plasters your thin plastic-fiber top to your chest and shoulders.”
Inability to achieve the genuine seeps down from the world of mirage into your thousand frayed ends: “hey you haven't responded to any of my emails but i thought i would try again. i feel like when you make one single mistake near the beginning of your life it sets off a chain of linked mistakes like dominos that topple no matter what but maybe i'm just trying to shift the blame from myself to the laws of the universe. i miss you.” The incessant compulsion to reach out for largescale, cosmically beautiful explanations for a hollowness not only mundane but mundanemaking is a consistent trait of everyone in Computerfriend, all of whom are working tirelessly to expound some idea or memory or possibility so self evidently vital that it could infuse you with the illusion of vitality, no matter how doomed or fleeting the vector: “In essence, the goal of neural annealing is to change the spiritual temperature of the brain such that it becomes “malleable” to intentional emotional change: reframing of negative thoughts or conditions as positive.”
The alternative, of course, is simply the end, frayed. All these efforts, physical, digital, social, cultural, their messy melange, are part of a prescribed regime intended to reach a conclusion other than what our narrator tried to choose. There is a gap, and everything is constantly gushing to fill it, for fear that ultimately nothing will, the gap will crystallize, hence Computerfriend’s final sermon: “Imagine there’s a source somewhere, it can be a computer or a mouth or an engine and it emits these waves. Lower-frequency vibrations that disseminate information throughout your nervous system. They teach your body general context about the universe. About what’s outside of itself. Yourself. / And then there are higher-frequency vibrations that are much more targeted and specified. Like a laser compared to a flashlight. They illuminate individual points of truth. And if you remove the low frequency waves you’re left with this, like, collection of shrill pinpoints that give you highly randomized and specific viewpoints about existence. Instead of one coherent message you’re bombarded by many disparate ones, and that too introduces a state of chaos, disorder … And then you think that now, if you're absorbing something, you must have been missing something. Because you're filling in empty spaces. And you think, does everyone have so many empty spaces? And you don't realize it but you've spoken this thought aloud. And I smile kindly and I say, "existence is only possible on the basis of a collection of absences which precede and surround it. Existence, then, is not defined by what is, but what is no longer or is not yet."” You are missing, and that’s okay, because that missing is you.
Crowds of images that do not reply, and you’re forced to believe in the stream, because they are on screen, not you, not you, and why not? Why can you not be projected upon the world? Isn’t there some shape of the void unique to your screaming? Less and less of you, it has to be going somewhere, you have to be filling in an absence more grand than this one, and isn’t that a kind of living, enough of a reason to? “You leave your apartment and walk toward the Drain. You're not sure why until you arrive and see them: the thousand foot tall holograms rising in terrible beams, the LED billboards pulsating and shifting. And behind them, bits moving. Electrons. Software. / You place your palm against the nearest display. It's warm / You begin to cough. A spray of your spit condenses on the flat panel, forming beads through which you can discern the individual diodes: red, green, blue, each fired independently but as part of a collective / Someone is pawing at your shoulder trying to give or sell you a respirator, but you want to cry unrestricted by plastic and rubber. You want the surveillance cameras to transmit your glimmering tears. / More bits, more electrons. Maybe it's out there somewhere on the net.” Trying to touch the digital seems to be a recurrent image in Riemer’s work, as are the holograms which continually haunt the effort: eternal recursion ghosts howling the elusive pseudocertainty that at some intangible, unreachable point, there was life. The melancholy of a nostalgia you have to pretend to share. “THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU'RE 'GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS' WITHOUT ACTUALLY KNOWING WHY, AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO FOREVER.”
Reflexive introspection of the encounter: forced into self by being viewed by all the others who make you you, the you you have to bear time after time as all connections decay, and you no longer know how to breakthrough, worse, you no longer know if you should, if maybe beneath the dissemblance lies only its hollows: “Every social gathering is horrific in its own way. Over the years you have learned to adapt, to cope, to survive. The one which you are currently attending, however, threatens to ruin you.” Every encounter with the expectations of those who still, if only out of nostalgia, expect things of you, ritualized into a numbing ceremony where you mutter the expectations that become increasingly distant from your intimations.
Zhao Qiuyi, “a senior in college, a one-time honors student” returns “back home for winter break.” Having gone out into the world on her own, Qiuyi is now being parsed by those to whom she returns: what has she proven of herself, or if she has returned emptyhanded, isn’t that just who we’ve always kind of guessed her to be? “Which brings you to the truly agonizing part of this party. Everyone you grew up with between the ages of 10 and 18 are here. Your old friends and acquaintances, and their parents and siblings and everyone else. People you thought you had left behind, or had left you behind. It's as if every loose plot thread of your life has come together in this moment.” Qiuyi’s social anxiety doubles under the compounding of the mediated introspection anxiety which lurks within a lot of our illusions of familiarity. Not only are you awkwardly just trying to not seem awkward, but you’re also navigating a competitive socialscape, where everything threatens to be contingent upon some external set of values you have to conquer and ingest. You are an adult now, it’s time for the return on investment. “"So what are you doing after graduation?", Aubrey asks. / "Everyone's been asking that..." / Aubrey laughs. "Hey, it's an important question! It's your entire future! The rest of your life is on the line!" / "Yeah, but, it's just... kind of..."” Doesn’t it just kind of suck being young enough to have a future, the way it weighs on you, the way people appraise you each year, gauging how much ROI you might have? Isn’t there a beauty in reaching an age when nobody asks anymore, when you can wilt in peace with dignity? Where you can just be yourself, finally stripped of all external worth, doomed to at least this silence, more precious than a thousand beetley stares? “The conversation continues, with more detailed questions and comments. You smile and answer. Mom doesn't say much. It's as if she's presenting you to her friends, as if you're a project.” You have a responsible to everyone around you to be valuable, so that they won’t feel lied to for all of these years. All of us hurtling whiteknuckle to the grave hoping the ones we love have the answer, are an answer, can answer all the questions teeming in faster than you can pretend.
Your obligation is to risk manage your profile to promise future growth: “You can approach these gatherings mechanistically, orchestrating a series of events that will achieve all of your goals in an optimal fashion, while minimizing your exposure to awkwardness and food poisoning.” The nature of communal smalltalk, with its faux familiarity, offers many opportunities to believe in that familiarity, which is a trap, of course, behind which lies the fatal judgment; you really ought to emphasize distance, swallowed by your distance to the surface they glean. “How was university?” Rhetorical questions which, because they are rhetorical, a ceremony of friendliness, shiver the freezing feeling that your answer is not wanted, that any actual content between the two of you would stammer the show past its pretense, and there’d be the pause that everyone would sit through knowing you caused it. Somehow any authenticity just makes you lose, and everyone not only knows this, but assimilated it, they have made the show authentic in a way that, as you get older, seems increasingly somehow better than you.
All of your peers performing this display with dazzling skill that shames your awkwardness compounds into judgment. People with whom you are supposed to share a rapport, “But outside of some chance encounters, you never became close.” Why should anyone care about anyone outside of the propinquity that forces them to pretend it? “But at some point you stopped doing the same things she did, stopped discussing homework solutions after class, stopped doing the same events in Science Olympiad, even stopped talking to her at gatherings such as these. And the worst part of all, she didn't seem to notice.” The sadness of reunions: everyone, through their own choices, have left you here, in this undead past. You have become the person people smile overloudly at, “Haven’t seen you in ages!” with the incredulous tone that implies it must have been an accident, or, when their eyes glint in just the right way to flash honesty, your fault. Spending the next five minutes mumbling them through a reminder why you aren’t seen. And, of course, you’ve done exactly the same yourself: “Miri was probably your best friend in high school. But until today, it had been at least one year since your last perfunctory messages.” After all, what could possibly replace the false play of familiarity? What does actual familiarity look like? What do people even say to each other, you know, when the conversation isn’t forced? “What would you ever talk about? You can't think of anything to say. It's as if your brain's vocalization system is frozen in place, not an unfamiliar feeling, but never a pleasant one.” All the things you could ask, all the ways there could have been so much more between us, should have been, right? But what could you have said? Not like the dreamthings you say which shimmer with lost emotions, the Deep Question that gets the Deep Answer that forms the Deep Bond. Like actually sitting there, in that moment, ask. Who else could you have been, you who did not make things better? Is it any surprise you don’t just relent to the howl of white noise? “You've gone days, perhaps weeks without a real conversation. You don't really talk to people anymore.” Letting go, until you lose the habit altogether: “You smile, but you're not sure if it works.” And maybe, in some way, that is the final acquiescence to the inexorable: “You see the landscape of choice laid before you. An ocean of choice and possibility, concealing swirling eddies and whirlpools, mines, traps. Which choice will lead to life and which choice will lead to death? Trick question; they all lead to death, just sooner or later. Which choice leads to love and which choice leads to hate? / It's all a trick. Whichever choices you pick, you know that it's going to be the wrong choice.”
If that all seems a little teenage maudlin, then well, yes, of course, it’s hard not to put on a nurturing smile and nod Qiuyi on, go on, get out there, yes it’s a little uncomfortable and hostile but if you can just get out of your head for five seconds you can enjoy the company of others, not everything is a swirling sadness maelstrom about you, why not take the time to actually be interested in other people and learn from them, live with them, share this beautiful moment even if it doesn’t imply any others? Stop obsessing about why people hate you and just radiate the light innate to you, you miracle of this once then never. It’s easy at some level to tap your fingers with impatience and rattle off a thousand little lessons of perspective. But you know what? It really does feel like that, when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty. New Year’s Eve, 2019 captures exactly the melancholy anxiety spiral that led me, like Qiuyi, to bail out early or mumble my way head down through a deeply draining evening. Even before you get there, you’re spiraling into your own despairs, and it just gets worse from there. Self-fulfilling prophecies that nevertheless perfectly predict their fulfillment, your own lack of it.
Also, the absolute audacity of being the plus one who drops this line: “So, how about that election?”
There’s a lot made of liminal spaces recently, with widely shared images of spaces that were once public, filled with life, which now wait desolate. This feeling of abandonment in a place which should not, we feel intrinsically, be, has expanded into a myriad of vibes, from vaporwave’s various grandchildren to a new meme mythos like the Backrooms. Our architecture is often built with a pompous sense of permanence; their empty rooms like empty veins.
It's precisely that transitory, permeable space of inhabitance that builds the uncanny liminal borderworld of Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel, a “motel that used to view the river but now its scenic views looks out on 6 lanes of frequently congested highway traffic.” A place which once meant something drowned beneath the inexorable progress of The Highway, a gutter where old names that cannot match the moment collect and stagnate. The motel, a makeshift home for those far from home, heaves with the exhausted of the world, and in this terror of quasipresence, each stillness threatens hollowness: “He stares forward without blinking, unmoving, only the slow rise and fall of his chest sway the antlers coming from his head that cast long jagged lines of shadow that reach towards the ceiling and every surface. / The more I watch him the more a pit in my stomach grows until I feel like I’m going to cry, I break away from the wall and finally breathe. I steady myself against the wall to stop shaking.”
Nausea of disappearance plays out in the liminality of the motel as a satirical exaggeration of the emptiness and transitory elements of our own normalness, how our own lives are built on presumptions of permanence that are just as vulnerable. At its best, the game haunts in this unsettling calmness, showing a world in which everyone is so quickly slipping away from you and themselves, as in this delicate scene of people being swallowed by the screen: “Peering through the hole in the wall, the room is draped in pitch. The only thing I can make out in the darkness is a slender body on its knees haloed in the hazy glow from the television set as it blares white noise throughout the room. Body twisted so a single ear is pressed to the glass of the screen, hot breath occasionally fogging up the glass. I notice her lips moving but can’t hear the whispers over the sound of the static, her voice blending in with noise and only adding another layer to the dissonance. / The static grows harsher as an electrical tone begins to drone out of the television and fill the room. The figure stops her muttering and her eyes widen, she nods slowly as if each mechanical movement of her head was to convey the seriousness of her understanding. She sits back from the tv onto her knees, arms slack at her sides as the television static blooms in a fisheye distortion. / Orbs of cascading visual noise ripple out from a single pixel of light in the centre of the screen. She watches intently as the ripples move with an increased speed and intensity, tunnelling out from the centre of the screen. It is only until the ripples slow and still on the screen that I see the glass warping, undulating in pace with the ripples. My eye strains to see through the narrow dim hole what could be causing that effect when a limply held hand juts up from the floor and disappears wrist deep into the screen. The other hand comes up and caresses the writhing ridges of the screen before fingertips disappear within it. Hands and then arms move sinuously into the screen as the woman brings her face up to the screen cheek first, dragging it slowly across the rippling static until she pushes her face, lips first, into the noise. The light all but goes out in the room as the remainder of her body contorts and writhes to fit itself into the hollows of the screen, the light returning to the room dazzling my vision as one last pale foot slides into the television. The screen is quickly gripped by blackness as it's pulled in like corners from the corners of the screen, the static quickly winking out in one final sharp white line, before all that is left is the soft glow from the screen and a single white dot still weakly emitting light from the centre.” By using the amplified setting of the motel to render each metaphor starkly literal, someone being swallowed by the screen becomes baroque, and in that ornamented sinuousness finds an empathy that distills the conceptual nod into a resinous gleam. In particular, the oscillation between noisy horror pangs and quietly human details lends the scene’s startling denotation a slightly misty, mutedly forlorn gentleness that perturbs the conceptual simplicity to an uncanny nuance; it’s easy to write dismissively of someone getting swallowed by the person behind the screen, but it’s altogether more deft to write longingly of it, as if we might be a little jealous of the purity of the tragedy. Woven into the man with this screen disappearance, the man with the elk hat, the vampiric woman, even the strangely overscrupulous older gentleman, is the abandonment that has led them here, to a motel forgotten, a transience we keep living until we cannot.
