3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There’s a tension in creative endeavors we don’t talk about much, among all the tensions we DO talk about. The first tension is artistic tension - the artist’s muse that compels them to create at all, to shape a vision into a coherent thematic statement. The second tension is craft, wrestling that ineffable vision into a concrete, real-world artifact for others to experience. Once that’s done, the hard work is behind the artist. All that’s left is to get it before an audience. This is the under-discussed tension: marketing this shiny new artifact to a world overrun with artifacts all desperately screaming for our attention. In the context of IFCOMP, this is the BLURB.

Blurb crafting is its own artistic mini-game. How much do you reveal of a work without diluting any intrinsic surprises and twists? How do you convey its conceits to drive that all-important engagement, without inadvertently creating expectations in the audience that color their experience? What is the sweet spot of sinking the hook without intruding on the art itself?

This tension may not be as under-explored as I think. Maybe it’s just a new revelation to ME. For an ambitious reviewer like myself, who presumes to consume ALL THE THINGS in a given IF event, the blurb is rarely more than prologue. This season though, where I am using blurbs to decide yes or no on a self-imposed engagement budget, it is one of two criteria in determining which seals to crack at all. Credit where due, 3XXX’s blurb is MAGNETIC. Crafted as an in-fiction-world commentary it economically and masterfully announces itself as a SHARP sexual-political critique/satire/polemic. That particular stew of preoccupations and tone rang like a dinner bell to hungry ranch hands. Yes, yes, a thousand times YES.

And hoo boy did the prologue deliver on that promise in spades. The work is lightly interactive, mostly a short story construct where the decisions FEEL tangential to the plot. Mainly present to let the player/reader collaborate in creating a protagonist. The world building is fully in the author’s hands and of course it is. No one gets to choose the world they inhabit. The conceit of a dystopic society where pearl-clutching fear of sexuality is concretized into over-the-top absurdist biology is exactly the kind of thing speculative fiction is made for: holding a fun house mirror to reality to expose fault lines through exaggeration. It is every bit as pointed and bitter that I could have hoped, condemning hypocritical Puritanism at the top of its lungs. Yes, yes, a MILLION times yes.

And then we segued to the 3 Act structure, which quickly dispensed with this setting to settle into a far more character-driven exploration of individual sexuality, repression, and awakening. The pointed vitriol of the blurb and prologue were sidelined in favor of a more hopeful, tender and PERSONAL tone. The details of the world are both backgrounded and muddied. For me, this created the most unwanted of feelings - slight disappointment? Not that the personal drama wasn’t raw, compelling and brave in its own right (especially in a late act when the author (Spoiler - click to show)steps into frame). Had I encountered the work cold, it is unlikely this turn would have registered so jarringly. It had everything to do with the very specific enthusiasm the blurb and prologue generated in me, only to left turn completely away.

This is not an unheard of technique - defying the expectations of your marketing CAN be used to great effect to land the surprise twist. Here though, the blurb inadvertently created expectations in me the work was never intending to deliver on. It had to fight all the nebulous promise in my head with its concrete alternatives. That’s just an unfair fight. It doesn’t help that in making its shift, the work undermined its conceit in a weird way. What was initially implied to be Puritanical excess as the backdrop for the world, was clouded by occasional allusions to that most boogey of conservative boogey-men, Political Correctness. Multiple times over-enthusiastic thought policing was identified as an element of the world’s over-the-top sexual repression. I’m not saying this is an unworthy statement (though I personally would need a lot more convincing) just that it further muted, blunted and muddied what started as super sharp.

There are other elements to the work that didn’t quite land for me. The transition to a personal story also had some off-feeling subtext. At one point, a character’s identity journey was identified as being partially the result of society’s chemical interference. That’s weird, right? To attribute sexual transition as an outcome of repression, not an individual’s self-actualization? Irony, yes, but at what thematic cost?

Then, the choice to fast forward between Acts, effectively creating new characters, tensions and themes in (almost) every one, left me more adrift than not. Any one of those acts could have blossomed into a full, focused narrative. The work was not built that way though. It was defiantly broad, trading sharp focus for a wide-ranging exploration of its troubled, human core. Not ineffectively, not at all, just… unexpected.

As a review, this feels unsatisfying. This work closes as a deeply personal, mostly unresolved, bittersweet grappling with extremely raw sexual identity issues. Is my best take really “Ok, cool, but more Harrison Bergeron, please”? And I trace it all back to how I consumed the blurb of the piece. For sure Sparks of Joy despite what you may think from my whining, even after the turn. My advice? Unsee the blurb and experience it without the crippling preconceptions I did.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic/Technical ratings:
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless