Unreal People

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)This Twine game was much more substantial than I expected and much less.

You play as a spirit summoned by a woman called Baba, a fortuneteller, as you are ripped from nonexistence into existence.

You have the power to hop from vessel to vessel, both non-living and living, and it gives you the opportunity to learn gossip.

And such gossip you learn! A cold princess loves a dashing, straightforward man who may hold a dark secret. A monk does not believe all she says she believes. And so on. You gather secrets like scores in games.

Eventually, you also gain the ability to make dialogue choices, allowing you to wreak havoc in others' lives.

In the end, before plot threads resolve, [spoiler]you become one with everything, and then nothing[/spoiler].

I would like to see the rest of the threads. I did recently teach a class on Hinduism for a few weeks as part of a World Religions course; I didn't know too much about Hinduism before (besides reading the Bhagavad Gita), but why don't I try to apply a superficial understanding of Hinduism to this game that may not actually be influenced by it at all?

We can see this game as a representation of the karmic cycle. Existence is suffering, and the endless cycle of new vessels and their attachments, both the good and the evil, and the happy and the bad, are not good. Only true detachment from everything allows us to exit the karmic cycle and escape the cycle of rebirth.

(My apologies for the limited understanding of Hinduism and the game).

Overall, I'm reminded of the game Riverside, which similarly starts out as a normal, promising game and then is abruptly derailed in a shocking, out of world fashion. You can peek at the walkthrough or reviews to see.

Unreal People is a vexing game that isn’t easy to come to grips with; it’s also set in “early mediaeval India”, so with Hindu deities in mind, let’s grant ourselves more than the standard duo of hands to work with.

So on the first hand, the game is a slightly-janky shaggy dog story. You play a spirit, a deva, who’s bound to serve a charlatan of a fortune-teller; you’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of both the humble and the exalted in a small kingdom, using your gifts to possess objects, animals, and eventually people in your quest for gossip. You’ve only got limited opportunities to jump from one vessel to the next, so most of your choices come down to when to stay and when to go (and if you go, who’s going to be the target of your next leap). The effect is of riding a rushing river, becoming privy to snatches of low-context conversation, brief excerpts of domestic drama, and unconnected vignettes that seem like they’re adding up to a bigger picture before the game suddenly ends because you chose the wrong branch and it instakilled you – fortunately, there’s an undo available to let you make forward progress again, but unfortunately, even if you evade all these hazards the game ultimately peters out without bringing any of its myriad plot threads into coherence or showing you the payoff for your secret-gathering.

As for the jank, there are a lot of typos – much like signage at a small business, apostrophes often appear just to mark that a word ends in an S – and the occasional sign of incomplete development, like the way that I learned that my increasing powers now allowed me to make conversational decisions on behalf of my hosts from the all-caps exhortation to “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!” Beyond these technical faults, the story’s structure is also decidedly odd; after half an hour or so of flitting around a dozen or so characters on the night of a feast, the game suddenly had me decide to contact the fortune-teller and call it a night, which started a new sequence sometime in the future with a smaller cast of partially-overlapping characters, which terminated in the above-mentioned anticlimax after about a further fifteen minutes. And but for the blurb and some of the names, I’d have had a hard time telling you where or when the game is meant to be set – admittedly, this isn’t one of my stronger areas, but things like the presence of light bulbs, and the drunkard princess’s habit of handing out high fives to passersby, undercut the verisimilitude of the milieu. And ugh, there’s AI cover-art (it’s not immediately bad, but just look at the reflections in the water and try to make sense of them).

On the second hand, I’m noticing some interesting resonances here. While I’m pretty weak on the history of the pre-Mughal subcontinent, I’ve got at least a little grounding in the contemporary religion and philosophy, so I definitely raised my eyebrows at details like the way that the spirit’s ability to possess starts with the lower orders of matter, like rocks, plants, and birds, before progressing to a cow, then to human beings in the throes of emotion or unreason, and then to calmer, more controlled people: squint and this isn’t far afield from some Hindu conceptions of how a virtuous soul can advance up the chain of being through reincarnation. Or consider that we’re not in any historical polity, but the kingdom of Chaitanya, Sanskrit for “consciousness”. More fundamentally, the way that you’re able to inhabit all the living beings (and some of the scenery) in the kingdom nods towards the Brahman-Atman belief that individual souls nondualistically partake together in the ultimate, unified reality of existence. And then the ending – well, spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)in the final sequence, you somehow possess everyone and everything at once, leading to a Mad Libs segment where you can type in dialogue for each of two characters, with the narrative voice needling you by saying this is super unsatisfying, huh? Which puts me in mind of lila, the idea that the divine unity created the world’s multifarious forms, and divided consciousness, in order to experience and enjoy itself: “god’s play”.

Well, so what? Does all this talk of unity and differentiation add up to anything? My judgment here is a qualified ……maaaaaybe. On the third hand, I’m personally fond of shaggy dog stories myself, and swerving from a tawdry story about a grasping gossip-monger to contemplation of divine mysteries is just the kind of bold move I admire. And even if the social reality of Chaitanya leaves something to be desired, there are individual memorable characters – like princess Gauri, unable to express her crush on the knight Mazboot (who, awkwardly, might be her half-brother, except by berating him, or the peasants squabbling over a stolen chicken – who together present a kaleidoscopic view of the human pageant, and allowing each of them a voice and a viewpoint is appealingly democratic.

On the fourth hand, though, it’s still the case that it sure feels like the author eventually just got bored with the story and decided to stop it, and for every entertaining bit of anachronism, there’s a clanger like Gauri saying superficial things about feudalism and post-barter economies. The quick shifts from one character to the next also meant that there were certain conflicts and storylines that I didn’t really have time or space to care about before I was on to the next one.

On the fifth hand – well, the number four is a big one in Hinduism (four primary social classes, four stages of life, four types of yoga), so let’s leave things here. Suffice to say Unreal People didn’t make me feel very much, so if that was its goal I can’t count it as very successful – but it did make me think.