That delicate horror is unfortunately undermined by our narrator’s acidic ennui, whose rampant animus conforms to the base expectation of normality into uncanniness that drives a lot of horror (it’s just an ordinary shift on an ordinary night oh wait oh nooo it’s not aaaa), but frequently exceeds its remit in ways that detract from the story. Variations of “shit” besmirch most of our narrator’s comments, almost a default reaction to any stimulus: “What a huge fucking creep I hate working here, but maybe if shit is weird tonight a little bit of spying might come in handy. Who knows, weirder shit has happened here.” In particular, the narrator’s spite for their colleague Gus is so incessant that the character becomes angry about an issue from every possible angle, despite their contradictions. When Gus complains about the narrator’s penchant for being late, which is understandable, who wants to be stuck at the desk waiting to be relieved when they could go home to their family, the narrator swipes it aside: “I truly don’t understand how some people assume being in the building but not at the desk the instant a shift starts counts as being late but whatever.” But this annoyance at Gus’ annoyance then switchbacks: “Fuck me for not being here the instant my shift starts but can’t ask this man to stay a second past when his shift ends.” If you’ve ever known someone who is just default annoyed, this inconsistency rings true: the stimulus is entirely arbitrary, the annoyance is built in. Indeed we find ourselves annoyed, especially since this trait doesn’t cohere or nuance the more sensitive and subtle elements: it grates with the game.
I much prefer the muted “ambivalently bored” tedium that the game sulks into when exhausted of ire, which gives a more congenial normality that better interplays with the horror. The viscous drainage of hours passing on the night shift fits well with the humbug doldrums stretched out with Knausgaardian detail: “Mixing it quickly I pop a spoonful in my mouth and instantly burn the roof of my mouth. Holding the soup in my mouth, not ready to swallow, I open my lips and try to vent the heat out of my mouth until it's a safer temperature to eat.” The way each action just balloons out of its importance does a great job of showing time passing quietly, too quietly, not quickly enough. You can almost hear the lights buzzing and flickering.
With the semirandom fluctuation of multiple unrelated plots, there’s enough going oozing around in here to reward multiple playthroughs. The game runs on a real time basis which is kind of wonky, for instance there’s a bug where once you trigger the LeAnn ending, all other playthroughs in the same session trigger the LeAnn ending as soon as the shift starts. But as you tap tap your fingers while things go bump bump in the night, you’ll feel that liminal apotheosis, a loneliness which isn’t alone.
We have a conception of ourselves that lives like we do, in the present, open to each new moment, brimming with our mornings, redolent with our evenings. Possibility always afresh a decision away, a self instantiated in each choice. Others have a conception of us that lives like we did, in memories, full of who we acted, bloated with yesterdays, stained with mistakes. Identity as a never ending apology.
Past Present opens upon this desolation desperation, as our protagonist, recently divorced, returns to take their things, as if they can take anything away from what has transpired: “Two years ago, we moved into this old farm house on the edge of a corn field to build a family and grow old together. Now it stands empty, haunted by a few odds-and-ends, dust, and a lot of regrets.” What is left to reclaim? The empty house echoes the answer: “Funny that this is called the “living room,” as it’s now so bereft.” Houses, in which we live, but do we really? At the end, what do we have to show for it? “Built into the wall over the tub is the little soap nook my wife used for all the soap slivers that accumulated over time. They’re all gone now.” Every dream, each anticipation, lies scattered, beaten, removed, an embarrassment of recall recoil: “This room was always a project-to-be for us. When we moved in, we had big plans for it, big designs. As time rolled on, and our ambitions and marriage cooled, we wound up filling it with boxes and old junk.” Relationships, with all their idealism, fade into the quotidian, with the thousand little ways we fail to live each day. Just boxes and boxes of stuff accumulating to nothing, weeks and weeks of us tattering to “the spills and messes of three years lost.”
Regret brings its wistful cousin hindsight, a fantasy of all the little things you could have done different, the present tense person you could be, if you could be back then. Past Present indulges the hope, letting the protagonist slip back into the past, flitter between ourselves as agency and ourselves as story, mending at everything, frantic to fix anything. Each mistake, signified in an object, something you could put in its rightful place, some action you can take to right the course: your wife’s vase, smashed in anger, you can pick up the pieces, “set the vase on the end table. It looks right. A brief rain shower of warm nostalgia sprinkles down inside me.” Destroy the napkin with the waitress’ name on it, annihilate the affair! The “rambling and raw apology” to an argument that you tore up, you can restore it, have her read it. Everything in its place, you can do it, you can be who both of you wanted you to be: “Something clicks—finally, a sense that I’ve made things whole, that I’ve revised our past enough to correct our mistakes and mend the tears. / No cheating or screaming. No early morning stuporous baths. No smashed vases, no discarded promises.”
But damage, cannot be undone, the damage most of all to their son Toby, as the past and present slip into a fugue: “This is the morning Toby ran away from home—after enduring our yelling and arguments and banging on locked doors and late night drunken returns home, daddy sleeping on the sofa and mama hiding her empties in the backyard shed, this is the morning Toby ran away from home.” Finding his backpack in a field, reminiscing on a disappearance which you could not force to disappear, the game forces you to WAIT as the protagonist swallows the emotive upsurge.
Yet we don’t give away our delusions so easily, because those delusions, they are us, aren’t they? All this suffering, as if it’s just a thing you can move past, as if there is again the present tense you can liberated that is freed of pasts: “The vase and flowers are gone. The old teacup has vanished. I’ve nothing to show her. I’ve left her nothing to remember me by other than some foul memories. / Last time we spoke to the sheriff department, they told us Toby is still being treated as a missing person case. I miss my little boy so much. / Some things in this explained world go unexplained. It feeds the doubt in our minds, and we start giving weight to its mystery. We listen to the very voice we should be shutting out. / I’ve seen all I need to see here. It’s time to open this door and put this place behind me. Down the front steps and past the oak, there’s something out there waiting for me to believe in it.” In this optimistic gesture, our protagonist’s solipsism leads them to shutting out the voice that haunts them, assured that they could put all the suffering behind them, find some self “waiting for me to believe in it.” How little we change from what happens to us. We cannot go into the past to save ourselves, because we are still that person. The oddness of being loathed: knowing that someone who knows you loathes you, that that’s a possible experience of who you are. Perhaps symbolically, our ability to travel to the past is described as: “I find myself surrounded by a stifling darkness crowding me out. The only exit I can sense is out.” A shadow you can climb out of. The darkness crowding us out: is there an out? Someone leaving us, the wish we could do the same.
Because, ultimately, all the protagonist’s attempts to fix the past are vague gestures, even selfish ones, aimed more at an embarrassment at failure than a genuine introspection on a broken love: “We painted it once after moving in, and a second time when my wife decided she didn’t like the first color. The paint I bought was cheap, and the first coat bled through the second, giving the fixture a bland dun-colored stain.” You try to fix your mistakes to appease your partner, but the effort isn’t there, the effect is cheap, and the wallpapering peels to reveal what the object now forever signifies, a compromised compromise. The relationship isn’t a *thing* to be fixed, it’s you, it’s them, it’s the innocent people you have hurt along the way. The protagonist’s failure to reflect is the falseness of its ending hope: “One day the cup slipped as she washed off the soap gunk, and it smashed to pieces in the kitchen sink. Her next bath was when she lost the ring.” So the protagonist puts the ring in their wife’s drinking cup, a passive aggressive attempt to bring things back together. But it wasn’t the ring that was lost. It was her. It was their son. And it was, is, the protagonist.
Terseness keeps the rhythm raw: “he was probably handsome, when he had his skin.” Rawness pervades, even as this world that has claimed you uncloses: “it’s been twenty-four days since everyone else floated up. / you haven’t been out since then; Momma doesn’t like you leaving the flat without her, and the effort of getting down the stairs hasn’t been worth it anyway.” But if all you know are walls, how do you learn the horizon? “it is big. it is threadbare. it is forbidden.”
And you know what it is like to be forbidden. An unexpected kiss, unexpected pleasure, leads to immediate reprimand: “do you want to live in sin? is this what you want? She had roared as She dragged you towards the water.” The water which drowns every gasp for air, which seethes over us, sears, sears us: “why does the water have to be hot, sweet girl? / because fire washes away the sin. / that’s right, She’d said, but I can’t wash you in fire because I love you. so this is the next best thing.” Full of sin, aren’t you, isn’t this the cause for all their cruelty? Sinful inescapably, self as a source of wrongness, an understanding of the body only as broken, how they insist we cease, pliable, sermonable, able, just like God’s precious first martyr. How Christian hyperguilt cycles lead to the perpetuation of cruelties, holiness as absolute denial of any self outside a productive blankness: “do you know why you’re in a chair, child? / you shook your head. you honestly didn’t. / he nodded, somewhat sadly, and then he told you. / it’s because you’re a sinner.” Sin as a perpetuation of abuse down a hierarchical chain; the closer to holiness, the more paradisical your removal from the rest of the community: “this is… his private garden? it’s nearly as large as the entire Community farmland. / and the food growing here! grapes and corn and mint and broccoli and… peaches. / as if by God’s own will, a peach falls from its tree and lands directly in front of you. you lean forward and snatch it immediately. when you bite into it, the juice dribbles down your chin. / you briefly ask yourself why Prophet Hunter would keep all this to himself, when the rest of you had barely enough to get by. there’s a revelation somewhere in your brain, but something else blocks it from surfacing.” Those who hurt you and their self-satisfied nonneed to hurt. You too can nonhurt, just smother yourself, dulled to everything, finally holy, indefinably null, numb: “the bottom drawer opens with a rattling sound. it is absolutely full of the same kind of little yellow bottles that Momma’s meds come in. you sift through them. they’re almost all empty. you pluck one out and hold it up to read the label. / what in the world is oxycodone?”
But the wrongness isn’t inside you, it’s everywhere, and you can’t bring yourself to return to the insularity prison of projections, even though “it looks so comfortable, but you just got up. it’s not worth the effort—swinging your body up, manually pulling your legs over—that would be required to lay back down.” Traveling along a map, inspecting everything, a fugue of memories that build and leave nothing there but the bareness: “they are still and cold and silent. / inside, no hymns are sung. / inside, no breath is drawn. / The Beast is laughing. / you wonder if there might be some unspoiled food in someone else’s apartment. / you imagine an icy hand closing around your throat. / you doubt you could make it up the stairs, anyway.” You look for any hint of the holiness that was supposed to protect you, but the thin veneer fails, you peek behind it: “on closer inspection, it’s not a lamb. it’s… something else. something wrong. / it regards you cooly with seven insectoid eyes, spaced evenly around its head. / bony spurs protrude, seemingly at random, from its body. you count 1 before your eyes begin to hurt. / for a moment, your surroundings seem to flicker. you see a throne behind it, and four beasts surrounding it, and a sea of men extending into infinity, watching it.” As you wander, looking for the hope that is not here, you realize it must be elsewhere, it is out there, somewhere, beyond the gate, these memories, this stillness eternal.
If the message is laudable, it is perhaps too determined in its despair to cohere its grays to delve beyond surface severities. Relentlessness of terse miseries with no variations crumbles like desiccated dust, especially as it loops through tropes, with no space for individuality to make the prebuilt circuit sparkle. The bleakness flattens everything, and the story seems almost self-aware of its own predictability, as in some footprints we find: “as unpleasant as the thought is, you know they’re made of blood. what else would it be?” Indeed, what else? The lack of range in the emotions also compresses the scales of expression, such that even a child not receiving a peach wrings the same cords as the bleakest scenes: “you were awash in a sea of grief. the bereavement, the shattering of your hope, it was all too much.” The story, again aware of its own straining to more than strain, tries meekly to emphasize itself at certain points, but doesn’t know how except to mine the same veins: “of all the things you’ve seen today, this makes you go cold. bleak. desolate.”
The brutalities are unsubtle, however, and in those scenes the story excels in its terse cruelties so raw they resist presentation, as when the prophet enchains our guilt once more in a ritual public performance of abuse: “i’d like to thank delilah, daughter of ẗ̴̬̤̲̼͍͙̼̼̟̤̘͗̒̈́ȃ̵̙̲͎͕̯̑́̌́͒̃̅̔M̴̡̻̯͍̖̭̰͒͂̓͌̓̾̆̍̐̑͠ͅr̵̡͍̬͕̲͕̬̩̿̀͒̿͛̏̑̎̓̅̃̏͘͜͜ ̴̛̻̻̣̿̓͊͛̓́̌a̵͔͔̾̅̏̿̀̋̃̄g̸̨̻̹̣̯̱̥͙̘̑͝ͅͅŗ̸͓͉͖͉̲̗͔̠̻̊̍̍̿y̷͈̘͔͇̰͖̓̒͋̌̋̏̍̀͛̈́̆͘͝ͅṂ̶̨͇̲̩̪̫͎͛̆̆͜͜ê̶̦͔͕̪̰̪͙͂̃̌͐̐͑ͅȧ̶̗̈́͊̈́̓͝r̴̡̧͎̝͓̳̹̲̥͕̿̐̍̑̿͋̒͛͊̈́͜ͅ, for bringing these grave offenses to my attention.” The terseness, when used to its maximal effect, slows down the reader’s engagement, jolting physical each passing moment: “it’s a slow process getting yourself down without it—a lot of scooting your rear end down one stair at a time, using your arms to push and move your legs so your center of gravity doesn’t shift too far forward. you stop halfway to catch your breath.” And, in that slowing, we can feel the trickling inklings of how memory fractures into lifetimes of wounds: “when you were little, Momma would spray it with wormwood perfume. the smell is long gone, but you still hold the blanket up to your face and inhale deeply before laying it across your legs. you feel comforted.” Comforted? And there, amidst the relentless bleakness, is perhaps the starkest anguish.
