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No fluke, December 1, 2023I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.
This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:
"You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response."
The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.
While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.
The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.
These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.