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.