A Mouse Speaks to Death

Played: 7/17/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs, 3playthroughs, 23 of 46 memories

I like mice. They have a clear-eyed view of cats.

This work is a choice-select piece, pretty much exactly what the title suggests. You are recalling incidents from a long mouse life to the Murine Reaper before your final curtain. The world is from a mouse based RPG, which, why not? There was a Watership Down one too. The big memory choices present as cards in a hand - you choose what scene to ‘play,’ then refine that scene with a series of subordinate choices. Ultimately, you have created a specific memory of your mousy life. After a series of these, during which a long and varied life is assembled via anecdotes, some pronouncements are made on your mousy character and… well, conversations with Death

I found it to be an interesting, melancholy, and effective construct. The variety of possibilities give some player authority to influence the mouse’s life; the limited number of ‘cards in hand’ effectively represent worldly events outside our control. By contributing to an entire lifespan, the seeming disconnected nature of these anecdotes actually thrive a bit. You could easily take snapshot memories from your own life - a patchwork that is technically accurate, but whose connective tissue is entirely missing and must be inferred. It is not an unsuccessful approach, and encourages the player (as we ourselves do in our own lives) to connect the dots.

But not totally. In life, we can’t help but carry ourselves forward in a continuum. If there is enough space to infer the continuum, great! But when details clash, or seemingly large events get summarily dropped or contradicted later in life (or in the body of the vignette itself!)… the seams show a bit. Most egregiously in two of my playthroughs my gender appeared to change during my life. (If that happens to mice, that is news to me!) Other times, my collection of ‘end words’ seemingly contradicted my life story, like when I was described as lonely after having a successful litter or a passionate first love. Let’s poke at that last one a bit. In presentation, first love was sold as a tremendously powerful event, as first love often is. Certainly for most of us, that first love is important, though need not define every subsequent relationship or even make our end-of-life top 10. But in a patchwork view of life, if it is important enough to BE in the top 10, wouldn’t the subsequent heartbreak/longing/supercession be equally or more important? It’s not that we HAVE to marry our first mouse love. It’s that if it’s important enough to recall on our deathbed, how that turned to loneliness (or lifelong partnership, or subsequent lifelong relationship) is maybe MORE important!?

Similarly, the language and lore of the place was 90% there, but seams showed. When world building with human-adjacent species, the temptation is to try to describe human artifacts through other species’ (here, mice’) eyes. When done well, it is very powerful to the human reader, and can really sell the alternate worldview. When not quite there, descriptions can be bafflingly opaque, where the reader is less drawn into the mouse’s eyes than pulled away to wrangle ‘just WHAT is being described here’??? The other pitfall is to throw up hands and occasionally just call them human things. This latter particularly jars, after the reader has grown accustomed to off-kilter mousey descriptions. The work is like 90/5/5 on those.

In the end, while I can’t shake the seams, the overall construct remains sound. The vignettes themselves are wildly divergent (as you would hope in a long life!), each with their own emotions and resonances. Their variety is fun, well written, and allow for player-driven maturation, trauma and changing approaches to life. (I think my favorite might have been a singular image of water, disconnected from context, that inexplicably stuck in my mousey memory. That kind of incomplete memory rang powerfully true.) The unspoken imperative to stitch these memories together in the player’s head is a powerful gameplay choice. The graphical presentation underscores that somber, reflective tone quite well. And the melancholy they assemble into is affecting, even with seams clearly showing.

What is this?

In A Mouse Speaks to Death, you’re a mouse at the end of your life. Death has come for you, but before you go he asks you to reminisce about the life you led. From there you go through several rounds of choosing a memory to experience (from a group of three available, all randomly selected from a bigger pool) and then playing through it. Each memory is a self-contained storylet with branching choices, so you if the cards are in your favor you can play through any given one multiple times to “remember” it differently.

The overall result is a slice-of-life (or to be more accurate, several small slices of life) of what it’s like to be a mouse in the author’s rodent world. The mice farm, hunt, live, love, gather, experiment, and die all under the feet of the mysterious Eaters (i.e., us) and the player can focus on what interests them the most.

What did I like?

This work is part of a greater universe that the author has written and that I’m not familiar with. I’m always nervous when approaching games like this because making them independently accessible to a newbie is a real challenge – trust me, I would know! So I’m happy to report that AMST pulls this off flawlessly. The world of the mice is a fascinating echo of ours high above, but just different enough to feel new and exciting. The vignettes frequently focus on something new and exciting to our mouse, thus giving them a perfect excuse to explain them to our player. Sometimes these things are basic parts of mousedom that they encounter for the first time growing up, and sometimes they’re more unusual experiences like finding human artefacts, but no two are alike and there’s always joy in seeing something new. I didn’t find myself repeating storylets because I was much more curious about both this world and about the life of our hero.

Also, I couldn’t bring myself to click on any of the obviously signposted negative outcomes for our player mouse, so clearly 1) I was engaged from the word go and 2) I am a huge weenie.

What could use improvement?

There’s no counter telling you how many stories you get to go through, and by about 2/3 through I started to both get confused (should I be doing something to advance besides looking at storylets?) and also they started to wear out their welcome. A visible turn counter, an option to end your reminiscence early, or just a lower turn limit would have been a great help here. The storylet variety also wasn’t great enough to support the number of turns you get unless you’re interested in replaying them, which (as above) I wasn’t. There was also an issue where you could get duplicates of the same storylet in the same turn, thus cutting down your available options

Other thoughts

I see you, fellow Terry Pratchett fan! I love the Death of Rats so this was a real treat.

Conclusion

This was a real treat, and a great game to start off the Review-a-thon. I hope this is a good indicator of what’s to come!

A creative look at a different world in this vignette-based game where you play as a sentient mouse. The vignettes were well written and interesting, the worldbuilding and mouse culture were particular highlights. I would have liked it if your choices affected the rest of the game more, and if there were more choices of vignette (often you would be forced to take ones you didn’t want, which made exploring the larger plot threads cumbersome).