PURE

There's a tradition in IF running through Anna Anthropy and Porpentine and carried on by others of writing body horror symbolic of the trans experience. This game is firmly and intentionally in that vein; the author explicitly says:

"Like many transgender artists, I tend to gravitate towards body horror as a reflection of my trans lived experience. For transgender players, I suspect the allegories present in PURE may resonate with personal experience."

In this parser story, you are accompanied by an heir (whom I saw as representative of wealth and power and possible romance) and two guards (who were often cruel or rough and who could represent society, police, the implied threat of violence) into a underground area of unspoken significance. You are filled with dread.

And well you should be. Like the progression of disturbing and dramatic rooms in the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, each room you go through presents you with some horror or dread, as well as symbolism. You perform symbolic acts like matching statues or solving riddles using items while simultaneously dealing with horrific bodily injuries to both you and those around you. Wording is intense and strong, but the text treats the violence in almost a holy light; this is not violence for violence's sake, but violence as a means of communicating the strength of someone's feeling.

Or, I could just be making it all up.

The game ends at a dramatic point, setting us up for part 1. It works as a standalone, though; if the author had written a few paragraphs of ending text, I would have seen this as a complete work.

There are some bugs and typos in the work, and I would definitely raise my rating if they were fixed. The errors I saw were things like default text printed after custom text (a common thing in Inform 7 when doing a 'before' rule but not putting 'instead' at the end of the last line) and typos like 'scone' for 'sconce'. There are some programming things the game does very well, like colored text, so I know the author must be good at coding.

This is a good work, and it's exactly the kind of thing that I think makes IFComp worth playing: personal, raw work that the author cares about and which tries to communicate something.

I played this one a few weeks ago now, and I’m not going to talk about the puzzles or gameplay or implementation at all, because I know other people will cover them and they aren’t what stuck with me. What I remember about this game is the sense of inevitability; you will progress, you will go onward (you don’t navigate with directional commands, just “forward”), deeper into this cave system, closer to your fate.

What is the fate that awaits you at the end, and why are you being compelled toward it? These are questions that arise early on, as I wondered why the PC, accompanied by two guards as well as someone called “the heir” who seems to be their lover, was being brought to this place with no say in the matter. There’s clearly a purpose to it, one the heir fully believes in; we don’t know what the PC thinks.

The guards start out derisive, disgusted by the PC (again for reasons unknown), but as you progress, a transformation begins. (Spoiler - click to show)You start falling apart, skin peeling away, fluids oozing out—and your companions transform too, in their attitude toward you, the guards becoming fawning and worshipful, wanting to taste your leavings, while the heir grows near-ecstatic. We’re leading up to something, to a conclusion, a revelation… except not, because the game ends before bringing any of this together; it’s another “Part 1” situation, weirdly common in this comp, but this one didn’t warn about that in the front matter, so I had no idea that it wasn’t a complete work in itself (okay, looking back at the comp page just now, there is a “Part 1: The Descent” subtitle [which here on IFDB is part of the blurb, making it even clearer], but in my defense the placement and formatting of the subtitles on that page has led my eyes to skip over them, so I hadn’t noticed it before). So while there’s certainly an interesting setup here, sadly it doesn’t go anywhere in this piece.