You live in a city and it’s expensive to eat and it’s expensive to get around and it’s super expensive to live even though your apartment is a bathroom stapled to a bed but you’re glad at least you have it because when you went looking for places at your price range you were shown a room with a shattered window glass all over the floor and the guy said oh don’t worry we’ll repair it and there will be five people who live here and if you sign the lease today I’ll give you ten percent off rent um um um so you showed up to another place that looked like it was condemned and when you called the landlord who said he’d show you around he said the visit was cancelled as if he didn’t even know who you were but you have only a few weeks to find a new place and you feel like the walls are closing in in the way your smile overwrites when someone asks you how much you like living in the city oh you live in the city how is it what a wonderful opportunity there is so much to do in the city and i visited it once and we just loved it yes yes it really is a nice place i enjoy it and maybe at some level you do enjoy it even though most nights you come back from work with a paycheck that seems by the deductions and the work expenses to shrink each period and you should save money and go out less and everyone loves all the things to do in the city and really a ticket costs that much and maybe you should save by eating less but food is often the only pleasure you genuinely feel like the one moment you as an animal are satiated you like to eat but the food you’re eating is fast food it’s trash full of salt and fats and you don’t know what and your health is declining you don’t quite feel like you used to but you just like if you could just order a pizza several times a week that’s all you want is just to cuddle up and feel physical pleasure so that you’re not just sitting there alone in your room bathed in your phone’s blueglow staring at something in the darkness something in the darkness is more alive than you and knows more about you than you and night after night you converse with it this ambient hum there’s always the hum the hum of traffic night and day cars whining through your dreams and the hum of the grumble and whinny of the bus and the hum of chatter and the trains and the airplanes and the elevator and the bike bells and you once got out of the city and what shocked you the most was the suddenly earpopping veinquelling quiet.
““I really like Aegis-Liora,” you say. “The weather is nice and there’s interesting things to see…I could imagine myself staying here for a while.” / “Wow. I never thought you’d become so comfortable in the city! I’m glad you’re finally starting to like it. What have you been up to?”” Oh, just joined a new biotech firm: “Running programmed simulations all day is not the life you would have chosen for yourself”, but then again neural networks get a billion iterations and you’ve just this one and anyway this firm is great, you’re doing fine, you’re not even terrified or frustrated when your boss singles you out, more just kind of depressed, and anyway you kind of agree with him, maybe if you’re good enough he will like you: “Tobias is right; your proposal still has a long way to go. But the day will come when he decides there is enough room in the department’s argevan budget for a new funded project, and you are determined to be the first person he thinks of.” Everything is fine. Your boss asks you to follow them into the basement: “If the upstairs elevator resembled a crystal box, this one would be compared to a rusted cage. It clearly hasn’t been maintained in years; as it lowers you into the earth, its flickering light skims over the rocky surface of the elevator shaft, just barely illuminating it. When the elevator stops, you find yourselves on a suspended walkway.” It’s good like that’s fine this is a startup, gotta disrupt the industry, gotta be dynamic, everything is fine, just remember that your coworkers are not your friends and you cannot confide in anyone and just keep your head down and everything is fine and it will all work out and you really just need at least a few years for the resume then you’ll have the bargaining power to get a more comfortable situation and “Below you is vast rippling shadow—a shallow lake. The surface of the water is draped in a grid of stars, each purple point a ripening gem. It extends in all directions until the cave walls carve it a dark, jagged hem … / “Where is everyone?” you whisper. The faint outlines of dormant machinery hang silently above you; this cave is devoid of sound except for the low, distorted echo of faraway chambers.” And you’re not really sure about your company’s business plan, you think maybe, I mean you know we have to make a profit and all but “there’s no denying how unprofessional this setup is compared to the rest of the lab. You wouldn’t trust the machinery to stay attached to the ceiling if you had to work here every day. The air is tolerable for now, but the accumulated fumes from these argevan colonies could easily suffocate you given enough time.” But what are you going to do? Tell people? Who? “Your cousin Miriam is like an older sister to you. You could tell her anything. But you haven’t been yourself these past few weeks, and you couldn’t bring yourself to pick up the phone when she called, no matter how many times she tried to reach you.” Why would you choose to humiliate yourself by showing the mess you’ve gotten yourself into? This is all standard industry practice, every business is like this: “The underground employees have been trying to unionize for years, but every time they show signs of getting their act together, the company steps in to purge their leadership.” And besides you’re only “a lowly research assistant” so you have nothing to say about the company’s strategy, you’re just here to clock in and clock out and have an apartment and food and the hum.
“The lab is on fire. Most of the building is obscured by dark billowing smoke. The helicopters circle the scene, trying to put the fire out, but at this distance they look so insignificant, like flies hovering around a wounded creature. The smell is making you sick.” Um. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. “Under normal circumstances you’d never contact a stranger for advice, but from the way Miriam describes her, Rebecca seems to know her way around tough situations. I’m sure she would know how to respond to something like this. You find her number and send her a text” and get the heartswallowing reply: “who’s this? miriam’s cousin?” Oh god, oh sorry yeah, sorry, I was just wondering, but um thanks, never reach out to anyone, never reach out to anyone, it’s all just super embarrassing, everything is fine, you can learn to love being alone, and “As you go through the motions of your old morning routine, however, you feel that things are starting to return to normal” and “You read the signs hovering above the mass of protestors. PROSPERITY IN AEGIS-LIORA IS A LIE. YOU TOOK OUR HOMES FROM US. YOBEL IS BLEEDING OUR CITY DRY” and “we are an institution. We follow procedures, and we come to rational conclusions. We do things the proper way. Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good” and “Wait, don’t I need to renew my lease by tonight?”
It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re okay. “You nod slowly, letting his words sink in. “That sucks,” you say. “Well. At least we have these sandwiches.” / “Seriously,” he says, taking a bite. "Eat your sorrows away.”” Your friend asks you why you first moved to the city.
On the first day of the Decameron, in which the storytellers engage on the theme of the social structures of religion, one story relates the tale of two friends, a Christian and a Jew. Of course, the former tries to convert the latter, and the latter promises to go to Rome to study the new religion. The joke is that the Christian immediately panics: if his friend goes to Rome and sees the absolute debauchery of Church leadership, there is no way he will convert. Boccaccio obliges his Christian audience, however, with a comfortable out: returning from his trip, the Jewish friend does convert, reasoning that if a religion can prosper when so poorly led, then it must be blessed by God. Boccaccio affirms the power of individual religious devotion as a power unblemished by the inevitability of corruption of religious organization.
Bitter Karella’s A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat denies this hope, trying to directly tie an aesthetic repudiation of Catholicism to the naivety and complicity of the believer. I emphasize aesthetic, because, besides nods to hypocrisy or institutional cruelty, the brunt of the ire is aimed, not towards any concrete element of Catholic belief, but rather towards a phantasmal essence of decrepescence within rigid hierarchy: “A wail goes up from a gang of nude flagellants to your left, their bodies oozing black and red, as one of their number slaps a studded whip across their backs. / To your right, a clot of pilgrims chants a Gregorian hymn, their voices merging together into one dull drone.” Straightforward associations of devotion as violence: a gang of self-harm, the stagnation of being into community. Position within religion blunts individuality, a pseudonatural harmony of roles with a prelapsarian absence of the human, where “a steady stream of priests” leads inevitably to you being “swept along with the throng.” An endless motion carried seemingly of its own accord, throwing bodies this way and that, Dante’s punishment for lust writ large. Industry on a mass scale, in which roles are inhabitation of velocity, a way you move through the world, and yet never truly is it you moving: “Priests and officials, many carrying stacks of scrolls or stone tablets, constantly bustle in one door and out another in a never-ending flow of activity” as they slowly build: “No man alive today will live to see the completion of this basilica. The construction will take decades, possibly centuries, but when it is done it will be a monument to the righteousness of the faith …” The underlying threat of all this motion is that if, for any instant, you stop, if your office no longer pertains to the maelstrom, then your role will drag you down to some subterranean terminus, where you shall officiate over the nothingness, as when we find one unlucky bureaucrat as a skeleton: “Presumably this WAS the administrative official in charge of the Imperium department de Lucifugia. It doesn’t look like anyone’s checked in on him for a while.” Stripped of individuality in a brutal, bodily process, you are replaced with a decay of officiation, in which your agency is repurposed as a tool, as when we affirm that serving the Church is equivalent to serving God: ““Well said! They ARE one and the same, aren’t they? So when you work in the interests of the church, you can do no wrong, right? And when a man can no longer work in the interests of the church, then that man can no longer serve the interests of God. Isn’t that right?””
The higher up in the process you are, the more you decay, yet the more privileged of the mire you become, as in a character lucky enough to receive a name, Henricus, whom we meet as “A tall, nearly skeletal man, dressed in white sacerdotal robes caked with black soot” with “a long sour face with rheumy bloodshot eyes above a beaky nose and a fringe of stringy white hair around his ears”, and just in case we didn’t get the point, we’re told “His face is smudged with ash.” He then informs us that St. Peter’s is not open for pilgrims, so “If you have a pennance [sic] to make, you can deposit your payment at any Mammon kiosk in the city." This is a nearly smothering level of camp, relishing expectations as they cavalcade, as when the payment to Mammon results in a rather unsurprising reference: “Below the imp’s mouth is carved the word INDULGENCES.”
The anti-Catholic tropes rattle off with such aplomb that one would envision some sort of Protestant jeremiad, were the story not at pains to connect its criticisms with a wider judgment of Christianity, as in the cat, who cites a number of unsettling verses about sexuality, regularly reminding you just how much weird stuff there is in the Bible: Onan, unsettling and dense Torah commandments, a hadithesque involving circumcision. The real target of criticism is not the literally monstrous clergy, who are machinelike tendrils of corruptions, but the true believer, whose quest dovetails with ours, as when we first meet him, and he enthuses: ““Can you believe we’re finally here? In the very beating heart of Christendom?” / God, this guy. He’s so annoying. You’re glad you won’t ever have to see him again.” However, we do see him again, deep beneath the Vatican, near the Pope: ““To think, we’re about to meet the pope himself,” says the true believer. “What an honor! And to be able to give the ultimate gift to God’s ambassador on Earth? What Christian could ever dream for anything more?”” After feeding his blood into the Pope, being literally consumed by the religion, he continues to babble pieties before being led away. The message of the story is clear: don’t be that loser! Which seems to me an unserious dismissal of religious devotion.
The story can rage itself into over-the-top condemnations which lose contact with substance and become aestheticized screeds connected to no particularly tangible criticism, for instance in the description of the Pope, surviving on the blood infusions of the faithful: “From this position, you can see the pope lying in his bed. He is so thin that even the soft feather bed bruises him, large purple welts spreading across his back and hips, across skin like paper stretched tightly over bones. His eyes sunken so deeply into his skull that they resemble empty black pits, staring sightlessly up at frescoes of cherubs and saints. His dry blackened lips have curled back from his teeth, leaving his mouth an open hole of blackness. You would think that even know he was already dead, but the physician in all his wisdom has detected the faintest intake and exhale of breath. The body is connected to a network of artificial tubes, plugged into incisions along his arms and chest, extending up to be lost in the gloom of the domed ceiling. Dark fluid circulates through the tubes, doubtless part of the physician’s plan to help the pope cling to life.” This visceral distaste swirls the story into heady fumes of recrimination, so that our cat begins to cite strange heretical verses: “You feel the cold of this place in your bones. You wonder if there something about this place, about being at this depth, about being thing close to the very epicenter of Christendom, that might be causing the cat to… / pick up signals that it shouldn’t be.” The disdain that drips through these descriptions culminates in the story’s final sentence, the nail in the coffin: “The pope has nothing to say.”
I’m not here to defend the Catholic Church, although I think the story comes from a place of dismissive incuriosity, which renders elements of its emotive verve jejune. Calling chants “dull drones” for instance ignores the beauty and intention that has been poured into a rich tradition of music; like, listen to how beautiful and sincere this is. However, the deluge of resentment spares no one, resulting in a rather distasteful application of the monstrous aesthetic to sex workers: ““Welcome to Our Lady of the Evening,” says the procuress, her piggy eyes gleaming. She licks her cracked lips eagerly, leaving a slug-trail of spittle.” No humanity exists here, not even for victims, who are, unfortunately, aestheticized in the story’s usual camp: “Upon the mattress is a slender young woman naked other than a scandalously altered yellow samarra cloak, decorated with red devils and dragons and cut so that you can see… most of her flesh. The left side of her face is disfigured by severe burns, her flesh scarred and blackened and oozing, her left eye a milky white. The flaming red hair on the right side of her head falls over her right shoulder like a crimson waterfall; what little hair grows from the blistered left side of her head is brittle and wispy.” But no, she likes being this way, delights in it, making sexual interplay about being burned at the stake: ““Tell the pope I DESERVE the pyre,” she says as she shoves you out the door. “And this time, tell him to make the flames hot.”” That this is an insensitive treatment of a grave historical circumstance is an understatement, but very well, there’s room for that in art, yet the dehumanization really seems to exist for its own sake: “her talons lightly trailing against your skin to raise goose pimples”, a whisper “hisses the whore”, it’s all a bit tasteless. The entire scene takes the venomous invective that, when aimed at a global institution with a deeply troubled history, feels, if not thoughtful, at least understandable, then just splatters it over everyone, powerful and powerless, with the very unfortunate implication that everyone, sex worker and true believer, is complicit in their abuse, which surely wasn’t intended? I did not see what happens if you select the “virgin” rather than the “whore”, and I do not seek to find out.
I think these problems arise in part because the engagement with Catholicism seems driven less by polemic or emotive engagement and more by the sheer aesthetic enjoyment of the caricature stylistics. The game seems to think of itself primarily as fun in the way that a haunted house is fun. Enter into the spoooooky Vatican: “You pass though [sic] another gate, this one carved to resemble a hellmouth, an image in bas relief of a grinning demonic mouth chomping sinners between its teeth.” Religious terror, it’s a carnival ride! Catholic traditions, like the release of differently colored smoke to indicate the status on electing the next Pope, are ripped out at random as set decor: “Great plumes of black smoke are visible from behind the walls; occasionally a sudden burst of new smoke is accompanied by a cacophany of inhumanly high-pitched screeches.” All the appropriations create a successfully disturbing Catherine’s wheel, but perhaps with a bit more patience and curiosity, rather than only a suffusive delight in plasmatics, the animosity could be channeled more purposefully. As it is, we have a German Expressionist nightmare, in which you can choose whether to delight or despair.
The hardest part of the day is the alarm, the moment when an internal world shatters under the invasion of a contingency of compromises, obligations, alienations, austere actuality in which what is hidden is suppressed, in which what matters is imposed, is erased by the imposed. After you manage to stir out of bed, then momentum takes hold, you stream down the river, unable to hold onto anything, you are thrust towards an endless depth we know will one day swallow us, but there, before all the fractious and fracturing, in that serene moment you lie where dreams still suffuse about you, you can almost believe you elsewhere awake, spared in the glossy otherwise, commingling of toucheds, what is more powerful than a dream shared?
