The Absence of Miriam Lane

This is a deeply affecting game that grabbed me from the beginning with an eerie atmosphere, and then continued to enthrall me with intriguing gameplay mechanics until the story reached a powerful conclusion. The game starts with a poetically stilted observation -- 'the sky over the garden is too bright' -- and slowly focuses and clarifies this thought into a moving realization about (Spoiler - click to show)a person, Miriam Lane, quietly suffering and struggling just out of the view of her family and friends.

The game starts with the player character questioning a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia or some other bout of forgetfulness. There's someone missing, something not quite right, and you're here to help him. From the start, the game is sparse and almost haunted -- the text is white on a black background and many scenes are accompanied by sketchy, high-contrast illustrations of the room or object that you're encountering. A soft, moody music is just enough to set the tone without becoming distracting. Given the unclear sense of the mission at first, and the eerie atmosphere, the game almost feels like a ghost hunt.

The game proceeds through a really interesting gameplay mechanic. The player character is equipped with certain observations/thoughts, and can apply these to different items or parts of the house to arrive at a heightened awareness of what's going on. (Spoiler - click to show)The unraveling of these insights in the bedroom is especially gripping: the player character sees small hints of a disturbed, unwell person, like half the bed being tidy and the other half being messy, a divot in that side of the mattress "as if something lay here in exactly the same position for a very long time." The more the player uncovers things that aren't quite right, the more the story clarifies and comes together, the answers being sought ambiguously between ethereal and corporeal.

The gameplay distinguishes this work from a typical Twine game. While clicking on links is the main mode of interaction, these links move the player around the space and enable them to interact with the environment. As such, the game plays more like a point-and-click adventure than an unfolding hypertext story. There are a couple other parts of the game that introduce other compelling innovations, too, like a flower plot in the garden, where the player can combine different attributes (color, amount of sun, shape of leaves and stems) to find different types of flowers. The concluding sequence, when the player (Spoiler - click to show)tells Miriam Lane her story to fully bring her back from absence, makes excellent use of cycling choices links. The gameplay, on the whole, integrates really closely with the theme of the game: the player needs to look carefully, read critically, and, above all, become attuned to small details to successfully find what they're looking for.

My only qualm with the game is that sometimes the next step or stage in the search can be a bit too unclear. (Spoiler - click to show)In the second part of the game, when the player is giving Miriam Lane objects to revive her, there is some negative feedback for incorrect objects that's helpful; but in the first part of the game, the player could apply thoughts to pretty much everything in the house without any penalty or without much guidance. Searching through the flower plots, while a really cool feature, can also become aimless, as there's not a great way to know if you've recovered everything there is to find from the garden.

Despite a few places that can snag the player a bit, the game provides a relatively tight, well-constructed experience that moves from an eerie ghost hunt to something far more real and far more troubling.