valley of glass

On thing that I never fully appreciated until I started writing some of my own fiction is just how full of holes most narratives are. I don’t mean inconsistencies in the plot or anything like that – just gaps, elisions, places where the story skips through some dull bits. They seem simple enough when you’re reading, but when you’re in the author’s seat, I found it was very easy to get sucked into the momentum of narrating everything that happened to my characters: if I said they went out their front door, well it just stood to reason I’d need to relate what they saw on the other side, then which direction they turned when they finished walking down the driveway, and then whether they had to wait for the stop-light to cross the street… internalizing that you can (and should!) segue into the next place where something interesting happens, trusting that the reader will follow, can be deceptively hard, especially when the next sentence isn’t “when X arrived at school…” but “the next day…” or “by the time Summer Break was over”, much less, as in the case of the fairy tale on which valley of glass riffs, “seven years later…”

The game doesn’t attempt to tell the full story of that fairy tale, or even an incomplete slice of it – instead, it lives entirely in the gap. I had vague memories of the Black Bull of Norroway, which is name-checked in the blurb, but had recourse to Wikipedia to fill in the details, and it sure is a fairy tale: there are three daughters who go off on three separate journeys, a youngest daughter who travels alongside a black bull and is gifted three miraculous fruits, a seemingly-simple instruction that’s accidentally violated to supernaturally-catastrophic effect, and then transformations, setbacks, a trilogy of bribes, and true love winning out in the end. There’s a bit too much business, a bit too little thematic resonance, for Disney to be adapting this anytime soon, but it’s an enjoyable example of the form, and valley of glass zeroes in on one particular lacuna in the narrative: after the youngest daughter inadvertently disobeys the bull which is her polymorphed love, she’s abandoned in the eponymous dale and forced to work for a blacksmith for seven years, at which point he promises to make her iron shoes that will allow her to climb the slippery slopes and make her rendezvous with destiny.

The game doesn’t give you the full context for why you’re here, or where you’re headed after your labors have finished – I’m not sure because the author assumed the audience would know the story (debatable, I think, at least in the US) or if being enigmatic was an intended part of the vibe. I will say I’m glad I looked up the story, since it enabled me to appreciate some details that initially left me nonplussed, like the fact that the aforementioned fruits start out in your inventory. Honestly, even with that background, the game is pretty slight: it just depicts you remembering how you came to the valley and then turning back to the forge to keep up your labors, hoping one day to escape. The writing is evocative, but there isn’t much in the way of interactivity:

"It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith. Your breath clouds in the crisp morning air as you walk the North Road, your borrowed coat wrapped tight against the chill."

(That last line is unchanged even if you remove the coat).

Pretty much all the player can do is explore off the road, which triggers the aforementioned non-interactive memories. The fantastical nature of the landscape isn’t especially harped on in these sequences, and while I typically like understatement, in a piece this short (it took me less than ten minutes to play through) I think going bigger would have helped it make more of an impression. Similarly, if you’ve read the story, there are some things you can do that would eventually change the outcome (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking open the fruits so the daughter can’t use the gems within as a bribe) but the game can’t really acknowledge that, since its horizon closes well before the next bit of the fair tale’s plot picks up. This makes for a game that’s pleasant enough while it lasts, but almost militantly low-key in its refusal to offer challenges, choices, or consequences, and even the mood it evokes is rather restrained. It’d be churlish to suggest that the fairy tale skips over this bit for a reason, but I did find myself wishing the author had communicated a clearer rationale for why this particular bit of the story was worth spending time on, besides the aforementioned narrative-autopilot I had running as a novice author.