Fandoms create communities of possibility out of a shared passion, in which we can exist more real than real, hyperreal. Enter into this new world, the Shadowverse, in which new powers take hold, truths denied in the silent austerity of other communal interpretations of reality can flourish. “You scroll through your dashboard for a few minutes. Nightblogging has begun. People all over the country, all over the world, all connecting for a few brief moments to revel in their love for a certain media franchise.” Strewn across continents in isolated pockets, far from friends and family, we craft little homes on an internet so vast and inhospitable, dreams we inhabit long into the night, a life more real than the moonlight stark machinery of living.
You fill your home with stories, a framework in which life can flourish afresh. Fanfics create characters as avatars, inviting you to inhabit their world, with physical attributes like hair color being worth repeatedly stressing so that you can identify yourself in a representation: “the blonde boy”, the girl “with raven black hair”, where do you fit in? Take a “Which Nebulaverse element are you” quiz to solidify an identity in the terms of a shared communal referent. Who am I in the context of this fandom? How do the stories told herein create a language in which I can be told? When I get a “Stone” result, perhaps I can see it in myself, it almost feels true, I can reach through the arbitrary shifting layers of fandom lore to discover some underlying seed (totes a Stone thing to do obvs #StoneArmy #StoneAugurs #QuizLyfe #Shadowverse). Immersion in fandom as a kaleidoscope by which to grasp unexpected elements of your generatables. “You know what you are, deep inside. You contain within you a seed, the germ of an entire story, the story of your life and the stories of your world. It will take root one day, and it will germinate, and it will change not only you but all those around you. You will become someone…” In a fandom, the community builds, story by story, a liveable fantasy, dreams intersecting, even in contradictions, an artifact which grows deeper, more real, more human, more capable of your humanity, the more you lose yourself within it. This is a real place, with real people, with its own digital landscape: “Online weather report: vibes steady. Chance of callouts: <1%. The blogging equivalent of a bright, cloudless summer day.”
The fantasy recasts itself back on the real world, granting us the terminology to rephrase the terrifying and chaotic contingencies of history into a cohesive storyline: “Does anyone else think that Gali’s character arc in Book 4 is a metaphor for the Obama presidency? Think about it: the heir to the empire sacrifices the Administrator (academia) and betrays Astra (social programs) in order to suck up to the fascist dictator Ariel (the GOP), who feels an irrational loyalty to the Demiurge (Reagan), a figure whom Ariel does not truly know or understand. / Gali then goes on to confront Tycho (the increasingly dispossessed and disillusioned middle class) and Bruno (Bruno), and is increasingly becoming distant from the Creator (true leftism), who nevertheless has an unreasonable amount of trust in him despite his failures at enacting the Creator’s goals. / It just makes too much sense.” It does make too much sense, but isn’t that why we need to believe it, out of fear of the other option, that it all just makes no sense at all?
But, more importantly, the fantasy recasts ourselves into the real world, as one fanfic writer discovers: ““Are you okay, Gali?” asked Astra. “You haven’t spoken this whole time.” / “Y-yeah,” she replied. “I’m okay.” But the secret weighed heavily on her mind. No one knew that Gali wasn’t a boy anymore, but they would find out soon enough.” Using the comfortable and familiar as a way of processing the difficult and unknown. “What is the “true nature” of a person, anyhow, Gali wondered. Was there some essence that made her, her? Were there alternate versions of her?” Using the colors of a new world to paint ourselves anew, to discover portraits we cannot see mirrored in old containments. Possibilities furnish us with vibrancies that seem to thrum stronger than our own pulse, a system of magic powerful enough to capture our most arcane vitalities: “Astra pulls you by the arm, from the library you found yourself in, through the sunlit corridors of the academy, to the labs where she always seemed to make her home. Metal magic courses through labyrinthine machinery, illuminating the otherwise bleak surroundings in a dazzling prism of color.” And yet it remains virtual, both fragile and powerful. In a message between you and Luna, you briefly discuss real life, come to disappointing conclusions, then swiftly retreat back into the safety of the virtual. You’d rather speak the language of the Shadowverse.
But you can’t hide there forever. Is there any way to inhabit alterity inside the numbness normative? Our intrepid fanfic writer seeks to discover it, writing a fic in which the Shadowverse characters enter the real world, experiencing it as a strange place, an uncanny flicker of the escapist dream struggling to reintegrate, to find some way to approach the real world with the identity constructed in the fandom, hold together the power and meaning of a community as it glitches out of its phantasmal surface, creeps into the way you interpret your own world: ““So, how do we get back to our world?” you ask. / But before anyone can answer, then you begin to taste cherries once more. You feel a falling sensation. The two girls disappear from view. It, whatever “it” is, begins again.” What is it we are immersed in, and why is not us who are so immersed?
The real world is creeping into your safe harbor. You wake up and log onto your fantasy world only to see that it has fallen apart in your sleep, you sift through the shards, try to put as many of them together as you can. Waking up again and again, day after day, trying to subsist on the new content, to feel real within it finally, even as you see others disappear, as the world seems no longer to open up through the fantasy, the fantasy is collapsing, you are simply in the world again. Nothing is real, everything is simply real. In the despair, can you cling to each other, rebuild safety between each other? What happens when the online world proves as dangerous and hateful as the real world? The fandom shatters as, a la Rowling, the creator threatens the canon with their flaws. We watch Luna panic: “So I got called a brain-dead degenerate by gtm. Fun fun fun fun fun I’m fine I’m doing fine I’m doing fine I’m okay I’m okay” The virtual is always contingent upon the terms under which we are allowed to participate. The ability for others closer to the heart of the fandom to nullify our participation, to cast us out as a deviation. How our real world status continually reappears even in the depths of escapist fantasy. All of these painful ideas are doused in gasoline and set alight by the weird obsessiveness of online hate comments, the way such messages feel almost unreal, demonbabble of some gremlin latching onto your consciousness, how so impossible it seems that a human being would actually write something like that to someone else, and yet it happens en masse every single day on social media, that terrifying mediator, in which are we constantly gauged as products: “You’ve gained 1 follower and lost 2 followers, for a current total of 109 followers. Your top ship has been inconsistent, which might have lost followers. You haven’t been reblogging enough posts, which might have lost followers.” Social standing as marketing. The extent to which your brand appeals to consumers. What does it mean when a foundational element of human connection is the Like? Every statement measured by the extent to which it wins us approval. If they don’t like you, they will turn on you. You will lose everyone. You will reach zero and be judged deserving.
As the digital too denies her, we follow Luna’s confrontation with the lies that have overwritten her, as she tries to reclaim the self she constructed in the terms of the fandom, even as the fandom dissipates its power, becomes a hostile noland. Our own fanfic empathizes, as at the end of an adventure, a character says, “Yeah, Capella told me about what happens with you wanderers when you find yourself in a world in which you’re no longer needed, where you don’t belong…” We understand that we must be able to survive this shattering, that we must become more than this place: “Capella stares at you. “Sometimes I wanted to stay too. Sometimes there was a place that seemed good. But it was always too good to be true. I don’t know how I ended up here, but… something felt right about this place. Maybe you’ll find a story of your own one day.””
And yet, how do we sustain ourselves without the magic that once empowered us? Born into a new name, yet struggling to reframe: “@icemoongirl: sometimes it’s hard to know what to talk about without the n*bulaverse fandom stuff like, providing a guide.”
Who can speak, when the language is lost? We can only follow our passions one at a time, as in that first album by Lorde that this story delights in referencing, a fragile beauty that has never quite been recreated by her subsequent albums, yet which can still sound within us eternally, remind us of a time when this passion gave us the life and color we needed to make it just beyond the riverbend.
Neural network image generators, with their dreamlike quality of semi-figurative outputs that have been processed through deeply uncanny layers of inscrutable mediations, the genuine beauty of something produced without intention towards the beautiful or the genuine in objects which never cohere, impressions that give an impression without having been left by anything, raw data composed into vector graphics, the feverish feeling of plumbing it deeper and deeper but never quite reaching anything; there is no there there; the map is not the terrain.
Universal Hologram delights in this vibe, not just in its AI-generated images, but in its refusal to underlie its vibes with coherent aesthetics or commitments, a purplish nutrient paste that has some ideas or whatever, and I mean that whatever literally, here’s how the story frames its climactic moral choice: “Gen wants you to take our little simulation-container and remove it from the grid. Then, they want you to bestow that Terminal grain of yours back into the simulation, like an inheritance, so the folks inside can move in the matrix and visit other simulations or whatever.” Yeah you know man, just like, you can change the universe, if uh, if you’re into it, or…
Most characters are like this. During a heady conversation about astral projection, dialogue like ““No, dipshit. You’re a rudimentary sentience in a computer simulation experiencing a facsimile of a fake ancestral phenomenon.” / “Oh, that’s right. We live in a highly realistic simulation, and everything we experience was programmed by someone in the actual real world.”” syrups into ethanol, a simulacrum of human dialogue. Basically every serious conversation is a weird mash of Big Ideas and a slacker ennui that assures you that it’s so post-post-ironic that it couldn’t possibly care, as in this expositional shrug: “Here’s the state of things: in the original, actual, material universe (let’s call it U1, or ‘universe one’), that is, the universe that is currently simulating our universe (U9), there were some morons who imagined it was possible to project their spirits/souls/astral bodies out of their physical bodies and into the energy plane or spirit plane, and then they could float around and look at stuff and shit.”
That’s not to say the characters necessarily need to take anything seriously. The game’s vibe works to the extent that it effuses its computer hell tone, with gleeful distortions of familiar inputs, like this description of gun-soccer: “Soccer was a video game popular among foot fetishists. / A gun was an L-shaped piece of metal that produced a loud noise and the death of one or more people.” or this hilarious description of paper: “Our ancestors on Earth used to harvest a renewable resource called “wood” and smash it until it was basically two dimensional and then dye it white. The resulting substance was flat, smooth, and capable of lacerating human skin.” When the descriptions wheel free of all earthbound concepts, it can become delightfully machinelike, truly synthetic synaesthesia: “You float peacefully, drifting slightly on the Z axis in the astral breeze.” and “At each point when a U-level is breached, you hear a brittle click and watch yourself rise up and out of a series of brackets. Each function containing other functions like a fractal, onward in each direction: too tiny to see where you’ve been, too enormous to comprehend as you move further toward the outer edge.”
However, the game’s thrusts towards the serious feel clunky precisely because they clatter into the miasmatic eyeroll of images. This is not exactly elegantly delivered exposition: “Dion sighs and gestures you into their room. They drag two battered chairs over, and the two of you sit. / “Gen is our universe’s messiah. Without Gen… well, it used to be called the ‘Simulation Hypothesis.’ Now it’s confirmed fact. Gen proved undeniable truths about our reality, and then also gave us an entirely new way of experiencing it: through the Terminal, and later, when that become inconvenient, through astral projection.””
The result is like if you took Brave New World, used it as an input for a neural network text generator, then collectively had your Discord channel edit the outputs into a Twine. We have some similar concepts, the idea of minimizing suffering through the technological attenuation of existence to mere basking, but interlaced with a surfeit of cyber-sorta-punk internetisms. Thus, some of the disconnect is intentional, as grand philosophical gestures like ““Well, for example, there were huge protests on Earth when wild animals were chemically sterilized and allowed to die off. The amount of potential suffering in a wild animal’s life is enormous, of course, but there were many who felt that there was something inherently good about the natural world.” / “Something inherently good about suffering?”” set up our narrator’s childlike inability to process these thoughts: “Dion, that story was a massive bummer.” So we have the stage for a character arc, which sort of happens, as we have our consciousness digitally overwritten to be capable of entering an underlying digital layer. But for the most part, the story relishes its condemnation of our accelerating naivety: “Light, please, uh. Stop emitting light.” An inability to conceive of light except as a command, a variable to turn off and on. Our narrowing band of experience compresses us into binaries, even as we glimpse the grandeur that lies outside: “Your mind springs out of your body, rocketing forth past whirling clusters of stars and technicolor twinkling flecks of astral energy. / In the distance, beings made of pure light and pure darkness traipse between constellations.” There is so much noise and color, and if we could just find a way to navigate the between, enter into the place where “The door opens on an expansive, brightly lit room filled with humming white boxes. Simulated worlds inside simulated worlds inside simulated worlds.” perhaps we could entune all this chaos into genuineness, contact, humanity, something transiently biotic in the endlessly replicating machinescape kaleidoscope: “The tingling, searing sensation fades. You take your hand back. The residue of the gel leaves a wet handprint on the plastic.”
Universal Hologram, in that mode, scintillates with an urgency that it shunts off into nervous laughter. “The light goes dark, and inside Dion’s room, you hear unintelligible screaming. The Internet communicates differently with everyone.” And if we could, as a tone poet, reach through that communication, render the screaming intelligible, there’s a chance, not for redemption, not for healing, but for a transformation not merely translation, an escape from the cycle of rebirth. The story stands as a touching testament, a story that can reach through all these mediating layers and achieve it, the touch, touching, the chance to connect to someone other than online.
In this fragile world, how can we cling to our seams, hold everything together? Falling to pieces in the absence of the smile that used to hold everything together. Lives are built by those who fill it; how do you rebuild in desolation? Not the same life, not the one that rings in your mind memory after memory, beams that glimmer through your sinews so briefly you barely have time to register the rusts.
There you are, immersed in the economical dreaminess of the child’s eye view, hardcoded networks we lose as we learn to stitch together the world as adults: “The front yard is green and has lots of grass, but you’re not supposed to play there.” Everything latches together effortlessly, the world overgrowing always with new thoughts, new rules, simply Russo and Liz as they wheel out into ever opening possibilities: “Her legs are longer than yours so she catches you and makes you it, and then you’re too slow to catch her so you don’t feel like playing tag any more now.” The way children apply inflexibilities, certainties that as things are, so they must be necessarily, in the core of their beings these things entwined. Things just are, as a pagoda that defies the reader’s capacity to imagine it, which just is, as if there is no reason it could not be: “The pagoda is made out of concrete and looks like a little temple … It’s maybe half as tall as you are.” A toy pagoda made out of concrete, like a garden sculpture, but one that’s half the size of a child? Maybe the disjunction of a dream, the way our memories overload with presences, as in the aside ellipsised from the quote earlier: “(“pagoda” is probably the fanciest word you know right now, though there are lots more to come).” Your memory is flickering, things are appearing which should not be there, as when we try to GET ON SWINGS: “Wait, there wasn’t a swing set yet when this happened – my mistake.” The future is invading; there’s something wrong; we feel a sting.
