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Coming out of the shadows, but nothing supernatural, December 23, 2022A woman has vanished, well, sort of. Her husband's a bit confused. There's no foul play, really. You're a researcher, maybe an investigator, maybe a combination. That's an early choice, but your title doesn't matter. Your task is to find out what has happened, where did she go, and why.
Everything seems in order in not just the house by also the story and the technical layout. The layout feels appropriate–black and white sketched pictures, unintrusive but effective music, and a small local map in the bottom left where you click on where to go. So big-picture navigation is easy. The calculated sparseness gives us a good feeling that something is wrong. We're seeing enough details, right? But we aren't.
Asking her husband gives you additional questions to ask in general. Some things seem out of place. The light is wrong. You can have up to five questions to ask, and the right one in the right place offers clues, leaving Miriam Lane closer to visible. Ones you don't need any more are discarded. While brute force works, things are generally well-clued, and you should be able to find some clear places to ask the right questions before the last observation or two needs guesswork.
Once you become adjusted to the light, you have an idea of how or why she is gone. Here there's the only thing that really broke immersion for me, but the rest of the game is so well-done, I may be missing something: you-the- character need to find her name, which her husband never tells you, but you-the-player know it's Miriam, and based on the puzzles in the rest of the game, "M. Lane" would seem suitable. It's minor, but the rest of the game is so strong, I want to leave the possibility open I was missing something.
Once she's visible, you can start collecting items. Some of them have special meaning to her, for better or for worse. An average reader should discern pretty easily what makes her happy and what doesn't. Also, the stuff that makes her happy is hidden, and most hidden items are similar to something unhappy in clear view, and yes, this Means Something. The more positive items you collect and show her, the more optimistic the ending is, though once you know her name, describing what you've found of her also helps her return to her normal self. This threw me off slightly, too. There was a status bar at the bottom, and it increased when you gave her something nice, but I was under the impression you had to make it go all the way. You don't. But perhaps I should have known.
You see, there's a moment in AoML where it clicks that the author knows what they're doing. This is the only other time AoML slightly broke immersion for me, and that was more due to me appreciating the technical and design work, because I was looking for it when writing a review. There's a book of flowers and a flower bed. The book describes several flowers. Each flower has about five descriptions. When you pick a flower, you're asked to choose from about twenty descriptions. But you don't need all five! I can't recall this convenience before and, well, it just makes sense.
This was an immense relief but also in line with the game: you don't need to know every detail about why things happened to Miriam, or how she got to be the way she is. Although in some cases, items you find may make her upset. Several that seem happy aren't, which you can deduce if you have been paying attention, thus putting AoML that much further above your average fetch-quest. That's how empathy works in general, beyond an "oh, you like this, right? Well, you seemed to enjoy it. Whatever." Miriam doesn't need that complete understanding, yet you feel she needs it, and her husband seems to want a complete explanation. None is necessary from her, and none is necessary in-game. So when we ask for people to understand us completely, perhaps we would really just be happy with people who understood enough to block out others who tell us, with bad intentions or not, "Gosh, I just can't understand this about you." For Miriam, it's her husband not really caring about her impractical or "childish" desires and ignoring her sacrifices. While that may be a truism, AoML pushes it forward nicely.
There's one more criticism that's quite high-level. I'd like it to be easier to tab through the options. There's a lot of mouse movement, and certainly AoML is more ambitious and intricate than your average Twine effort, so there needs to be, with pop-up screens when you want to think or take an item. This is detailed GUI stuff, and it's the sort of request I only make when it's clear the author knows what they're doing and then some and, well, I wanted to see everything in-game before rifling through the source. I think with something as high-level as AoML is, it leaves you asking for more--especially because the main NPC, Miriam, never did, and look what happened to her! That's what being sympathetic gets you, game.
This is minor, though. AoML offers a wide variety of emotions and choices. You can play very badly or well. The second time through, when I knew there were things to be remembered (the more you remember and find, the more you recover of Miriam) I felt bad forgetting stuff I should have known. It occurred to me that there were people I found forgettable whom I cared about more than noisier people who grabbed my attention, and perhaps I was on the other side of that.
One more thing: AoML made more than enough sense the first time through, but it made a lot more sense when I replayed the introduction and poked around and also re-read the content warning. So much is well-hinted. It leaves you feeling you missed something, and that is your fault and not its, and that's an eerie feeling. I wound up remembering times I'd been ignored in my past, as well as people I ignored. There was no rage. But I remembered certain items people felt should give me joy and didn't, and I had an explanation. So that was a boost.
AoML and Elvish for Good-Bye were my top two rated entries in IFComp and may be more similar than you think. Both talk of unspoken desires. In AoML, they're more realistic, stuff you can't say you want, or stuff that can be easily crushed. EfG is more fantastic, more optimistic, a knowing there's something out there you can't imagine one day. Each feels necessary to give life color in its own way.