Nova Heart or Don’t Be Standing Around While the Earth Dies Screaming, or: Who Is To Blame When the Owls Leave Candy Jail?

A bit of background: for Shufflecomp, prospective authors submitted a list of songs, which the organizer shuffled and sent back out. Authors were then to write a game inspired by (at least) one of the songs they were assigned (details). Nova Heart is inspired by seven songs.

I found Nova Heart's story to have a disjointed feel. There are sudden transitions and shifts in perspective, and the whole thing is rather bizarre. Intentionally, I assume.

Interesting language and vivid imagery are Nova Heart's strongest points.

You are in a woman's clean white utopic apartment, one hundred floors above the city.

The wailing sirens of the deathpaddywagons are drawing closer. You have to run.

Run now.

I admit I played this game because of the silly title, but I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I read all the reviews I could find first, and it's sort of interesting to see how people rate such a weird edge case of interactive fiction. Reviewers lamented the lack of depth in the interpreter, the illusion of choice, or the relative simplicity of the player's interaction. Despite this, some people don't seem to have finished it properly. And yes, it's short, but for a joke to work, it's crucial that it not overstay its welcome.

None of that seems relevant to me. A game that is MORE interactive is not automatically better than a game that is less. A game that wastes a robust interpreter is not as good as a game that makes perfect use of a spartan one. It seems like the author set out to write something absurdist and funny, and I found it delivered both very well. The tone of the parody, incredibly self-serious pastiche did it for me, and the way the game clued you in to the correct solutions to its admittedly simple puzzles worked, and made fun of genre conventions at the same time.