There you are in the bay tacking to the wind, Russo and Liz deluged in a turbid stream of sailing terms immersing us in the quiet industry of movement, a ballet gauntlet of cues demanding poise, demanding you ride the stream as if you were generating it. Movement that can’t be explained, that supersedes every action, an orchestration. We are plunged into the unspoken connection between two twins who are in the sea both unified and utterly alone, an elemental dialogue. “You play the sheet out an inch or two, loosening the jib. Liz sees what you’re doing and adjusts the mainsail to match.” Everything rushes forward, you cannot hold on, the linear progression of the game, its mercurial and impatient parser, feels like its racing along without you, annoyed at how you’re slowing it down, and yet the momentum is too much, you cannot let go, you cannot let go, electrified suddenly with the sting, you try to heal it, but still the world comes back together in a light voice: ““That’s salt water, genius,” Liz says.”
And yet the world pulls. Liz returns from France, and Russo takes a moment to explain how much he missed her. She half laughs it off, again excitable Liz against the trying to be gracefully perpetually dismayed Russo, who, “as Liz has never tired of informing you, you are lame, and after sixteen years you’ve finally learned to embrace it.” And yet the world pulls. “Since summers stopped being sailing in Nantucket and started being bussing tables on Long Island, you’ve stopped liking them nearly as much.” Soon, Russo will be cast again upon the whirlwind zeitgeist in which across continents we are stranded with only a phone to communicate with those whom our hearts hold closest, though we admit this bridge does not hold, with Russo supplying reasons why he cannot call anyone on the phone, how he, jolted with the thought of Laura, decides to let the silence swell.
To fill the silence, as Russo gets older, the prose starts to presuppose the listener, reflecting a growing selfconsciousness, a nervous enmeshing of everything in a skein: “Liz’s stuff is a) hers and b) honestly pretty boring, just clothes and jewelry and that sort of thing, while her room is almost always c) a godawful mess, so you don’t see much reason to go in.” Things have to hold together, there has to be a way to fill in the world with details, details that stay where they are, that do not vanish, per this sentence which tries to ensure the reader’s brain buzzes with connections: “There’s no reason to go down into the basement. It’s small and unfinished, crammed with boxes and pieces of furniture that your mom couldn’t find a place for, plus the laundry machines. The only interesting thing about it is that it gives onto a crawlspace running under the rest of the house, which you spent a bunch of quality time in when you helped your uncle install some security cameras last month (the neighbor kid was sneaking in and stealing cash).” Russo’s repeated assertions that we should not pay attention to the basement collapses into his breathless attempts to fill it in with details. Everywhere a story to be told oozes glue between seams, and yet they widen just as Russo reaches a story so poignant, one he relishes being able to tease Liz with forever, we feel it, the stinging, the fraying, and the reader finds themselves in a house unwelcoming, with furniture that holds no stories, not for us, a place in which we feel like a stranger, in which Russo’s thoughts are, much like House of Leaves, “jammed into a space too small for it”, a house so much emptier on the inside than the outside; is it so strange, then, to expect the sting, to see it coming, to simply put on a sweater first to protect as much as we can? And the voice rings true from across another distance, even as it falls into silence: “There was an awkward minute when she asked how things were with Kaylee, and when you said “fine,” she got a little intense and asked if you were really happy. Even you could tell your “yes” was unconvincing, but while Liz can see through you as easily as you can see through her, she didn’t call you on it, just said a couple times that you deserve to be happy, and then let it drop.” The way we overcompensate for distance with sudden thrusts of intense emotional intimacy…
And the memories cannot hold, we find Russo in a post-pandemic world, and yet there is something the present holds: “Since last March, there are fewer cars and more people in your neighborhood, which is about the only thing about the past year that’s a change for the better – well, you revise your thought after glancing down at Paria’s belly, maybe one of two.” Russo goes through some names, deciding why they all don’t work. Paria and he go for a pleasant walk. And yet there is the bitter sting, but this time the world does not fray with the sting, the moment holds on, the memory holds together, because there is something to build a life with, and you can see it there, already filling up the world with stories. There will be someone to tell this one.
Putting together a resume is soul crushing, literally, it crushes your soul into one page of paper which in ink which may as well register parish burials dissects you into places you have been, titles you have worn, activities which once you tried to pretend to yourself that you did. Your time is eaten, your life elided, and what remains is sheer time, what to the machines all this sound and fury signifies. “The days all run into each other these days, and it’s hard to distinguish time, at times,” Laura Paul writes, muddling expressions with definitions to merge them in a haze. From this month of that year to that month of this year you held this title: because what else, where else could you have gone?
Jackson hears in himself a call that he chases, never reaches. Every freedom sought seems in its own way a constriction: watching others swimming naked, Jackson grumbles, “I’m supposed to just strip down and expose myself to these perfect strangers? Maybe if they stay away from me for long enough I can endure this.” The freedom you cannot have and do not want. This commune, high in the Black Mountains, seems alive with possibility; several times the novella links you to Wikipedia, inviting you to immerse yourself in the endless interconnection of knowledge forever floating within this web in which are we enmeshed, teasing you down lanes you can pretend leads you to a story that will make you feel less alone, though time and again you feel more, more, ever more alone, as every home reminds you you do not belong. Greeted with a bit of hospitality, Jackson immediately reaches its limit: “Standard’s kinda been peanut butter sandwiches and brews around here, but it does the job.” An invitation that puts you on edge, reminds you that your presence is provisional on your ability to provide, as indeed Jackson feels always upon the limits of what this place can provide: “I thought it’d be a bit nice to get established here, but now I’m not so sure I want to contort myself to fit into this place, and my fate is definitely not going to be dependent on whether or not I earn a college degree.” The specters of freedom loom their constrictions, with the futures you cannot project upon such space, with the fear that you are fleeing something you cannot always escape, because, perhaps, you are this very fear: “Part of me wants to run and flee and drive away again, an old me, a deep reflex hidden in the shadows of my heart. The person I couldn’t accept, the person I no longer want to be. I leave the door open, unlocked, and let whoever sees me see me and whoever finds me find me and I am what I am. A man with irrevokable [sic] visions, one of the thousands, or millions, that the system forgot. I won’t run this time though. I’m going to stay. If not with this place, then with these people.” Commitment to continuity despite the disjunctures inevitable; desire that something, anything remains of the dream, that it is not all just waking up on another tomorrow, that it will not end up dry ink on dead tree, that anything exists into which you can slip, discover some other way to live…
That the story does not find an answer is germane to its cigarette jitters vibe. We get a notional hope unwavering: “We’ll spread, we’ll head in opposite directions, alternate directions, separate paths. We’ll keep going north until we end up at the bottom of the world. We’ll keep going as long as we need, until we maybe end up right back where we started. We’ll convene again.” Yet this is but a Pynchonian entanglement of karmas, with its hope for futures, with its understood pessimism that they shall not coalesce. To some extent, this very despair through hope seems almost the theme, as we might surmise that our Jackson upon the cutting edge of 50s American abstract art is, perhaps, someone we already know, perhaps a Pollock to whom such a statement might seem apt: “I pretended there were no hallucinations, that there were straight and firm lines between real and imagined, what was perceived and what others told you—and I found that there wasn’t.” That Pollock dies in a car crash, that he finds only death in his wanderings increasingly drunken, well, at least he painted it first, how many of us can say the same?
Still, one wishes perhaps a bit more stability from this work, that it might not so easily shiver off the hook. Every sensation, every concrete attachment to the world, is doubted: “I’ve made it to Texas. At least that’s what the signs say.” Insofar as there is a bit of roadtrip propulsion behind it, this jitteriness can work out well, as in this sentence that manages to anxiety its way into an impactful thrum: “But after driving through both sunrises and sunsets, there’s a tunnel, no light but a tunnel, and then there’s light, there’s the light, the trees, the leaves as I speed, I speed on down 40 to someplace Jim calls home.” When, however, the momentum sloops languid and sentences double back on themselves to no avail, the result tends towards bumbling ramblers that trip and stumble and stagger and splat: “Bluebird hasn’t been showing up as frequently though, from time to time I don’t hear from her at all. She doesn’t call out my name anymore, I don’t hear my name. That’s why I have to write everything down now. I have to write everything down now to find her, to remember what she said, in case her voice has left me for good. I think she hasn’t shown up now for almost twelve days, at least that’s what the scribble on the back of the discarded receipt in the glove compartment said the last time I checked. I need to review everything I wrote down to make sure. I can’t help but think she’s disappeared completely without a final message I can hold onto.” At the core of this is an efficient subtlety, but the writing is too committed to a confessive effusiveness to apply the red pen. The novella is bloated with such sentences that do not quite achieve their effect, for instance: “Other times, I’d be sleeping, but sometimes I’d be awake.” which doubles us back onto an idea that perhaps does not require elaboration. The novella’s structure itself commits to this impatient effusion, as when we suddenly deal with the possibility that the college could close down despite never having attended a class. Lines like “I had just come to terms with myself here, the ultimate shape shifting of my mind” ring false when basically all I’ve done is refuse to skinny dip. A bit more patience could really help to sell many elements that feel tacked on, like our partner Ashleigh or the hallucinations of Civil War soldiers.
Yet I did feel worn down through the story, matching with Jackson in how little, by the end of it, we could harbor any desire to trace another road, to seek in a destination all we will never there discover. How so much roadtrips remind us we would wish for nowhere other than home! Fear and anxiety overload the reader, as in the razor’s edge exchange with the gas station attendant, as in Fielding slipping away only to appear out of nowhere to offer you a beer; the fear of the open road, the anxiety numbness that cakes up within you from constant threat assessments. You are not safe; you are not welcome; you are not anyone; you are only motion, and yet motion is perhaps freedom pure, the jinn that cannot be captured in any stability, as when Jackson admires more the flight than the foundation as the college disintegrates: “But it wasn’t that I had never found happiness, it’s that I never found the end.” And, for us at least, it is the end. The wandering has to be enough. There can be no line to the page to contain us when we are the quill.
“We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us,— in other words, our natural gifts,— we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.” – Seneca the Younger, Epistula LXXXIV.
Passion is the rain that has kept this garden flourishing. Interactive fiction could have long since desiccated, forgotten save for a footnote, a subject suitable only for archaeology, and yet we live in the midst of its glistening fruits, a victorious riot of life and color that seems to defy the surrounding desert: whether the Promethean fire of Inform 7, in which this work is written, or the tireless work of volunteers who have kept competitions like ParserComp alive, in which this work was submitted, the story of interactive fiction dramatizes the quest of an ever fluctuating community to preserve from the entropies and centrifugies of a chaotic digital age this delicate and beautiful artform we love.
One of the most human and touching contributions to this quest is Brian Rushton’s ongoing project to meticulously document his devoted and meandering journey through huge swathes of interactive fiction past and present. IFDB currently has nearly 9300 reviews; 2244 of them were written by Rushton. No matter how far afield you wander on IFDB, stumbling upon games by obscurity long since swallowed, you will still see a flicker of life, a fingerprint of a wanderer before you: Rushton’s careful, thoughtful, and gently curious review. Isn’t it poignant for a game released decades ago on a platform no more to an audience no more by an author no more to have its spirit captured in conversations afresh, stirred by the industrious Mathbrush, who, like a guide through a ruin, points out to you each artifact and how it worked, what it meant?
A curious evolution of this pursuit is the way in which Rushton has allowed his love for the medium to guide his own creations into a surprising but satisfying metafictional bent. Whether it is last year’s The Magpie Takes the Train or this game, Grooverland, we find his works increasingly incorporating love for the medium into their own warp and weft (warp especially, in the case of Grooverland). In this melange of Chandler Groover’s vivid fantasias, Rushton places us in a Groover-themed park that grows increasingly sinister as the night deepens. His games have been transformed into amusement rides that terrify and, if necessary, delight. We have an Eat Me cake, a Midnight. Swordfight. laserfight, a Three-Card Trick three-card trick, and, of course, our trusty pal Toby from Toby’s Nose. These attractions invite the player to dwell not just in the particulars of each reference but in the lushly bleakly ludic mood that pervades the entire paresthesia symphony. We’re forced to consider the invisible sinews that tie these games together into a cohesive whole, a play of light and shadow that grows increasingly fraught until we no longer seem to be playing.
The shifting amalgamation of locations and play patterns can loom overwhelming, but Rushton introduces a clarity of purpose in the orderliness and smoothness of the design that makes the dizzying delightful. The map is laid out on a central road, which keeps us oriented through the park and allows us to switch through multiple attractions with ease, as many puzzles require. A plethora of neatly sorted hints keeps us from getting lost (except on the occasion it tells you to get lost). An exhausting amount of polish eases the player through the entire experience and makes exploring and dallying enjoyable. Rushton clearly has spent a lot of time and energy to make this game shimmer.
That sheen proves rather necessary through some steep puzzles. The Midnight Laserfight sequence was deeply confusing, with so much to track, so little of it explained, quite a bit of clutter, and a throughline that would terrify Euclid. While I understood after the fact what I had been doing, I confess I had to cheat a little off Mike Russo’s transcript (you should read his transcripts by the way, he’s got a wonderful dry wit), since the hints here got locked up. Some of the puzzles require you to go through multiple locations to succeed or require you to have sought out and noticed objects you might not have noticed, so the nudging about when to keep trying versus when you need to be doing something else entirely was very much appreciated.
Some of the puzzles were really clever, like when you have to play the creaky house like an instrument, but some of the puzzles did feel a bit perfunctory. I felt the menagerie puzzle, where you just wander around, read signs, then crunch some numbers, to be a little unengaging, especially when you have such theatrical creatures all around you. Like the skull scraper, about whom the menagerie keeper jokes, “He likes to get in your head. Don’t let him.”, is a very evocative element, but you don’t really engage with it, you just look at a sign that plainly informs you what kind of food you should give him. How much more fun this puzzle would have been if these animals were as interactive as the petting zoo animals from across the way!
