Slated For Demolition

There was a big shift that I saw in Twine games from when I started (around 2015) to now. Those earlier Twine games were often influenced by Porpentine or furkle, and it was common to have long, surreal stories with intense, personal writing about loss, identity, or feelings with a big dash of absurd humor. There were other twine writing styles (like 16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonalds), with more of a gaming/puzzle/points focus, but the number of intense personal games was higher.

Nowadays, the Twine field has too many genres to call any dominant, but a lot of popular Twine games are puzzle-based (still accompanied by strong stories), like The Den or A Long Way to the Nearest Star.

So this game gave me some nostalgia, as it seems like it could easily have been a popular 2015 game.

There's a good chance I missed something essential in this game, so take my summary with a grain of salt.

You play as someone who has experienced some kind of loss or betrayal of a friend or romantic partner. 'You' and 'me' are different people; I think they might both be facets of the same character, or 'me' might be a demon or grief itself or the person who they lost, I'm not sure.

In three different acts, you explore an abandoned house (that is 'slated for demolition' and is also the game itself), a grocery store and an apartment building. There's a checklist of items that you can find in those, but it's not necessary to get them all and the game has fully prepared for you not to do so. It allows you to play with or without the back button, and I chose to play without it, and I also chose to choose the most self-damaging or excessive options at any point.

And there are a lot. Spaghetti has trauma associations here (and so do red slurpees), with multiple memorable scenes where you can draw out your own innards as spaghetti with continual pulling until you're hollowed out.

There is a segment near the end involving (Spoiler - click to show)suicidal ideation by someone dear to us. I couldn't tell if this was a new person or the main person we think about.

The ending prompts us to (Spoiler - click to show)consider something we regret and might need to let go. I enjoyed picking a few things in my life to contemplate on and to write down in the game, like my alma mater not accepting me back as a professor when they had intimated for years that they would do so, and the slow decline of a once-close friendship.

For me, I didn't understand the story, but I understood the feeling and feelings, or at least I experienced the emotions I read about in the game like ' this game gets it, I've felt like that before'.

The game seems like it has many different paths, but I didn't feel compelled to replay, as I feel like it fits the game's message to not go back and correct mistakes.

I went into this knowing very little about what to expect, but the short description reminded me of surreal games like Kentucky Route Zero, Signalis, and Paratopic. What I came out of it with was an experience not unlike those games but, perhaps because it's interactive fiction, more affecting and impactful than I ever could have imagined.

I won't get too much into how the game plays because other reviews have done that well. You're exploring various liminal spaces and discovering objects that have significance to the author, all while being haunted by a spaghetti demon that oozed its way out of a Slurpee machine. You're presented with choices, different paths, and a list of specific items to collect.

Possible criticisms I can think of for Slated for Demolition are that it's too sincere or too nebulous. To the first point, I would say that I think we need more sincerity these days, and to the second point, I don't think coming up with your own interpretation for a text is a bad thing. I think that's needed too. The author digs into their past enigmatically but also shines a light on the reader, leaving behind any self-indulgence and attempting (and succeeding) to make a connection through words on a screen.

It's a game about self-reflection, growing up, and forgiving yourself. It's about mental health, with the appropriate content warnings and resource links attached. It's about healing.

This is where things get spoilery. I have a lot to say about the ending, so there's a lot of spoiler-marked text ahead.

A couple of other reviewers mentioned that (Spoiler - click to show)being inserted into the game didn't work for them. Personally, I felt that (Spoiler - click to show)being reached out to in this way fit the game perfectly. The author alludes to the fact that you are indeed playing a game and you are part of the experience multiple times, so it didn't come as a shock in the end. I also feel that this piece was very much written with interplay between the writer and reader in mind, and at its core, isn't that what interactive fiction is anyway? You are often shaping the story through your choices, and you are put into situations that you must react to. There's an organic unity between author and player.

There are, of course, a lot of surreal and highly metaphorical games about trauma, and there are probably many reasons for that, but one of those, I think, is that the subject matter really lends itself to that approach. Trauma loves symbolism. Trauma revels in taking an ordinary everyday object and turning it into an emblem for the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. And because it’s an ordinary everyday object, it can lurk around every corner waiting to ambush you in the middle of a perfectly good day and remind you that you’re still not over that thing.

Slated for Demolition represents this experience by having its protagonist, as the blurb says, “haunted by a relentless marinara pasta demon”. (It feels slightly inappropriate in this context to say that that turn of phrase delights me, but it does.) There’s something bathetic in this, to be sure, but again, that seems fitting in a way. It’s not really funny to be having a panic attack because you saw a regular everyday object, or something that isn’t even that object but kind of looks like the object, but on some level you grimly recognize the absurdity of it. In practice, I didn’t find the silliness of the concept too distracting; the game mines the pasta imagery for some surprisingly effective horror scenes, and a sequence in a grocery store where the words of the description start to be replaced by types of pasta is legitimately disorienting. Given that most objects in the game have some kind of emotional significance tied to a key memory, I was a little bit surprised that this ended up not being true of the pasta, but at the same time the pasta is positioned within the text as something destructive of meaning—not insignificant, but sort of anti-significant—so perhaps that's appropriate as well.

The game has a world model of sorts, and a list of objects to collect, and at least one actual puzzle; all of this works well enough, but it’s mainly in service of getting fragments of text that you can piece together into something resembling a picture of the PC’s past and present (albeit not a complete one, and deliberately so). In addition, although I’m one of those people who’s always complaining about timed text, I thought it was well-used here—it’s not the default or used very frequently, so when on occasion a phrase appears word by word for emphasis, it has the intended impact.

I was quite absorbed in the specific, sharply drawn if disjointed details of this one person’s life, so it really threw me to reach the ending and (Spoiler - click to show)suddenly be asked to insert myself into the game instead. That’s not a thing I generally find rewarding in games and I especially did not like it as a swerve from inhabiting the consciousness of a very specific person who was not me (and occasionally also a very specific marinara pasta demon). But there’s precedent in this kind of game for reaching out to the audience this way and making them think about their own lives, and it’s hard for me to tell if it’s not well executed here or if it’s simply not to my tastes.