Spring Gothic

This game is an exploration of long distance relationships in the modern age. The art is excellent, the writing thought-provoking, and the music moving. Everyone involved with the making of Spring Gothic was really pulling their weight.
 
I very much appreciated the game's depiction of neurodivergence (it's heavily implied (Spoiler - click to show)at least one of the main characters is autistic, although likely doesn't realize it herself yet). The way the story didn't shy away from showing some of the uglier sides of its characters—even as this related to neurodivergence—was refreshing. Nica and Chun are not idealized and sanitized romance protagonists. These are real people, flawed and compelling.
 
Their pasts, ideas, and desires are handled thoughtfully, their travels though London grounded in real locations depicted through photographs, their inner monologues filtered through past experiences and formative books, authors, and artists that influenced them as they grew into understanding themselves as queer women. (Frankly, the frequent name-dropping of books, queer theorists, and movies was one of my favorite parts—I've added several to my to read/watch lists.)

My one complaint was (Spoiler - click to show)the speed at which the relationship seemed to reach repair after the argument felt awfully rushed. Maybe that abruptness was the point, and the sudden jump to more or less "back to normal" when Nica returned home was part of continuing relationship dysfunction, but I couldn't quite parse if this was the intended reading. Whatever the case, it wasn't enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of what is a truly remarkable and layered game. I know I'll be thinking about it and its characters for a long time. 

This game will appeal to people who want a specific kind of linear visual novel. It has no puzzles and no choices that affect the narrative. Actually, no choices at all, as far as I can tell.

So it's closer to a linear short story than you might expect from interactive fiction, but it makes good use of the "interactive" part: there's graphics, music and sound, and each line of text is carefully paced to maintain interest. Screen transitions and sound are managed effectively to enhance the mood, e.g. the background goes dark when a character retreats into her own inner thoughts, so you get a black screen with nothing but one hard-hitting line of text that makes you sit back and say, "Dang." Happened a few times.

The overall effect is cinematic, and the third act switches up the format entirely, in a way that works very well in context.

Also, the graphics are cool. The two main characters, Chun and Nica, have fun sprite art with dynamic expressions that change based on what's happening in the story. Plus, and this is key, the photo backgrounds seem to feature the real places the main characters are traveling to.

Someone on the Itch.io page said they were "blown away by how enamoured the game is with reality". The photo backgrounds are one great example. This story is firmly rooted in the real world. It isn't shy to discuss politics or our current reality; in the opening, Nica, who's trans, says "The new US president hates people like me". Meanwhile, Chun (Spoiler - click to show)is originally from Hong Kong, but her family moved to the UK because she participated in the 2019 protests against the Chinese government and they were afraid for her safety.

The characters bring up books that actually exist (e.g. Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney), movies that actually exist (e.g. Nica and Chun watch Letters from the Big Man (2011) together, a scene that taught me about a movie I've never seen), and people who actually exist (e.g. lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall). It was immersive. I felt I was there with the characters, walking through London with them, watching them navigate their relationship together.

London is of interest to me, being the "capital of a decaying empire" and all, as the game says. Regretfully, I think Britain has pizzazz and can't make myself get over it. But the relationship is what really takes center stage here. This is less a story about London and more a story about the main characters as a couple.

The relationship was very well done. I find a lot of fictional relationships too perfect for my tastes. I'm more familiar with the part of a relationship where you're constantly second-guessing yourself, wondering if you actually like the other person or not, wondering if you're doing the right thing, than the idealized final stage where you're supposed to love and trust each other. Even with someone you've known for a long time, there's always a degree of uncertainty over how much fun you're having together, and it's something you have to constantly be aware of and ready to respond to if the answer if "not much". At least, that's how I feel.

This story got at that experience. The things Chun and Nica do are things I've done, and they felt intimately familiar. Not just the part where they're watching movies or traveling together, but the constant anxiety layered on top of that, worrying about how much intimacy the other person wants and whether that move was one step too far, did you ruin things, are you really having fun, do you really want this relationship, what kind of relationship do you want in general, and what will your life look like if you can't handle one? Will you be alone forever?

The effect is simultaneously cozy and ridiculously stressful. I had a tiny box of mints nearby and ended up eating about half of them.

If I had to offer any criticism, it would be that the ending sequence (Spoiler - click to show)felt almost too harsh compared to the two's behavior when they make up afterwards. This is Your Mileage May Vary territory, but I was wondering how the relationship could ever recover at that point, and was surprised when Nica was willing to forgive Chun after what Nica had said to her earlier. This can be chalked up to personal idiosyncrasy, though, since everyone has their own personal standards for relationship issues.

In general, really liked this one. One part I especially enjoyed was towards the end, when (Spoiler - click to show)Chun and Nica can't make themselves talk face-to-face, so they go into a virtual VRChat world together and communicate through VRChat, while sitting silently in the same room. It reminded me of the way my friends and I would talk during breaks in high school, typing rapidly to each other on Skype chat while we were all sitting in the same room and completely silent in real life. Or how we'd sometimes burn time by just pulling up the laptop and scrolling through Reddit together. A lot of people disdain the online and privilege real-world interaction, but to me it seems they're just different ways to interact with people. Chun and Nica wouldn't have met if it wasn't for the Internet connecting them across thousands of miles. The real world isn't always inherently superior.

That said, everyone needs to live in the real world to some extent. I guess navigating the boundaries between online and offline is what every person needs to manage on their own, deciding what they want and how much is enough.



Story excerpt:

Melodrama is only melodrama to those who don't share the same concerns and stakes of the characters.

We have been taught to withhold our emotions, to calculate, to belittle those who make a mountain out of a molehill.

In short, we are taught to be monsters to each other.

---

Because we are monsters, I see relationships as fragile, ephemeral, always in need of repair. They are susceptible to decline when we stop being proactive about maintaining them. We fool ourselves into thinking they are small matters until it is too late.