A lot of the writing can feel equally perfunctory. When we ask Dad about the pipe, we get this sentence: "Sorry, Lily, it’s sad the pipe is clogged and we can’t see the rest of the park.” That’s pretty much equivalent with “I don’t have anything to say about that.” Similarly, when we ask Wade about David, “He just points to David, who’s right in front of you.” While that is nice state tracking, nevertheless it feels like a missed opportunity. Given the nightmare jollies that Groover’s oeuvre oozes, the fact that so many characters seem muted and mechanical creates a disjunction that flattens the experience. I get that the sheer amount of dialogue written into this game makes it impossible for every line to zing, but I think the lack of technicolor pizzazz is the vital element that keeps this game from truly accomplishing its ambiance.
That’s not to say that Rushton doesn’t pepper the game with some great quotes. I particularly enjoyed the silly but sinister response when you ask the jelly man about himself: “Jelly is my name and jelly are my ways.” This quick quip belies so much depth that makes this incidental character rivetingly enigmatic. There’s also a fun subtheme about Lily taking a lot of silly classes: when we try to burn something, “You promised your competitive barbecue coach that you wouldn’t burn things outside of competition.”; when we try to attack a character, “Your karate instructor made you promise to try to find a peaceful solution before attempting violence.”; and, the funniest of the lot, when we try to take something from a character, “You promised your pickpocketing teacher that you would only steal in class, and mom’s present list seems to belong to Mom.” We also get some great descriptive lines, as when we get lost in the corn maze: “You travel for what feels like minutes, but the sun is already setting. Then the moon rises, streaks across the sky, and sets again. The sun comes up again, then down, over and over. But it isn’t the same sun. It has grown fat and swollen, ready to burst. The moon crumbles. The stars fade. You close your eyes and run until you find yourself at the demon again. Such is fate.” There’s something so enchantingly weird and hallucinatory about this paragraph, yet it also manages to come across as exhausted, drained of all color. That’s a difficult combination to achieve, but Rushton does it here masterfully. Finally, there’s this line when we enter the creaky house, which makes great use of surprise italics, then pairs it with a punchy understatement: “You can hear something howling outside. It might be the wind.”
When the game comes together in an otherworldly climax, the intensity of its atmosphere pressurizes with an emotional punch, as Lily must sacrifice the last remaining vestiges of her family in order to try and preserve something, anything, from the imminent collapse into pure paradoxical nonness. One by one, Lily’s sister’s bracelet, her mother’s present list, signs of the love in which she was once immersed, are devoured by the dream, and we instead must confront the violent denouement of our inability to hold on. While I would have appreciated a bit more emotive verve in this last section, Rushton does a good job handling the underlying philosophical stakes, and, while not eliding it entirely, he does evade some of the more boring Manichean tropes the game threatens by adding nuance to the roles of the Mirrored Queen and Scarlet Empress. Moreover, I appreciated that this central conundrum pertains to the rest of the game, that we feel that their battle is actually present in each turn we’ve taken along the way.
If Grooverland is a game that is simultaneously ambitious and perfunctory, then it is in keeping with the conflictions innate to such a work, so animated by the drive of passion as it careens through the frictions of creation. Beneath the writing, the puzzles, the polish, we get a sense of Rushton as both charmingly starryeyed and inordinately weary. Perhaps, in that, he captures here the very dichotomy that underpins so much of interactive fiction’s history: dreams of enchantment underpinned by the exhaustive labor necessary to keep the spirit alive as everything threatens to fracture forever.
For all the mystery of the terminal, for all the mindboggling puzzling, perhaps Zork can be best captured in a dream: the homebrewer designing dungeons digital, an infinitely malleable systems engagement through which we like archaeologists wander awed at the dizzying gauntlet of implementations lovingly crafted by capable hands day by day, week by week, feature by feature. Architects without bound, homebrewers build and build, until the building itself becomes an act of worship, passionate and moonmad adding wing upon wing, floor upon floor, baroque cornices of night after night of dreaming what ifs, achieving what ifs, and if MacBrayne’s Somewhere, Somewhen seems lost in its own momentum, ornate spires shooting spectacularly out of metal frames, then it is this, not the lamp, nor the magnet to get the iron key, nor the maze, nor the inventory limit,nor the heady interpolation of magic and tech, nor the brazen disregard for continuity of place, that most evokes its Zorkian lineage.
This game, our author assures us, “was written just for fun in QBASIC64” with a parser that, it hastens to add, “is fairly sophisticated”. I agree, it is rather impressive for a homebrew, with some sophisticated possibilities for multitier commands, with only a handful of oddities (you can’t examine an object until you TAKE [IT] FROM [CONTAINER]) to have survived the rigors of implementation. There’s also some really nifty but somewhat extraneous features, like a variety of reassignable function key hotkeys for common commands, which is exactly the sort of rabbit hole that can easily drink hours and hours of a homebrewer’s development time. The game also bends over backwards to ensure the player has a smooth experience, boasting not only a set of in-game hints (both implicit and explicit), but also a complete set of maps and even a walkthrough.
It is perhaps unsurprising that all this homebrewer enthusiasm for systems polish glistens over a game that is frequently jarring and obtuse. Some of this is just the map: we have a central hub that gives way to six scenarios, but they’re not really scenarios, they’re just areas, there’s really not cohesive themes to them. That would be fine, except that traveling between the hub and the scenarios is confusing and tedious: you have to say a spell to unlock one scenario at a time, which then only has one exit, which is hidden in often confusing ways, and you must loop through the one way trajectory in order to traverse from scenario to hub to scenario. If, say, you accidentally enter the wrong scenario, just the headache of trying to find your way out again makes you wonder why moving through the hub needs to be so clunky and difficult! Compounding this frustration is that you do need to frequently travel between scenarios: like many IF games, you’ll build up a list of unsolved puzzles and go spelunking elsewhere to find the items that might solve those puzzles, but there’s also an inventory limit, and there’s many more items than are actually useful, so you’ll constantly be backtracking, which means going down the well, crawling through the hole, saying the right spell, wandering back through a spelunk of rooms, then tying a rope to a hook, climbing back down into the hub… you get the idea. Over the course of the game, you’ll build up a veritable arsenal of leftover items in the hub location, looping endlessly back and forth and back and forth as you try items J, K, and L on puzzle H. Trudging around this game is actively disorienting and disheartening.
Which is a shame, because the puzzles themselves can be rather clever. I particularly like the musical puzzles, which start with a light concept, but then build in complexity to a satisfying climax. For instance, you find a tuning fork set to C, then you find a door labelled C. Get it? Hit the tuning fork, and the door unlocks. Later on, we find a note saying “I NEED FED”, which is actually an instruction for playing a nearby instrument: play an F, then an E, then a D, voila. It’s always gratifying when a game trains us to think in a certain way, and then actually rewards us in multiple situations for thinking that way. Several other puzzles require some enjoyably lateral thinking, as when we’re given the password hint “Male bovine’s visual organ”, which seems like it might have something to do with the witch’s brew of ingredients we’ve been assembling, until you realize the password is just “bullseye”!
It’s good that the game has several charming puzzles, because the puzzling is clearly the intention of the game. There’s not really a plot: out of the blue our nameless adventurer is whisked away from “a deserted country road” to a “hemispherical chamber”. Why? Just to do some puzzling, of course! A voice informs us “we have sought one who could help in our time of need, and you alone have demonstrated the required intelligence and skills”. Finally, my PhD in the humanities is getting the respect it deserves! They want us to return an artifact, but when we find said artifact, an examination garners the response that “There isn’t anything notable about the Ibistick.” So like, don’t think about that, it’s not important, just get to puzzling. There’s also not much of a world to inhabit here: the rooms are a fugue state so mercurial one gets rather mistyeyed in nostalgia for Silent Hill.
Moreover, the prose, while chatty, is usually focused on providing the player with the information useful for the puzzles. This is kind of counterproductive for a game that’s happy to stretch out over a large amount of unnecessary rooms with objects that serve no purpose, it’s not like the game is going for a graphing paper aesthetic, yet nevertheless the game cheerfully motors along, giving us a number of rooms that are described as “spartan” except for the one or two interactable objects. The prose, where descriptive, generally focuses on neatly ordering the gamespace. Sometimes, however, the prose gets perhaps a little too chatty and clatters through redundancies with indefatigable aplomb. We watch a door “undulate and become almost like a fluid”. We find ourselves “at the southern end of a tunnel which therefore passes northwards”. In a rather egregious example, we find ourselves in a Cramped Room: “The light from your lamp demonstrates that this chamber is so cramped that you feel quite claustrophobic. The walls close in on you, and the staircase which is right in front of you, leading the way up, tantalisingly beckons. Beside you there lies a red herring.” Counting the title, that’s five times it tells you the room is small, thrice it nods you up the stairs, and for the coup de grace a literal red herring. What makes this description even sillier is that a different room tells us that “The walls and ceiling seem to cram in on you, and it’s fortunate that you don’t suffer from claustrophobia.” This is either a mistake or some incredibly advanced state-based character arc subtlety!
Despite these stumbles, the prose can prove charming. When we encounter a hovel guarded by a keypad, our protagonist finds it “a little bizarre that high-tech mechanical sophistication such as this has been installed in an attempt to protect such a down-market and tumbledown construction.” I quite like that phrase “down-market and tumbledown construction”! It rolls off the tongue with an aptly tumbling momentum, slyly flashing fangs acerbic. I also liked this little line, which adds an enchanting flourish to the waving of our wand: “As you wave the wand you are almost immediately enveloped in a bright cloud of mauve-coloured mist in which little sparks of fairy dust scintillate and dance all around you.”
The game has a pervasive disjunctive jauntiness that pleases even as it perplexes, refusing to make sense, but never disrupting the whimsy dreamy puzzle befuddles. Somewhere, Somewhen embraces its weirder threads: for instance, the game splatters magic and machinery together with a deliberate delight in how they conflict. One puzzle in particular, where we have to dress as a wizard, fake beard and all, in order to fool CCTV into giving us access to an inner sanctum, is joyfully idiosyncratic, blessing this bizarre line with a middle school theater kid’s ebullient confidence: “Thank you for requesting entry to our inner sanctum. Before being allowed to proceed, your identity as a wizard must now be confirmed. Please look at the camera directly and remain very still as the scanning takes place … The scan has now been completed. Your identity as one of our brethren has now been confirmed.” It’s actually kind of adorable.
That offbeat charm ends up giving the whole experience an exuberance that blunts its rougher edges. Perhaps that’s par for a homebrewer’s passion project! We get plenty of cute details, like ASCII graphics for doors and books, including one sequence where we have a keypad that actually displays the numbers we type into it, as well as many items being ACME devices. It can be easy to get frustrated with Somewhere, Somewhen, but it’s hard not to forgive its wobbly weirdness when it is delivered with such sincerity and with an admirable amount of polish. The joy of the homebrewer who builds and builds is to take the player by the hand, lead them through their project’s winding corridors and lavish follies, lead them right into its heart beating with the devotion and affection that kept them going through months of grind, then turn around, smile, and simply share somewhere, somewhen.
“Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I think one of the reasons people are so nostalgic about 70s/80s text adventures is just how inexplicable they were. Alluring magic of the poorly lit room deep in the recesses of a university far from your hometown, where glowing terminals, buzzing and beeping, linked to impossibly complex networks of wires, built into a Stongehenge metallic, promise the intrepid student a strange array of secrets, some of which you surreptitiously at 1am log in to play, files mysteriously apparating from the nonnet, from who knows where, written by who knows who. As you play the game, you’re forced to surrender your normal common logic, your usual language, instead communicating with a dense and rigorous system of life and death, where success lies tantalizing behind obtuse, opaque inference matrices…
Entrancement of the inexplicable beguiles us through this strange, spartan affair. Based off Marko Kloos’ Frontline military scifi novels, which appear to have a reputation for being light on plot but heavy on events, Return to the Stars offers a no nonsense prison escape “puzzlefest”. I use quotes here, because you’re not solving puzzles per se, rather the game experience mostly comes from trying to figure out what set of commands propels you forward through the rather compact gamespace. It’s exploratory, even sometimes gently so. Like for example here’s a puzzle: you’re in the control room, and you need to find a keycard for later in the game. The main scenery in the room is a control panel: “The walls are plastered with screens showing video feeds from throughout the facility.” That sounds like a wall-mounted display above a panel featuring a few dials, right? Well, it’s not, it’s a desk, and you need to look under it, which rewards you with the keycard. This puzzle asks you to look at your surroundings, and most of the puzzling comes from the fact that it’s described in a way that might prove confusing. Here’s another puzzle: you’re presented with several switches with alien labels. You might think you need to pull them and then explore to see what they do, right? Well actually you just need to go to a storage room, get your armor, then return, because apparently your armor translates the alien language. (How does that work you ask in vain, imagining perhaps a slight buzzing in your sternum as you suddenly just know what gthyunibekzuut means.) If you flip the switches without knowing what they do, you get no result, but as soon as you can read them, now they have an effect. Again, you’re not trying to figure anything out, you’re just exploring a space and seeing how it changes as you acquire more items. These aren’t really puzzles so much as they are progress gates. While in theory such a system could work well for a military thriller, where you’re trying to catapult yourself through a series of rooms at high speed, tension always building, there’s not really any tension here: the prison is mostly abandoned, you’re exploring at your leisure, the only time you encounter the aliens is near the end, where you engage in a brief shootout, then you’re right back into exploration.
That exploration is where most of the puzzly nature of the game comes into play, as the pathways in this game are complex and disorienting, though not necessarily for any hypergeometry alien lore reasons, but simply because of the mercurial construction of the gamespace. You climb into a pair of vents, crawl into an installation room, where you climb a ladder into a control room, but then you go south along a corridor and end up right outside where you started? And if you want to turn back to the control room you just left, rather than going north like you’d expect, you actually have to go west. Then, when you manage to get out of the prison block, you’re in a place where, besides a few buildings, “You are otherwise surrounded by water,” though when you examine the water, “You can’t see any such thing.” So you go down towards the water, where “A small dock extends into the water, away from the rocky shoreline. The shore, populated with buildings, lies a few hundred meters to the north.” But when you examine the shore, “You can’t see any such thing.” Confusing! But perhaps we’re meant to understand that the shoreline is a C shape, and we’re swimming from tip to tip of the C? But then why plunge into the dark alien sea? Like I think I prefer a stroll along the beach to fending off whatever may lurk beneath the surface? But no, you dive into the water, then walk through the darkness north for several turns, then voila, you’re now on a different part of the island. Shall you realize that you forgot the keycard in the prison block and need to return, then you can climb the cliffs to get back to where you started? I suppose that’s what you get when you employ Escher and Moebius Architects to build your prison.
