Retrograding

Friends, we are just a week out from the end of the second-biggest Comp in history, and while I’m on pace to complete my reviews just before voting closes (with the main question mark being exactly how much longer than two hours Murderworld winds up being), let me level with you: it’s been a fairly intense experience maintaining an average of just over two reviews every single day. On a physical level I’m getting tired, and mentally, having all those stories – and my critical reaction to those stories – sloshing around in my brain at once for over a month means that I fear I’m not a sharp as I was when September dawned bright and clear. Case in point: when I try to pen a basic summary of Retrograding, just a couple sentences on the plot and themes, I feel myself spiraling into uncertainty. Sure, the game employs a maximalist version of some of the anime-style storytelling tropes that I’ve previously mentioned don’t resonate as well for me, but I can’t help feeling like my internal fuzziness is to blame. So, let’s give it a shot:

Retrograding is a visual novel where you play an interstellar garbagewoman, tasked with traveling to the ruined husks of abandoned colonies in search of refuse you can feed into the incinerator-engines that power your civilization. You get to choose a partner to help you on your latest sortie – I picked Zinnia, a woman who’d previously been a high-up in the corporation we work for but who went rogue before being recaptured and reprogrammed back to loyalty – and then the game settles into a fixed rhythm of alternating scenes where you engage in scavenging, examining various bits of detritus before picking one of three possibilities for disposal, with interludes featuring an intense dialogue with an AI that you’re somehow linked to and which seems to be having delusions of grandeur. And then you and your assistant fall in love, though maybe that’s the AI’s doing and it all feels pretty sinister.

That sounds plausible enough when you write it all out, but I’m pretty sure at least 10% of the above is wrong, and I was still in the dark about much of what I am sure about until pretty late in my playthrough. Like, when I was choosing my partner, I actually thought I was a sort of bounty hunter and I was choosing a target to go after, since the dialogue kept talking about “reclaiming” and the various bad things the potential-partners had done (I think the other option is some kind of terrorist?) I’m also not sure whether “Maria”, the AI, is the same as the helper-robot who assists you in recovering debris or an entirely separate character, and really, her whole deal is extremely [citation needed] to me.

Partially this confusion is an intentional result of the game’s decision to forego conventional exposition, but I do get the sense that I wasn’t meant to be quite as in the dark as I wound up feeling. There’s a database of “records” you unlock as you go, which I presume is intended to provide some of the context the main narrative elides, but instead of clear lore-dumps, you get more of the same elliptical writing and cross-cut dialogue that characterizes the central thread. Always, there are a lot of words to read, but I found them very difficult to parse. Here’s some background on one of the worlds you can explore:

"Prox-3 has been razed down by time and a constant beratement of stars."

And a description of Zinnia:

"She looks to the world bringing life to the phrase ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’ when the only treasure should be the credits left across the table. But she isn’t motivated by silly things like profits."

There’s no copy and paste function that I could find, so this is all transcribed and might have typos that make it less clear than it actually was, I admit, but still, these are opaque statements. I often do enjoy more oblique prose, but in this case the writing didn’t do much for me – I think when this style works for me, it’s because the author’s choosing words that are evocative of specific heightened moods or have particular historical or cultural associations that add enough flavor to infuse the tangled syntax with meaning. But Retrograde just often felt vague to me, and the flavor I picked up on was generally sour: the protagonist isn’t a happy person, the banter with Zinnia at least started off pretty aggressive, and so the vibe was pretty disaffected, and since the game is much more vibe- than plot- or gameplay-driven, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged.

Retrograding’s approach to player agency also undermined my engagement. You do have choices, but the game doesn’t feel very responsive to them – the main thing you have to do is pick what to recycle, but you’re not given much information about the various objects, and your ultimate choice doesn’t seem to have narrative consequences (it does unlock a different “record” entry, but these just depict the protagonist and sidekick talking to each other in their well-established, kinda-snipey communications patterns). The choice of sidekicks does seem to make a big difference to the story, but as I mentioned I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was making my pick. And the climax pushed me and Zinnia into a doom-inflected romance that felt like it wasn’t especially responsive to anything I’d done to that point. I don’t mind a game that’s light on branching, don’t get me wrong, but since there are choices, I did wish I had more context to make them intentionally, and more clarity and what if anything they meant.

So yeah, my experience of the game was that a lot of stuff was happening but I didn’t really understand or click with most of it; words kept washing over me without finding much purchase, and even when I did start to understand something of what was going on, Retrograding was eager to move on to the next bit of obfuscation. Possibly if you’re more in turn with the storytelling style deployed here, or if you play repeatedly to see all the potential angles of the narrative, it feels more coherent, but unfortunately I was just too frazzled to get much out of the game.