"I am inventing all this and it is about to disappear, but it does not”

"So, what is this work about?" is the first question people ask, if deciding to look at something. In the case of Iaia, well, I think the meaning is surreal and open to interpretation, not in the "the author was lazy and wanted to get something to the jam before the deadline" way (they made it by about a week) but in the "this is genuinely disturbing-in-a-good-way."

What happens is simply that you are walking along the street and reflecting on a very odd life and choices made. Which has been done before, but it pushed the Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime into my head, and also, it had an epigraph from Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, which I hadn't read, but based on what I saw here, I'm interested.

Given that this was for Single Choice Jam, there is a choice at the end, a surprisingly normal one, which makes sense. It's a good one to have after surreal reflection. I will keep it in spoiler tags, so if you want, you can have a quick play-through (there was some tension as to what the choice would be, and I don't want to ruin that,) but even the response is not what you'd expect.

Iaia has no back button, so you have a lot of text to re-scroll through first, but that's more than okay here (I just repeatedly hit tab and enter.) The first time through I wondered if some text was randomly generated, maybe because the author tried this trick before with Phenomena, and it worked well. But the images are deliberately chosen, and they feel well above "throw stuff at the wall."

So what is the choice? (Spoiler - click to show)You buy a drink at the vending machine. I like it a lot, because I think back to when I bought stuff at a vending machine, and I knew it was overpriced, but it looked very good. I was reminded of the vending machine in the high school social lounge, how I wanted to order one of each, and it would've been easy to do so if I planned things out, but I never did. The magic of vending machines died early for me, which is good for my pocketbook, I suppose, but I missed that. I was surprisingly disappointed on the first play through that (Spoiler - click to show)root beer was sold out, and it turns out it always was, but I still played through to buy root beer. It mattered to me much more than it should have, which on reflection was really, really neat.

Anyway, the next time I (Spoiler - click to show)drink root beer, I'll think of this game. Maybe I will even replay it at the same time. That'll, like, totally show it it can't stop me from doing what I want!