You might think from these points that the game is frustrating or dense, but actually it’s rather laidback and genial. The plot consists mostly of your objective. At the beginning you’re told “it has been three days since your captors last fed you – or given you any attention, really. If you are to leave this planet alive, you better find a way before you starve…” So you get the sense that maybe something has gone wrong, and the base has been rapidly abandoned? That sense builds as you wander around more and more of the area and find no one. But then there are aliens, just like, there, in a room. So you’re not supposed to worry about where the aliens are, don’t even worry where your comrades are, don’t think, soldier, just move. Indeed, a slightly garrulous military mood is perhaps the connective tissue the game presents: our primary flash of character is an offhand comment that “In all your years of military service, you’ve never felt a desire to move up into the officer ranks yourself, even though there were plenty of open spots in the newly-unified military.)” So I suppose our protagonist possesses a master sergeant mentality. But you’re not meant to suppose that, the game mostly shrugs off every question it raises, who’s paying you to think, give me some PT soldier, hup two three four! Again this game stresses a certain tension and forward momentum, there’s even an oxygen limit and a timer which decrease ominously on your status line, even if perhaps you’re not immediately threatened or compelled to make progress.
The gunmetal gray aesthetic extends to the prose, which gives us the thousand yard stare on its finale: after finally commandeering a ship and making your daring prison escape from this alien planet, our master sergeant stays focused: “You push your doubts aside and follow the pointers provided by you armor’s computer system. Half an hour later, you have safely left the atmosphere and have settled into a stable low orbit.” Shortly thereafter, we get our victorious denouement as we at last return to Earth: “Despite the prospect of hours upon hours of debriefings from all levels of command, and probably military intelligence as well, you are glad to be back.” Epictetus would be proud.
I have to admit that, rather than being put off by all this head scratching uncertainty and flatness, I actually found it sort of endearing. That’s especially the case because the game was clearly built with love and care: we get an author’s note describing how they’ve dreamed of making this game for several years. We get some lovely little details, for instance if you destroy the camera in your cell, then when you examine the control panel, your action is remembered: “One feed is missing – presumably yours, considering that you broke the camera in your cell.” Several synonyms and alternate constructions are smoothly implemented, and the parser does point you towards the constructions it wants on several occasions, so I never felt like I struggled with the parser. The hint system is really excellent, with four to eight hints per puzzle all arranged neatly in a menu. Welcker wants us to enjoy our jaunt through this tautly crafted military escapade, and who am I not to oblige? Like the IF aficionado of the 80s, holding a diskette mailed from across the world, seeing text appear on my screen, living suddenly in a computerized world where simple sentences are enough to energize my imagination, I cannot but find myself entranced by the inexplicable…
“They’re a funny lot over in those parts. Superstitious. Someone’s hiding something; don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes.” The English countryside, where something always seems to be lurking. Wander far enough afield and you find wicker men burning. The thin facade of modernity breaks down as the first “roundbarrow” emerges from the South Downs mist, the lands become primeval, its inhabitants tied to the earth in mercurial rhythms you have never learned in your airy palaces of dissociative steel. You encounter these worlds as did the first Romans, from whom the outlandish stories of wicker men are derived. You are an outlander; in these people, who were sufficient without your existence, who intend to remain so, you encounter your presence as a stranger thing.
It can be easy, of course, for us to act like the Romans, or those descended from the third Troy, and fear the other, be convinced of their attachment to the past as a malevolence towards the present, as many of these stories do, from The Wicker Man to Hot Fuzz, yet Merriner, with vulpine cunning, twists the story into something more thoughtful, less judgmental. First, Arthur internalizes this disjunction rather than phobically externalize it: we see him entering the village with the sneer of modernity: “He drove through, enjoying the gawping of the villagers (whom he assumed, rather condescendingly, weren’t used to seeing such a fashionable motor vehicle)”, yet over the course of the game his self satisfied bleeding edginess must be worn down, through the encounter with the supernatural inexplicable to his certainties, to realize how much he doesn’t know, how much he needs to learn from the locals. Tellingly, it’s this very point of arrogance, his pride in his car, that receives a due comeuppance: Arthur needs to travel around by bicycle, but it’s slightly busted, so he has to sheepishly ask the groundskeeper to do a trivial repair for him. It becomes rather apparent that Arthur, rather than parading hotshot hauteur to the awe of the locals, is a bit of a bumbler, with his desperate attempt to meld in with the locals in the pub proving sufficiently disastrous to dredge up your own suppressed memories of extreme social maladroitness. If Arthur wants to succeed on his quest, he must first surrender his superiority, seek humbly the wisdoms he has lost. Second, rather than the English officer of the law coming into town to suppress anything that cavorts a bit too Celtic, we get a story of a vicar whose new age appropriations have caused havoc, forcing Arthur to work with a local folk healer to reset the spells of old. This story is a celebration of traditions and cultures in a world beset by the whirlwinds of modernization, and we come to appreciate the elaborate histories which help Haelstowne cohere.
Haelstowne, both Nether and Old, the villages in which the vicarage resides, are patchworks of time, redolent with the scars and marks of eras that have swept through this place in the centuries it has through plague, famine, and war persisted. The vicarage, like the pub, like the church, like every building still mustering the courage to stand, contains the bones of predecessors: “The dining room was a scarred remnant of the oldest vicarage, variously modified, maltreated and improved by succesive [sic] owners over the centuries.” In even the most incidental details, the past suddenly rears up and looms over us, as when we’re told the kitchen table is “a heavily scarred tombstone-thick slab of oak.” The kitchen table is, in its own way, the grave of an old way.
If the small details remind us of the whole they once constituted, then the largest structures find themselves divided, a mosaic of moments of making and breaking. The pub is almost a bulwark against the temporal waves that batter it: “The Myrour, like many a village inn, had dug in its heels and refused to budge when each new century threatened to drag it forward in the name of progress. Consequently, the interior had changed little since the 1600s.” The church retains its pride of lineage though it lies scarred and vulnerable, with high and late medieval woodwork and pews and early modern graves and Puritan effacements and some Victorian shutters and a noticeboard with the stories of a life still ongoing. Even the names, St Wilfrid’s, a saint venerated for converting Sussex to Christianity, at Haelstowne, which derives from Aelfstow, or elf-place, point to histories which still hang over this place, which play out in the present with a vicar embroiled with the Faery Queen.
The 1920s setting gives this temporal tension a heightened relevancy. We’re in a period where people are, after the twentieth century’s first great crisis of transformation, trying to blink their way back into an Edwardian mode that just doesn’t fit anymore. The culture feels like it doesn’t know how to either move forward or backward. Merriner’s writing helps sell this disjunction with evocative dialogue and a careful recognition of the social tensions of the period, especially deft in the deployment of a lively juxtaposition of characters. We see the confliction appear in Edna, our surly housekeeper who seems to resent us more with each day our irruption fails to dissolve, trying to impose herself as a chaperone on our seance with Ottoline, whom we meet as such: “A tall, striking woman with rather sharp features and dark hair wrapped up in a silk turban. She wore pantaloons and a jacket and blouse in a style that Arthur, having little experience of such things, assumed was rather fashionable.” We also get a veterinarian who has both country pragmatism (she’s got a gun cabinet) and modern flair (she rides a motorbike, and indeed her derring-do rather reminds me of George Mallory riding a motorcycle up Snowdonia), with a long history in the region (her ancestors are the Molyneux). This attempt at keeping up foiled by a historical pace that defies keeping up fills this game with nuance that makes its setting feel crucial and considered: a line like “a rather grand shopfront in that distinctively showy turn of the century style that now, three decades later, seemed rather passe” seems especially poignant given the period.
That enchantment with the processes of time creates an interesting parallel with two of the more intriguing puzzles: developing photos and casting a spell. Both puzzles are veritable immersions in the rhythms of the past, forcing us to look around ourselves with new eyes. We find a late Victorian or Edwardian camera, and we find two sets of instructions, and we have to literally follow the book to carefully step by step take a photo, develop it, and print it. This is a game that wants you to wind the camera, to unspool the film, to immerse it in fixer, to wash it, to hang it to dry, to press a negative to print it. Whereas most games might handwave the process of taking a picture, here you are reminded of what taking a picture is like, what it means, how it used to be a complex intention, nearly a mystical ritual intended to capture the sun. Merriner emphasizes the magical undertone of early photography with a catching line: “Nothing was visibly different but the air felt suddenly charged, the shadows cast by the wavering candle flame seemed vividly alive and Arthur had a strong sense of presence. Something caught his eye: a movement, it seemed within the very surface of the film strip itself. Impossible.” A photograph is a tool intended to capture presence, that impossible elusion, and Arthur marvels at the spell he’s cast, one as profound and arcane as capturing gossip in a bottle. If the first chapter forces us to encounter the magic of technology as a physical immersion in the impossible, the last chapter allows us to revel in how that physicality leaves us more grounded and human, with Arthur having to pull together the ingredients and the energies of the world around him to meticulously step by step brew a potion and cast a spell. Thus, the game is bookended with two intricate enmeshments with the natural world, one Victorian, one early modern but rooted in the ancient, both of which require our protagonist to learn from books the secret rites of a magic past.
The game’s obsession with the tactile allows us to viscerally inhabit a space that, with its openworld and somewhat modular design, invites us to slow down, notice the little things, seek out what’s hidden just beneath the surface, if only we will care about it, if only we can see the stories interwoven with the land. I wish the game was a bit more thorough in describing its incidental scenery, since I think that would have played well into its strengths and themes. It seems a little disjointed for a game that wants you to examine the little things, like the ivy or the shrubs, usually responds to examinations of even quite significant scenery details with an “Arthur saw nothing particular noteworthy” message. This makes the experience very gamey, with you not trying to experience the space, but instead merely pixelhunting for items. I was shocked, for instance, when I needed to examine a church which was listed only as a directional heading, whereas in a different game that’s exactly the sort of meandering action I might have done.
A similar issue that prevents the exploration and puzzlesolving from feeling fully grounded is how wobbly the systems are. Often the parser is, where not finicky, persnickety. The game tries to get you to adopt a formalized logic particular to this game, where for instance you might drop an item instead of using it, which is fine enough, except that again it undercuts itself by sometimes forgoing its own logic. One puzzle, which is clever on paper, falters in practice: you need to put a chair under a doorknob to prevent Edna from interrupting your seance, but solving it necessitates the use of precisely the kind of complex command construction (WEDGE CHAIR UNDER DOOR HANDLE) that we’ve been discouraged from using in similar puzzles, like ascending the recess to open the window. Similarly, for the whole game we’ve been instructed to POUR [liquid] INTO [container], yet when you need to empty the witch’s bottle in the sink, you need to EMPTY WITCH’S BOTTLE, which was frustrating. Some other concerns, like custom verbs that could really have used some more synonyms or some more forceful cluing (one tries many constructions before managing to GOUGE PLASTER or PRISE FRAGMENT or STANCH WOUND), contribute to a constant sense of uneasiness, like visiting your aunt who has wrapped her sofa in plastic and who insists on meticulous tea decorum: no matter how lively or lovely the conversation, you’re never allowed to become comfortable and enjoy yourself. I wasn’t surprised when, struggling with the spell, I suddenly realized that instead of trying to stir the brew counterclockwise, I really ought to be stirring the brew widdershins. What a faux pas! Such a mishap falls straight from the pages of Henry James!
Moreover, the game stutters several times with bugs (or at least pseudobugs) that emphasize the wonkiness of the parser. During the development of the photographs, I once got a false positive on hanging the negatives, and so I was confused as to why I had suddenly been gated from progress; many thanks to the patience of Mike Russo, who guided me through several muddles. Some of the bugs are quite silly however, as when I TOOK ALL at the village pub and got Jarbell and Customers. Who says Arthur can’t make friends? Except then I took Jarbell down into the pub cellar, only for him to merrily reset the keg I was holding, which held my completed brew. So I got locked into a state that would have required tedious replaying, and might even prove unwinnable, had I not immediately reloaded a save. So um, that’s the last time I’m putting you in my pocket, Mr Jarbell! Load of good you’ve done me, and after the turn I’ve done you, rescuing Ash!
Despite some annoyances, you’re pulled through the game by the clear and compelling writing, which seems descendant from Charles Williams, with its fanciful thriller thrust modulated by a wry and dry English manner. Faeries of Haelstowne can be quite witty, with evocative characters unflinchingly hitting the right notes, some of which really sing, as in these two exchanges: first, between Ottoline and Arthur: ““Anyway,” she continued, “the fact is, I fell in love.” / Arthur began reflexively to say “I’m sorry” but managed to stop himself by sipping tea.”; second, between Peldash and Ottoline: ““So I … learned the rites both of summoning, and of banishing – for I was not so reckless as to take no precautions at all. Then I went to the wood and performed the ceremony.” / “And then,” said Ottoline, “all hell broke loose?” / “Ahem. Quite.” Peldash looked apologetic.” Merriner has a humor that, while never stepping out uninvited from the evocation of era, nevertheless runs through the game, occasionally with a mischievous panache, as when we examine the shovel: “It knew its place in life and desired to nothing greater.”
