idle hands

I recently contributed to a game with a dozen or so different authors (Mathbrush’s Untitled Relationship Project 1); the various excerpts are all mixed together without attribution, so part of the fun of playing is trying to figure out who wrote which bits. And while I felt reasonably confident in a number of guesses, the ones I was surest of were those by Sophia de Augustine. While their oeuvre has a bunch of recurring motifs – religious imagery, flawed dads, queer love – even when those elements are dialed down, there’s still something instantly recognizable about their prose, and that something is adjectives. Adjectivitis is a curse, of course – I’ve spent a lot of time groaning at fledgling writers’ attempts to pad their prose by making sure every noun has at least one modifier attacked to it – and often it’s good advice to use them sparingly. Sophia’s writing rejects these counsels of caution, however, and winds up distinctively effective by picking exactly the right words, over and over.

That gift is at the heart of what makes Idle Hands successful. A bit of dynamic fiction entered into last year’s Neo-Twiny Jam – which limited games to 500 words or fewer – it recounts the before, during, and after of a bout of love-making with a demonic partner (the timeline shifts around a bit, and also this is the kind of sex where you have more than one go). The focus is on communicating an overwhelming sensory experience, not plot or narrative; you get a bit of a sense of his personality, but this is an element of flavor rather than anything resembling a character study. As dynamic fiction, there’s also nothing by way of player agency or choice – there are a few highlighted phrases that reveal a bit of additional text when moused-over, which serve to engage the player and provide an opportunity for them to feel complicit in opting into the sex, but otherwise you’re just clicking the forward arrow to reach the next passage.

Given the necessary privity of the piece, these are the right choices – constructing context for what brought these people together and what their coupling means, or allowing for different paths through the text, might seem fine enough goals in isolation, but efforts in those directions would come at the immediate expense of the game’s throbbing, fiery heart. So this is a piece set up to live or die by its prose, and fortunately it delivers, a marvel of evocative economy:

"He is all forked silver-tongue and razor-sharp teeth, biting off the rounded, purring edge to his voice with a cessation droning like fruit-drunk wasps at summerly height."

I could write a couple of paragraphs just on why I like this one sentence so much, but I think the strengths are obvious: its descriptions are playfully haunted by the traditional attributes of the devil, makes sure even seemingly-innocuous details like the timbre of a voice have a seductive tinge, and confines itself to just one idiosyncratic bit of vocabulary to make the reader slow down and feel the emphasis proper to the final simile. It’s a dense style, and in a long game might wind up feeling like too much, but the game also does a good job alternating its purplest transports with sacrilegious gags or winking references to boning; it also doesn’t rely on any one trick for too long, opening with a bunch of alliteration before wisely putting that back in the quiver for the rest of the game.

Admittedly there are a few moments where I felt like the writing was so heavily freighted that it threatened to topple over, but only a few, and it always reined things back in: this is a controlled, writerly piece that creates a singular aesthetic experience through well-chosen words (and also through well-chosen colors and visual theming, though as always I feel less qualified to comment on those elements). I can see how some potential players might find schtupping Satan to be an off-putting premise, but those interested in giving it a try will find lots here to enjoy.

[I should acknowledge that Sophia provided a cool banner for my Review-a-Thon thread on the IntFic forum. But a) I’d played the game and formed my opinion of it before I learned that, and b) I think everyone knows that if you want me to write a positive review of your game, bribery is a far less efficient approach than just slathering crypto-Catholic themes all over it, so Sophia’s bases were covered either way]

For my first IFDB review, it seems appropriate that I should respond to one of the rare pieces of fiction that has been written specifically for a reader like me.

By that I mean, Idle Hands recognizes the kind of androgynous/masculine allure inherent to the cultural figure of the devil, without conflating interest in that as necessarily also a desire for non-consent or torture. The writing style here is sexually explicit, as advertised, but also feels cozy and wholesome without fully abandoning the vague undercurrent of threat that is essential in drawing one toward something marked as “evil” in the first place.

The main dynamic element of the piece is a series of “hover-reveal” links. When you hover over these, new text is revealed, which vanishes again if you move the cursor off of the link. The “reveal” aspect of the link mirrors what is happening in the scene. For instance, the devil makes a show of removing his glove for you, such that the reveal of more text precisely mimics the reveal of a hand. The hover aspect also implicates the reader in this intimacy by making touch (of the cursor) the way to reveal the more intense/romantic details that in-universe would be accomplished through actual physical contact. By hovering over the links, the reader moves closer to the devil in a tactile sense, and pulling away loses sight of those same details. It makes those furtive moments more precious. You cannot hold onto more than one of them at a time. You cannot have everything at once. But, you are nonetheless invited to partake at different sites for these ephemeral moments of connection. The devil understands his power, clearly, in providing satisfaction that is by its nature temporary.

Idle Hands was submitted to the “Neo-Twiny Jam” (2023) which has the requirement that the story be written in 500 or fewer words. This has some significant implications that are relevant thematically to the work. I first thought about how disappointing it is that the scope is not greater—I would love to go on a grander adventure in exploring the world of this text. Finally, a work that gets me! How is there so little of it?

But thinking about it more, because this is a piece about the experience of craving, the impact of the piece would probably be lessened if there was a lot more of it. That is, I suppose, the genius of adhering to something like a 500-word limit, no matter how frustrating I find flash fiction. Thinking about a creep in scope, the more that specificity of the point-of-view character would be allowed to develop, the more chances for a reader to become unbound from that character realizing it was “someone else” and not really them. While ordinarily I prefer when works are about someone specific as the point-of-view character, here it works greatly to the advantage of the immersion of the piece to avoid that.

There is a focus on precision of language that would be much more difficult to sustain over a longer work. I enjoyed the writing style, which retains the clarity and approachability of prose while infusing a poetic level of attention to detail, a balance that I found effective. Similarly, the UI is polished, a cozy box that really emphasizes intimate attention between the reader and the devil, with each of those under 500 words gaining so much importance because of that attention. I felt welcomed into a space where I could focus on what is truly important in life: thirsting for the devil.

My advice to potential readers would be: pay attention to the content warnings. My guess is, you probably already know whether or not you want to read sexually explicit content about the devil!

If you don’t, stick to your virtues.

And if you do? Subsume.

This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.

It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.

The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.