Polish the Glass

Polish the Glass is a medium-length choice-based game with an unusual story. The PC’s mother can’t stop herself from (Spoiler - click to show)polishing the glass in the Bar (it’s always capitalized) down the street. This leads to a breakdown in the PC's parents’ relationship and eventually the dissolution of their marriage. However, as the PC grows up, she eventually takes a job working at the Bar, just like her mum. She finds herself drawn to the Bar, continuing to polish the glass, and slowly cutting herself off from relationships with other people, again like her mum.

There aren’t too many choices in the game. The vast majority of your clicks are to advance the text a sentence or three. At first I didn’t care much for that, but the more I read of Polish the Glass the more I came to appreciate this mechanic: It forced me to slow down and actually read every sentence. I couldn’t as easily skim the text and only carefully read the parts just before my next choice. So, even though I didn’t have many choices, the story actually did feel interactive to me - and more so than some other choice-based games I’ve played that also give you few choices but have much larger chunks of text between successive clicks.

The writing is good. It’s spare in a way that works with having to click to advance the text every couple of sentences.

I feel like the events in the game are a metaphor for something, but I can’t decide what. Here are some ideas I’ve had: (Spoiler - click to show)Alcohol addiction. Addiction in general. Aging and death. Depression. Perfectionism. Giving yourself too much to other people and having that suck the life out of you.

It might also just be a story, with nothing particularly metaphorical about it. I think it’s fair to say, though, that I feel like I didn’t really “get” Polish the Glass. For some works you’re on the author’s wavelength, and for some you’re not. Or perhaps dynamic fiction is just not my thing.

Again, though, I thought the writing was strong, and if you like dynamic fiction you may very well appreciate Polish the Glass.

This was an IFComp game that I liked quite a bit more than, it seems, many of the other IFComp reviewers did.

This is almost purely dynamic fiction, a style of interactive fiction where you mostly read a linear narrative, with different special effects adding to the atmosphere and some scattered choices. "My Father's Long Long Legs" is a classic example of the genre.

This story is about a woman whose mother tended a bar and was obsessed with 'polishing the glass'. It's a story about growing up in a broken household, coming to grips with our parents' problems, and the spiral of obsession and addiction.

There's probably a metaphor here, but it's abstract enough not to be clear on what the metaphor is, which makes this game much more effective for me.