Remembrance

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 8min, 4 endings

Hitting quite a run of these Short Story IF works. I suspect (and only suspect, not having participated in Jams of my own) Jams encourage this style of IF. Broad puzzly works, with complicated moving parts, player initiative anticipation, and their attendant debug and tweaking are a lot harder to force into a tight development timeline than a controlled linear narrative. Not a dig, linear narratives after all are the PROTO narratives. Should not be a surprise that there is a Jam that acknowledges this directly, the One Choice Jam. Makes the subtext text!

This is a story about mourning and reconciling difficult parent-child relationships. Per the one-choice conceit, you must select one of four artifacts to honor your mother, with mini-sections giving context on each of the choices. Actually, ‘difficult’ isn’t quite the word I want, though it is technically accurate. The story is not more or less difficult than any portrait of two differing lives squashing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frictions, and further burdened by unfair and/or tone deaf expectations on both sides. Y’know, standard interpersonal relationship stuff.

This is a pretty good representation of that dynamic, I found. The artifacts represent samples of different aspects of this relationship. The One Choice offers conflictory impulses. On the one hand, it asks the player to select only one aspect of the relationship to foreground. A relationship that is explicitly NOT one thing, but a synthesis of them all. The very act of selection betrays the reality of the relationship’s complexity and flattens the fullness of it.

On the other hand, the player is deciding which memories to prioritize, in some way acknowledging that the complexity need not be uniform. That some traits might loom larger and more accurately summarize the relationship than others. Or more importantly for the protagonist, maybe the complexity was noise that distracted from the aspects that loomed largest.

There is a subtle on the third hand here, begging the handiness of the metaphor. Because the player is making the choice, the choice becomes what the player/protag WANTS to be true, almost independent of the deceased. It becomes more about the survivor than the deceased, and more revealing of their needs and wants. This feels like a stunningly well-observed insight into how ALL human relationships work, especially ones relegated to memories and not new experiences.

The work then hinges entirely on this one choice. I find it telling that the denouement is (Spoiler - click to show)not materially affected by the choice - funerals are scripted ritual after all. But the choice itself is what makes all the difference, to the protag and the player’s experience.

Hrm. So while I seem to have successfully avoided narrative spoilers, I have nevertheless completely spoiled the emotional content of the work. Does that count? Is there a mask for that?