Tales of Nivea: GRIP

Most people might compare this fascist bureaucracy/complicity simulator to Papers, Please, but the first comparison that came to mind for me was De Novo, a game from IFComp 2019 that had some thoughts on capital punishment that it was trying to share but unfortunately was something of a nonsensical mess.

A lot of De Novo's problem was a poor understanding of the real-world legal system it purported to be portraying, and GRIP (I'm sorry, I can't call it Tales of Nivea, it just makes me think of the skincare brand) at least avoids that by setting things in a fictional locale. (A fantasy setting, in fact, and one that the PC gets an infodump about in "as you know, Bob" fashion.) The level on which it falls apart at the slightest prodding is the prose, which is in a style that I've seen impress many people because it sounds smart and literary, but which is actually rather vague and meaningless when you try to dissect what it's saying.

GRIP is also pretty repetitive in some of the constructions it likes to use. For example, in the blurb, there's this phrase:

you mostly believe it, the way you believe most things you haven't been asked to look closely at yet

And then in the first three or four passages of the game proper, we have:

you have been living the way a man lives when he is careful and nothing else

you brush it down the way your mother taught you to make a thing look tended even when it is only old

you take it although you no longer need it, folded into the breast pocket, the way you carry anything you are afraid to want too openly

And on and on and on throughout the game, often multiple times in a passage. Part of my problem with this construction is that it often acts as a sort of pseudo-description: you do [something sort of abstract] in the way you do [something else even more abstract], and the reader can fill in the blanks and sort of feel like a description has been given but we never actually get to the level of anything concrete. But even leaving that aside, when you have an unusual and eye-catching construction, especially one that lends itself to longer sentences, you don't want to be using it every paragraph (much less multiple times in a paragraph, as GRIP sometimes does) because it makes the rhythm of your prose feel monotonous. If you don't vary up your sentence length and structure, readers' eyes start to glaze over a little. To an editor like me, this also gives the impression that the text didn't have much of an editing pass done, either by the author or by anyone else, because "oh shoot, I just had two consecutive sentences that both said you do something the way you do some other thing, I'd better change one of them up" is the kind of thing that's relatively easy to catch. There are other things that give this impression, too; there are a few instances in the worldbuilding infodumps where the writing gets sloppy to the point of entirely leaving out words, like a sentence that says children usually do something "at age" and then skips whatever number was supposed to come next.

The sense of carelessness is furthered by the fact that the narrative frequently loses track of itself, forgetting things it's just said. For example, when it comes to the first potentially-dangerous magical child that you have to evaluate, the game says this:

You read the reported-by line twice. Voluntary registration inquiry. Somewhere in a Block C tenement, two working parents read the same white notice you copied an address from, and they believed the line at the bottom of it enough to bring the Program their daughter's name.

But the notice doesn't solicit registrations of dangerous magical children; it's a job posting. There's no reason to think it would prompt someone to register their child rather than to apply for the job themselves. The notice does contain your department's slogan, "REGISTRATION IS PROTECTION"—but not at the bottom. So there's a vague idea that there was a notice, and that the notice was about the registration program, but the author apparently didn't glance back to see what it actually said.

This is one example, but the game is littered with continuity issues (including some prominent examples in the ending that I think most people are likely to get on the first time out; there's an argument that in that case the references to things that never happened are there on purpose, but the way this problem occurred throughout the game often to no discernible end didn't leave me with a lot of trust in the purposefulness of that particular instance). There is a possibility that most of the continuity errors are bugs rather than writing issues—that there is a version of events where you saw or did whatever it was the game says you saw or did, but the flags weren't set properly—but that wouldn't really contradict my overall point about the carelessness, just suggest that it also applies to the code.

There are lots of games out there that are released in a rushed and underedited form—I've made some mistakes with deadline pressure myself—but this is where we get back to De Novo, because the thing about making big swings to deal with issues like the wrongdoings of the justice system is that the sloppiness often starts to feel a little offensive, even (or especially?) to people sympathetic with your overall message. (Both games also gesture at additional experiences of oppression that they then don't engage with in a meaningful way, De Novo by making its protagonist a Black man and sort of vaguely hinting that the unenviable position he's been put in is related to the ease of scapegoating him based on his race and then never really following up on that, and GRIP with a subplot about domestic abuse and its treatment by the authorities that doesn't seem aware of the way this issue as it exists in the real world is entangled with misogyny.) If you're going to engage with very heavy subjects in your writing, I really want to see some care and attention, rather than empty flourishes that sound good if you don't think too hard about them, and GRIP mostly deals in the latter.