Cycle

Ever fudged so badly in your relationship you wished you had a time machine/trinket to go back and fix your mistakes by actually doing and saying the right things to save what is almost lost?
This is something that Tiel doesn't need to worry about, as his grandmother left him a neat little pocketwatch, allowing him to save his relationship... if he plays his card correctly.
Through a thread of choices, your actions will determine which ending you will receive, and whether you will manage to save your relationship.
Still, regardless of the end post, Heron's criticisms only resonate ever so louder with every new cycle. Sure, you may be acknowledging eir hurt and needs, but are you truly doing this selflessly? Don't you invalidate eir choice, the one triggering the story, by going back in time until you succeed in your goal or relent in your defeat?
The game does not just do time loop incredibly successfully, it also raises quite the moral questions about slippery slopes when rewinding time...

I don’t know if I’m especially atypical in this, but every once in a while I notice how there are certain allegedly-universal elements of the human experience that I’ve actually never personally experienced. I went to a boarding high school, for example, so the prototypical John Hughes version of one’s teenaged years is unrecognizably exotic to me. Or there’s the fact, which is not unrelated to the prior point and is related, finally, to the game I’m reviewing, that I’ve never been broken up with. That’s mostly just a factor of having had fewer, longer relationships rather than because I’m some amazing catch or anything, and of course I’ve read and watched plenty of breakups from both perspectives, but the result is still that my primary personal reaction to breakup conversations is just wanting them to be over and done with, rather than replaying them over and over in my mind to try to find just the right thing I could have said to get a different result.

Boy howdy is Tiel, the protagonist of Cycle, not in that boat. This is the choice-based original upon which How Dare You is based, and among the myriad differences between the two is that in this iteration, you are nearly compelled to replay the breakup sequence, trying myriad different strategies and exploring the tides of cause and effect; Tiel is frankly like a dog with a bone, unable to let go and accept Heron’s word that their relationship has run its course.

Another difference is that where the parser-based version of this story presents it almost as avant-garde theater, a nearly wordless tableau where the scenery reveals the merest hints of the context of the fight and gesture and action carry the plot, Cycle is not nearly so minimalist. The opening narration here is three or four paragraphs that provide more information on Tiel’s living situation, what he enjoys about his relationship with Heron, and creates a spirit of optimism that’s suddenly ground to a halt by his soon-to-be-ex’s “we need to talk”, whereas in How Dare You there’s only a bare sentence or two before hitting that moment. And in addition to the backstory and detail, there’s a lot more dialogue – I got a much clearer sense of both Tiel and Heron this time, and why their relationship is probably doomed.

Cycle also does some interesting things with its gameplay and potential branching that I don’t think are mirrored in its remake, but they’re sufficiently spoilery that I’ll hide them for the rest of this paragraph: (Spoiler - click to show)so the “cycle” of the title, and the esprit d’escalier that I understand often accompanies being broken up with, are made quite literal here through the device of the watch Tiel can use to rewind time and try again. I was really taken by surprise by this pot twist, delightedly so – I’d gotten a sense of why Tiel was a bad partner, but seeing him manipulate Heron via undetectable means, and reading the implication that he’s been doing this from the very beginning of their relationship, makes this story something far more memorable than a quotidian breakup. I also really liked that the game doesn’t just make every option available to you from the get-go; each loop adds only one or two new options, based on what didn’t work or almost worked the previous time. This means that there’s a sense of progression even as events are repeating: structurally, we’ve got a spiral, not a circle. And the possibility of reaching one of the endings is withheld long enough for the player to have no illusions about the stakes for their choice.

All told I have to say I enjoyed Cycle significantly more than How Dare You, though I respect its radically different approach. I’m also now very curious how I would have felt about it had I come to it assuming its characters are the same as the ones in this game; the subtle push towards making Tiel physically violent in the latter game makes a lot more sense to me now. Regardless, Cycle certainly stands on its own as well as being part of an interesting pairing – though it’s definitely cemented me in my belief that the best breakup is the one everyone walks away from as quickly as possible.

This is a kind of medium-length Twine game with some nice styling.

It starts out with a 'my parents don't understand me' kind of vibe and has the kid running out to have an argument with their current partner, which gave me lots of flashbacks to my most recent creative writing class I taught in high school, as that's the kind of story the better writers would write (the bad ones involved Ninja from fortnite and lots of helicopters). Still, I didn't have high hopes.

But then it pivoted into a thoughtful and interesting story involving (Spoiler - click to show)time travel that made for an excellent game. You have the chance to try a lot of different ways to stay with your partner. Your character has real flaws and strengths and felt like one of the most real people in a game I've read recently.

I thought the ending didn't make sense in-universe, but makes perfect sense as a metaphor, so I'm leaning more towards the second point of view in my personal interpretation.

There's some fairly frequent strong profanity.