The Pool

The storyline is a familiar one, of course. The narrator remains generic throughout, without a place on the lab team, and in fact so do the other characters. The explanations for each choice gives the narration a distinctly self-conscious air.

My overall impression was that it could use more polish. The writing feels rushed in places - as if it was trying to sketch out a scene and ran out of time. There are unfinished branches, which is a shame for a competition entry.

Without being emotionally invested in the narrator as a person, I felt no need to ensure their survival - instead finding all the branches felt like a story mapping exercise. There is definitely potential in the storyline to populate it with perhaps fewer but more realised characters to give the choices some emotional weight.

This is a short, basic Twine game about an aquarium where weird monsters are in a pool and you have to run away.

The game does give you some options; there are several situations where you have to search for items by clicking on a variety of links. There are also some big branches in the story, especially at the end. At least one final choice just lead to a blank page.

The formatting doesn't put blank lines between paragraphs, which I found pretty difficult to read. There are many typos such as no spaces after periods, it's vs its and capitalization. The dialog felt a bit unnatural, but I don't know why.

I found the overall story to be descriptive, but otherwise I think this story needed a bit more work. I think the author is capable of pretty fun stories given more time and more feedback prior to releasing.

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Another default(?) themed Twine entry, this one set on a research vessel out at sea with a crew of young oceanographers. The black/white/blue color scheme serves this game a little better than others given its horror theme, but barely so. During I think the 5th play through I did stumble on a nifty use of dynamic font, would have loved to see more of that but as far as I can tell that was a one-off.

The tone on this one was noteworthy. The protagonist is not dynamic, they either perfunctorily or begrudgingly follow the choices you make. They got some stuff they’re dealing with, and not particularly effectively. It’s an unusual choice which at first puts the protagonist at a remove from the player. This is reinforced if you try to goad them into action – things don’t really working out if you do. Heroic-feeling choices either outright fail or come with significant unforeseen drawbacks. Driving this PC is kind of like pushing jello - you can’t always get them to go the direction you want, and even when you can its never very responsive and requires more work. Fortunately, they are surrounded by much more dynamic NPCs which definitely give some welcome propulsion to the action. First play through I never did synch with the protagonist (and kind of admired the NPCs) and was left at a remove.

Construction-wise there are long linear sections of action, punctuated with choices you have no real way of assessing, meaning things can feel arbitrary. Some of them do allow you to build the character, or maybe shade them at least. Normally, this design choice frustrates me if there isn’t a thematic reason behind it. There’s two reasons why here, this actually kinda works? The first is that when the action gets furious in the third act (really there’s only two acts, so second act), making choices in a spur-of-the-moment panic probably isn’t going to result in deliberate, fully-informed decisions. This tracks. The second reason it works, and why the character choices can work, is only really revealed on subsequent playthroughs.

There seems to be a lot of plot divergence available here. Early choices take you down very different plot paths. It is a short game, but nevertheless it feels very broad. This is not a ‘plot will always reconverge, it's the friends you make on the way that change’ design. The protagonist/player alignment benefits from these multiple playthroughs. It’s not a long game, and it's a race to see if you will come around on the protagonist before the end. First play through I did not, not even close. But on subsequent playthroughs, because the plot varied SO much, you weren’t revisiting the past, it was like you got more time with them. I wouldn’t say you ever really like them, but you at least get past “would you just step up??” to some early stage of sympathy.

But the real secret that multiple playthroughs reveal is how deeply cynical and hopeless the whole thing is. First play through you might assume “well I made some bad choices, sorry dead characters.” (Spoiler - click to show)I played to 6 endings and they’re ALL bad! The ‘best’ was physical survival but very depressing and it went down from there! That’s not necessarily pleasant or enjoyable, but it is… bold. Pet Cemetery is one of my favorite Stephen King stories because it is so unremittingly tragic. There is no ‘magic book/shaman that saves the day at the climax.’ Uh, spoiler. It is a no-compromise approach to horror that dares you to appreciate it. Which I kinda do? (Someday I’ll figure out why it works for King, and fails so spectacularly in Halloween Kills. Probably because it's King, right?) I did not try to determine if there were NO (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic endings, but I do kind of hope there aren’t.

So where does that leave me? Play through wise, between the difficult protagonist, limited and arbitrary choices, mostly vanilla presentation it was Mechanical and Seamless. (Spoiler - click to show)But it gets a bonus point for committing to its bleakness across multiple endings.


Played: 11/1/22
Playtime: 30min, 6 endings.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

I’ve a couple times in my reviews done the gimmick of presenting a game by harping on its most hackneyed or weakest elements, then doing a lame rug-pull and revealing that Actually It’s Great. I’m not doing that here – The Pool is objectively not that good of a game. It’s a horror thriller that’s simultaneously underdeveloped and overbaked, with a premise (sci-fi monster aquarium research base attacked by inside-man saboteurs and also the fish monsters turn you into zombies and also some are psychic octopi or something plus you have social anxiety) that has way too many details yet makes way too little sense to hang together. It’s a default-Twine presentation, with all the typos and sloppy writing that black-and-blue color scheme often signifies. It boasts multiple branches, but they don’t work that well on their own, throwing out-of-context character betrayals and plot twists that seem to presuppose multiple replays to be coherent, let alone effective. And at every point it manages to step on its own theme, as the story ostensibly presents the protagonist learning to grow past their anxiety but in reality brutally punishes you nearly every time you step outside of your shell and trust someone else or behave the slightest bit altruistically.

But – of course there was a but coming – I enjoyed it quite a bunch, laughing at it as much as I was laughing with it but laughing all the same. For all that I take IF sufficiently seriously that I’ve written a review engaging with a game through the lens of Brechtian “epic theater”, sometimes all it takes for me to have fun is playing a dopey monster mash on Halloween, as I was lucky enough to do.

Look, this thing is ridiculous, with shifts in tone that make gold-medal slalom look like a lazy inner-tube ride down a gently winding river. One second you’re about to bash a sea-zombie with a rock but focused more on how that’s scary because it’s taking you outside your comfort zone than because you’re about to bash a sea zombie with a rock (who does have that in their comfort zone?), the next you’re facing down a terrorist who’s unleashed all this chaos because “I just wanted to escape all of this. This monotony. Don’t we all?” (protip: if your villain’s motivation could equally well apply to starting a D&D club, taking up swinging, or unleashing a seamonster apocalypse, it could probably use more time in the workshop).

There are a ton of instadeaths, too – again, many cued by doing something seemingly in-genre and innocuous like extending a moment of mercy to seemingly-beaten enemies – gorily described but so many in number, and so lightweight due to the omnipresent undo button, that I started to relate to the protagonist as though he were Wile E. Coyote, fated to be dismembered, drowned, and zombified for my amusement.

My instinct is of course to overcomplicate this, to bang on for hundreds more words unpacking why I enjoyed it despite its flaws, perhaps delve into what “so bad it’s good” really means and assess whether liking something ironically is meaningfully distinct from liking it directly. But for once I’m going to resist, save for noting that for all its warts, this is a game that moves, setting up and resolving conflicts quickly and efficiently. Due to some of the storytelling issues noted above, the transitions can sometimes be a little rough since you don’t know what all the characters’ deals are, and the worldbuilding is pretty arbitrary so what happens next can feel a little random. But once you’re in a scene, the stakes tend to be established clearly and concisely, and nothing feels belabored or like it overstays its welcome. Lots of IF – especially choice-based IF, which tends to have longer gaps between player input than parser games – can feel quite plodding so it’s nice to play a game with some zip in its step, and as the rest of the review demonstrates, good pacing can make up for a whole lot of other faults!

Bottom line, The Pool is trashy and dumb, but if it catches you in the mood for something trashy and dumb, and you don’t overthink it – for god’s sake don’t replay it to fully understand how all the strands of its plot fit together – and read it quickly so you don’t notice the typos as much… well, you still might dislike it, because it’s a rickety contraption. But you might find it scratches an itch, and catch yourself thinking “sea zombie” to yourself with a giggle for a day or so. Some games aim for more, some settle for less, but here we are.

I knew this was going to be a horror story when I started, which isn't my thing, so I was pleasantly surprised by the first bit: you have a choice to applaud or not. The lecturer notices whether or not you do. This sort of thing invariably charms me, exposing people's passive-aggressions and leaving you helpless without melodrama, and it bought a lot of good will going forward. Because The Pool does feel a bit chaotic. Part of that is the author's intent–aquatic monsters have been created at a biological research institute, and you will want to figure out why. Oh, and survive, too. It becomes pretty clear that something has gone wrong with the experiment, but it also becomes clear that your definition of "wrong" may be others' of "right." The Pool is also a bit low on polish at the micro level, but I'm impressed with the branches where you can get yourself killed.

I managed to escape, and I felt a genuine relief beyond the trivial snark of "ha ha ha I can move on to the next entry, and that's good, because I'm behind schedule for reviewing everything in IFComp anyway." I'd reached a sort of operational base for my explorations into other branches, and I was interested in not only the ways I could get killed but what they meant. The instadeaths seemed a little less insta. So the organization is impressive. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes moving parts I didn't cop to in my first forays where I did stuff, undid, and looked around. My character felt like a bit of a cipher in the process, someone who wished they could do more, and even at the end where I eventually survived after a lot of trial and error, this didn't seem to be resolved.

This is okay if you're trying to make an AFGNCAAP, but here, you sort of wonder how someone so insignificant and malleable got a job at such a place. This is compounded slightly by going too far to the other extreme with, say, "Ask XXX who would like to attack first, but secretly hope XXX says yes." This is a bit on the nose, and it's not the only one. It does feel like a lot of dialogue could be cut down, and it would've given me endurance to look through even more branches to see the full backstory. Because I'd like to.

The Pool reminded me a lot of early Choose Your Own Adventures but was a heck of a lot darker and didn't have the totally random endings that sometimes got sprinkled in, the sort that seemed like a brilliant reversal when I was twelve but seem totally unrealistic now. There's still the sense of getting shot unexpectedly or dying other ways, and these do make sense the more you explore. So there's general creepiness and intrigue here, and it certainly reminded me of people I thought were my friends, but it turned out they weren't. (Don't worry! Nobody got killed there!)

Sometimes it feels the pace is too much, and the "help bad person X" choices are too scattershot, and it even seems a bit too bland, until you realize something genuinely disturbing is happening in the background, or you get shot, calling the integrity of another character into play. This more than saves The Pool as a solid work to me, and though I recognize it's not perfect, I legitimately enjoyed it, and if parts left me confused, there were bits I was glad to patch up and realized I'd just missed.