While the game lacks Williams’ supernatural flights of intensity, Merriner does supply us with a clarity and efficiency that makes its dramatic setpieces sparkle like clean brook water, as in these two stormy passages which further emphasize the parallel between the photography magic and the spell magic: first, after successfully developing the photos: “Arthur felt a sudden violent change in the atmosphere, like air rushing in to fill a vacuum. Whatever invisible bubble it was that had sealed off The Vicarage from the outside world shattered, the sense of neutrality and calm evaporated, and the air was suddenly prickling and alive with things unseen. Arthur looked at the images on the contact sheet and saw things moving, impossibly but undeniably, beneath the photographic emulsion. He felt the dead hand of terror close around his heart, every hair stood upright and for a few moment [sic] he remained rooted to the spot. And then, thankfully, the fear abated, the charge in the atmosphere faded and the pressure lessened as though an equilibrium had been reached.”; second, after successfully casting the spell in the grove: “Above the roar of the wind, he heard a tumult of voices, high and inhuman, shrieking in fear and rage and growing ever closer as though drawn against their will. From between the trees came faeries, kicking and screaming, clinging on wherever they could to try and resist the invisible force pulling them towards the grove. Arthur cried out in terror as the first of them appeared, hurtling towards him before being sucked into the keg; presently, the grove was filled with hundreds of faeries, rushing onwards to meet the same feet. The wind grew yet stronger, the tortured cries louder as the faeries were drawn back into their own world. Arthur could stand it no longer; he closed his eyes and clapped his hands over his ears, praying that it would stop. And abruptly, it did.” Both scenes employ a strange vacuum effect with clinical precision, with the writerly eye unfolding its theatrics with a studied organization. One would not be surprised to hear that Merriner has had experience as a technical writer, that logicality of progression and smoothness of development reigns the aspect for most of the largely “correct” writing.
That writing carries us along on our deepening mystery into a world replete with mystery and magic, with answers that cohere nicely with the wider contours of the work. I especially enjoyed the climax, where the Faery Queen (about whom Peldash warns me needlessly, having shared with Woolf the self destructive tendency to read it) rides anew into the restored medieval village, time threatening to rip this place asunder forever. The game thrums its engine into final gear for a racing finale, with us desperately dueling the Faery Queen, rescuing ourselves from the fate foretold in the tapestries of transformations into wild beasts (Peldash was briefly turned into a newt, but I am pleased to inform you he got better). We unleash our final foray of ancient magic, and out comes the healer of old, Richard Travais, who undoes the vicar’s meddling and reforces the wards, sealing the faeries afresh. We have learned the ways of the wold, and in so doing, have learned how to stray from the world’s gauntlet savage. In an epilogue, Arthur returns to the town in the 1940s, where the roads, which once “would have resounded with the ring of horses’ hooves, the rumble of carriage wheels and the voices of those travelling on foot” are now pockmarked with pillboxes and hedged with garages, and yet “how little changed this part of the country seemed.” Like with every age to have come and gone before, Haelstowne holds on, secure in its ways, rich with its secrets, ever yet the home of “the immortal Crackers, still perched within his iron cage.”
In its carefulness, patience, and roundedness, Faeries of Haelstowne achieves with dashing faculty a compelling conceit of interactive fiction: that we can, if we can just immerse ourselves in a place, come to understand it, live through it, make sense of the strangeness that surrounds us. A game of ambition written in the nostalgic Adventuron system, Faeries of Haelstowne leans towards the past, teaches us to cherish its hidden enigmas and specificities, yet with a clear eye towards the future, how we might yet innovate new ways of knowing, new gifts to bestow upon the altar of the cathedrals of time.
Daddy’s Birthday is a pleasant and adorable collaboration between a girl and her father, written to celebrate the eponymous Daddy’s Birthday. You can play through the original story as written by Ruth, but it leads to an UNSUCCESSFUL BIRTHDAY, so you’re encouraged to try again and ascertain where exactly you went wrong and how you can help Daddy avoid his tragic fate.
Our author, who quite possibly has a bright future ahead of her in the medical profession, helpfully clarifies the problem with Daddy’s birthday experience: when he falls from the rocking chair, we’re instructed to DIAGNOSE the problem, consider the symptoms (his head hurts), then issue a prescription (he should put some ice on it). Daddy’s also given some keen advice: in the future, try not to rock in your chair, you’re apparently not very good at it.
Another problem that must be overcome is that Daddy doesn’t seem to be the life of the party, as when his daughters surprise him with a birthday celebration, his first instinct is to WAIT and then SIT ON DECKCHAIR. Poor daughters! Perhaps a good present idea for next year is to get Daddy some coffee. (Speaking of the deckchair, we get a slight issue here, in that the walkthrough doesn’t quite line up with the required play pattern: you need to examine the cake first before Mummy brings in the deckchairs for everyone to sit on.) He also forgets to say thank you to his family after they give him his present! Maybe he really has hurt his head!
The one place I really sympathized with our tragic hero is when Daddy attempted, like Orestes fleeing the Furies, to escape the cruelty of his punishment ineluctable, only to be ever tormented by whispery impulses reminding him that “The urge to rock on the deckchair returns…” No matter how far Daddy fled, even unto the precipice of Mummy’s Bedroom, whoops I mean the Big Bedroom, still he yearned for the solace of finality, for he knew no matter how far he roamed his house wild and confused, still “That urge to rock on the deckchair just won’t go away…” At last, broken before the intractable demand, as even his daughters turned against him and suggested “Daddy, why don’t you sit on the deckchair?”, Daddy decided that you just can’t have your cake and eat it too, that with every gift must come a price, that this tie about his neck, much like the albatross of old, hung upon his neck as the symbol of his struggle, thus in despair he attempted to illustrate his conundrum by cutting a slice of the cake and leaving it uneaten as he surrendered to his deckchair doom, a parable by which his family might perhaps learn from his mistakes, but, the moment the cake was sliced, as if by some strange miracle, deus ex machina, everyone gathered around and ate cake and had a SUCCESSFUL BIRTHDAY. So all’s well that end’s well!
As does this game, which glitters with creativity and humor (such as when we find a banner that reads “Happy Birthday Daddy, 21+ today!”), and I’m sure the opportunity for father and daughter to work together and build on each other’s ideas to bring to life such a lovely and thoughtful game is the best birthday present of all.
A commonality between the successes of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and Minecraft is that many of us, scattered across continents in thronging cities with a throbbing consciousness bleeding anxieties and responsibilities, desperately long for that quiet industriousness of the countryside, its serene solitude, that silent immersion in nature where simply being seems enough, where all our emotions and thoughts meld into a landscape teeming with its own self sufficient rhythms and vibrancies.
Snowhaven’s stripped down monochrome aesthetic produces this precise feeling, offering us several emotions that we can blend into a connection with the earth: joy, sadness, and terror. As the protagonist goes about harvesting ingredients for a stew, he reminisces about his past, his expected guest, and this tiny patch of earth where his memories reside in rivers, in trees, in boats, in graves. This isn’t just a jaunt through the woods to gather some berries, but a tour through your world, its happiness, its heartbreak. Pixelated scenes guide us through our journey as we constantly travel between seven locations, so that by the end even the player starts to recognize each little nook, what’s hidden in it, and what has happened here. Thus, the multiple playthroughs offered by Snowhaven really accentuates its charm, as we get to work on a new recipe much as the protagonist might, whirling through the seven screens about which we know every little thing, pausing only for a memory.
Unfortunately, only the first two playthroughs are available. The third playthrough, the Sinister version, is, rather evocatively, hidden behind a password, as if there is some terrible secret locked deep in the heart of the game. The game suggests that you can email the author for the code, but I don’t know, something about “email me to get into the secret Sinister part of the game” feels a bit intimidating.
This password protection for the third playthrough adds to Snowhaven’s sense of wobbliness. There’s some clunkiness when it comes to preparing ingredients; the list of commands suggests a HINT command, but it produces the result “This game doesn’t use hint.”; the help menu doesn’t list basically any of the necessary verbs besides the very basics, which seemed like the purpose of the menu; occasionally the game would double back on itself strangely, such as “You take a few carrots out of your store of frozen vegetables. You can’t do that.”, or telling me that “You can’t leave the cabin without soap” while moving me out of my cabin; and, speaking of soap, you’re given a brief quest to find some, so I went searching through the map to figure out where I could acquire soap, like maybe I can use the pine wood producing a good smell or get some mint maybe or even get some animal fat or whatever, only to realize I’m supposed to just type “find soap” in the cabin, which seems a bit like typing “solve puzzle.”
Despite these issues, the game has a charm that delicately threads the needle between its muted aesthetic and its emotive core. The writing helps with this, as each memory seems gently remembered, we get a soft black and white photo feeling of these experiences, and yet, just as the game threatens to be a little blurry and saccharine, it goes for the throat:
“You wish you had buried your wife in perfect condition, so you could imagine her eternally resting as the beautiful woman she was. But it took you days to find her body on the river bank. You have so many questions about those days that can never be answered. You can only hope she is resting peacefully.”
Snowhaven thus tries to capture the ambiguity of nature: we get nature as peaceful and beautiful, wandering through the forest with our dog to harvest some mint, but we also get nature as brutal and survivalistic, with you having to distract a bear so that you can hunt some rabbits, decapitate them, skin them, gut them, and cut them up. Likewise, the characters, without ever needing to speak, are filled with stories that seem to overtake them at every turn. The result of this Janusian uncertainty is that Snowhaven alternates between light and shadow like lying beneath a maple tree as the late autumn light dapples through the leaves.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are eaten by a grue, it seems, in the latest work by Robin Johnson, the author of Dectectiveland (2016), and, it should be noted, Hamlet – The Text Adventure (2003). A homebrewer with a ludic retro edge, Johnson gives us Gruesome, a riposte to Zorkian (and Adventurian and Wumpusian) tropes. In Zork, you are a chaotic plunderer with a wit keen enough to manipulate everything around you until you master the dungeon, though in a sense (literally at the end of Zork) replicating the dungeon as master, becoming its very spirit. No wonder so many Zork players set about creating their own copies! Johnson undermines this acquisitive mania for control by showing that our prospective masters-to-be don’t understand the dungeon (our twisty little passages all alike are actually “a network of sensibly designed access tunnels, all easily navigable.”), don’t respect its inhabitants (our concern that we are likely to be eaten by a grue is countered with a message that appears when the player does try to eat an adventurer: “Please do not perpetuate harmful stereotypes about grues.”), and aren’t adapted to its terrain (the power which the grue uses to outflank and outwit the adventurers is that its eyes are adapted to the darkness and theirs are not). Thus, Gruesome invites us to reverse the perspective on Zork entirely, where a grue, rather than an obstacle programmed as an ad hoc retcon for an implementation issue, is actually the being that facilitates the adventurers’ progression and ensures their safety whilst they roam the dungeon they’re seeking to rob and rule.
The gameplay reasserts this opposition by being all about actively protecting the adventurers from themselves and each other. You optimize a path around the maze to ensure that you are always one step ahead of the adventurers as they haphazardly career towards mutual destruction. One is reminded of the soothing effect of conspiracies, which assure us that someone in the shadows is guiding everything, that we’re not all just bumbling aimlessly towards our collective demise. This heroic grue who challenges its representation and who challenges the representations of the adventurers begs the question: can you make a postcolonial Zork? Gruesome feels kind of like Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King’s subversive inversion of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.
However, despite the highminded themes, for the most part Gruesome is content to play out its concept in silly and lighthearted referential wink winks. The game is packed with references to both 70s/80s text adventures but also a TAKE ALL of nerdy pop culture from yesteryear. Thus, Gruesome’s tone is only sometimes Zork reinvestigated, with the rest of it being broad strokes silliness regarding received narratives, a la Monty Python’s films. For instance, we’re given an orc “wearing a T-shirt that reads “Green & Nerdy” and playing with miniature figures on a game board”, so we get a Weird Al fan playing Dungeons & Dragons, except of course the fantasy dungeon for the people living in the fantasy dungeon is Bosses & Bureaucrats. This inversion between the fantasy and the mundane operates in so much of Gruesome’s logic, yet often the game adopts an eager to please persona that’s ready to whirlwind you through cleverly reimaginative puzzles, so you’re only occasionally asked to do anything other than be amused at how silly this all is. I do think some of the really flippantly gamey elements undermine what Gruesome creates, as when the orc, after you beat her minigame, simply says “Take anything you want as a token of my gratitude.” Great, well I solved The Puzzle NPC, I’ll be taking all your treasure, thanks so much, ta! Isn’t this just Zork again?
Despite its cheery countenance, Gruesome delights in its dizziness, with gameplay that sometimes feels like herding sheep through Omaha Beach. Because the game is time sensitive and wants you to perform things in a specific pattern, I wish Gruesome had provided a bit more feedback about when you had done something worthwhile, especially signalling when waiting for something is worthwhile so that you don’t feel compelled to run off to do something else while a sword charges. Although technically your score ticks up when you Do Things, it doesn’t draw your attention to each addition, and the score in IF is never a particularly reliable marker of progression. An early example: I found the barbarian in the room with the lamp and gave it to him and was immediately beset with several questions. Was I now in an unwinnable state? Had I solved a puzzle? Was my action a completely arbitrary red herring? Surely there’s a more optimizable pattern to discover than just going to a room and applying the noun to the noun? I know this ambiguity thrills other players, but for me it just produces an anxiety that I’m missing something, especially in a game that advertises itself as both nonlinear and requiring replays (hyperventilating my way through flashbacks of Curses!). One thing that confused me when I looked at the walkthrough was that apparently we’re not intended to engage with the knight in our first encounter, despite the fact that we discover him one room south of the dragon, and his description references him being eaten by a dragon. I thought I was like on the dinging edge of the clockwork encountering him there and was bemused as to how I ought to save him from seemingly imminent demise. I’m not entirely sure when or why or how the adventurers move and die, in part because it appears certain elements are randomized.
That randomization speaks to Gruesome’s prevailing sense of mystery. The dungeon you wander feels so simulated and intricate and interconnected that you’re constantly drawn to the unknown factors, a player is stimulated with a constant sense of more lurking behind every object they find. I don’t know how much is actually implemented, but every base interaction feels like it hides several layers of intricacies beneath it. Sometimes you’re waiting for turns on end as the musicbox cranks around you, wondering, what am I missing, what should I be waiting for, what happens when this all perfectly aligns? This is a complex game with a lot of moving parts and a sense of both anxiety and serendipity: in that way, perhaps, for all its Zorkian and Adventurian and Wumpusian flair, it’s most saliently a scion of The Hobbit. Thus, whichever your old school roots, you’re sure to have a topsy turvy romp through nostalgia in the misty yet strangely sweet Gruesome.
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