constellate

It may be that there are other games that I’ve started up, squinted painfully at the text, and then thanked heavens – and then the author – that there’s a font size option in the settings. But I’m not immediately thinking of any off-hand, meaning it’s still a sufficiently rare occurrence that constellate’s opening made me acutely self-conscious of my age, and the current and sure-to-increase physical decline that goes along with that. It’s not a pleasant headspace to inhabit, but it’s an apt one for this story of spent interstellar gladiators coming together to manage their decay.

The backstory here is doled out in hints and partial memories doled out through multiple replays: you play a former soldier, scarred by what you’ve seen and done, retired now to become a farmer. Your former commander, Eris – who seems to be something more than human, almost like a Warhammer 40k Space Marine – took a more direct route out of the war, falling from the heavens and barely surviving the ordeal; you’ve been trying to nurse her back to health as best you’re able, though the things she’s done dwarf your own crimes by their enormity and you fear her age and scars mean she won’t ever be able to come back. Oh, and the devotion you used to feel for her may now be turning into a kind of love.

As is typical for the author, the prose’s lushness and emotional immediacy mean that the general fuzziness over exactly what’s going on doesn’t matter that much, as the feelings still come through. Here’s the opening, for example:

"A blanket of snow covers the earth, obscures its surface, veil waiting for debridement. Microcosm, these tiny moons carefully hung in orbit, made in desperately hopeful vignettes of a pastoral, ancient Earth. Manufactured nostalgia for things long since extinct; to work the land with your hands under pale blue skies, to find purpose as dirt gathers beneath your fingernails, to gaze up at the unfamiliar vestiges of the constellations, their myths blurred by time, lost in translation, warped by distance from home."

Or here’s a description of Eris:

"Her, the tired woman ill-accustomed to dealing with Earth-like artificial gravity and the changing seasons, long-limbed and thin enough to count each individual ridge of her spine, tattooed in elaborate patterns that emerge from the sleeve of the too-short sweatshirt and make themself known in other places, the thin strip of warm tan skin between hem and waistband, the pantleg haphazardly scrunched to rest below her knee. Beneath the softened exterior lies the spitting image of every heretic you were taught to fear and despise."

The themes here are right in the open, but not in any bald, dead way – this is a game that knows what it’s about, and isn’t afraid to tell you because it has confidence that its prose can carry you right along. And it did; much like the author’s earlier Protocol and the Revenant’s Lament, this is a story of a dangerous, broken person and the woman who loves them, but the specifics are drawn so distinctly that there’s no danger of repetition.

While the writing is the most immediately engaging element of constellate, I actually find its structure the most interesting piece. This is a relatively short game, but it has a fair number of choices, which significantly branch the passages you see and the text that you read – indeed, the IFDB page mentions that there are nine endings. But after three replays where I tried to take reasonably different tacks through the materials, I didn’t experience much difference in plot – things pretty much land in the same place, and the emotional dynamics between the two characters remain a constant, but the particular ways those dynamics get activated, the give-and-take balance between attraction and despair, can shift substantially, and I also saw noticeably different bits of backstory depending on the choices I made. In some respects this is an inefficient way to design a game; I suspect a single playthrough sees a much smaller percentage of the text than is typical for a game like this, and the relatively small number of choices that draw attention to how consequential they may be risks players feeling like the game is less reactive than it is. Plus I didn’t find myself compelled to go back and exhaust the different endings the way that I sometimes do when there are clear stakes established around decision points.

For all that this is an idiosyncratic choice to have made, though, I’m not sure it’s a bad one. My playthroughs feel more authentically “mine” as a result than I typically experience with choice-based IF, and the conflicted, self-denying nature of the protagonist’s feelings for Eris make it reasonable that there’s no canonical playthrough that directly lays out the relevant history and emotional toplines. For two people who don’t really belong, living on a fake planet that likewise doesn’t belong, feeling their bodies give out as fast as my eyesight, this sense of contingency is a perfect fit.

This game was hard for me to understand. I played through it three times. I'm going to summarize it here as best I can.

It seems to me to be a science-fiction story where you live on a moon with your girlfriend, Eris. It also seems that (Spoiler - click to show)Eris was part of a Wandering Fleet where she murdered many people as a soldier. At some point she fell from the sky and was left brutally wounded. She is now older with grey hair. At some point (possibly when she landed) her heart was exposed and her aorta severed, and you were left coated in her blood. You watched the wound heal to a small scar. Eris is wiry and has trouble with cold and gravity. At some point you were also violent and followed her like a lap dog and killed people and supported her killing people (this is the part that didn't make sense so is likely wrong). Now you crave more close physical affection but you both hate and love her and she's kind of standoffish so everything kind of sucks but you kind of like it.

It's relatively brief, with complex writing and choices that lead to substantially different material on different playthroughs.

Played: 7/9/24
Playtime: 20min, 4 playthroughs

Sometimes my subconscious is an a$$hole. There is a phrase that came to mind during my third playthrough that was deeply uncharitable, kind of mean, and I could not shake once it hit. It also came kind of out of the blue, like a dreamstate free association. This is the second work by this author I have played, and I am just an outright fan of their prose. The dreamstate is a natural outcome of this mesmeric writing style, whose use of swirling imagery, conflicting clauses and poetic descriptions weave a spell like few others.

In IF I have encountered many, many attempts at this kind of word alchemy, vanishingly few this successful. The prose whisks you along, hinting at backstory through misty descriptions that leave an impression then maddeningly waft away, propelling you to the next thought or emotion. My first two playthroughs, I was driftwood caught in the eddies of this work, sliding to and fro, gently prodded to one direction or another and constantly, comfortably rocked while being so. I found it a joy to read. An example which, because I am a word nerd, stopped me in my tracks to admire it: “a place in her long shadow shaped exactly like you”

constellate tells the story of the reunion of two soldiers, one retired, who share an emotional history while hinting at the harsh backstory that led to their separation. The protagonist/player is processing deeply conflicted emotions at the reunion, and the gameplay centers around how you choose to engage that conflict. It employs one of my favorite (when done well) mechanics: links that change text inline to refine the sentence they inhabit. Here, this mechanism perfectly conveys the protagonists conflicted mindset, and gives the player some autonomy based on where it ‘resolves.’ I cannot tell if the narrative changes based on where the final click leaves things, but the thought that it might makes me happy. It certainly does yeoman’s work to sell the protagonist’s internal conflict.

So I went through twice in kind of a dream haze, savoring the warm, enveloping prose, the charge of conflict presented to player/protagonist. I think there was a weird schism there though, because while I definitely felt the conflict, the actual romantic feelings eluded me. If anything, an unhealthy lust, fueled by protagonist’s self-hatred, seemed a more convincing response… until some random firing neurons produced this:

(Spoiler - click to show)Space Nazis in Love

Once that cold, cruel phrase bubbled through the prose miasma to hit my forebrain, it became the only prism I could view through. My subconscious is an a$$hole, but, it’s not totally wrong? Without hint that the backstory is unreliably reported, which we have no reason to believe, we are instead left with two people who commit horrific acts, only one of whom seemingly has any regrets. Yet that pretty fundamental difference is still secondary to their strong chemical attraction. The author is not unaware of this contradiction, certainly the climax is fraught with conflict and compromise. As a player though, I kind of lost connection - sure, they’ve got pretty epic baggage, but even bittersweetness carries sweetness. Is that really what they deserve?

So my recommendation is play through this game for sure - admire its seemingly peerless prose; marvel at the effectiveness of the static links; get swept along by its rhythms and beats. Just stop after twice.