The Whale's Keeper

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Well this work presents an interesting review question, doesn’t it? Do I evaluate the story in isolation, or in conjunction with the novel, emerging IF platform it is showcasing? It’s not like I open every Twine review extolling the virtues of Point-And-Click, that would be weird. Counterpoint, I belabor Texture’s strengths and weaknesses with literally every review. For a lot of IF, how well it integrates its user paradigm can be a key element in its overall impact, for good and bad. Here, NOT acknowledging its novel approach seems incomplete, given the platform’s developer is ALSO the author. I guess it was a more straightforward question than I thought.

In its most superficial read, I can’t help but call it the opposite of a Twinesformer. This is not a parser masquerading as a point-and-click, this is a choice-select masquerading as a parser! Yes, you are typing command line instructions, but only those the story gives you, beat-by-beat. It’s a DeceptaTwine! Ok, contextually it’s much more than that, I just couldn’t resist the gag.

Plotopolis, the new authoring platform, repurposes IM applications to deliver IF. What a great Mission statement! It is kind of ingenious, I mean the command prompt has just been sitting there THIS WHOLE TIME. It also immediately casts the experience as a dialogue with a storyteller, which is a really cool way to leverage IM. Given the cold reception timed text receives, I will be curious to see others’ takes on this. For me, the out-of-the-box tuning was pretty good - more often than not new text became available just as I finished reading the previous. Certainly the user commands to slow and speed things should provide knobs for everyone.

I have to note this story chooses not take advantage of the dialogue paradigm, which pretty quickly reverts back to a limited-choice DeceptaTwine experience. This is not a problem per se, and probably a good way to communicate to future authors that it doesn’t HAVE to be dialogue. It does strike me as an incomplete showcase because of it though.

The story on offer is really offbeat and weird in the best way. You wake up in the belly of the whale. A series of impossible-to-predict things happen from there. As a fundamentally choice-select tale I found this to be about ideal in leveraging the form. Choice-select can falter in a lot of ways: incomplete choice availability given the logic of the world; choices the player can interpret differently than the subsequent text jarringly delivers; choice incompatibility with narrative goals that then must be forced back into line; reconvergent choices that don’t justify the divergence. When choice-select is BEST employed, every choice has a purpose: either to build player affinity with the character or narrative thread or branch the narrative into a new thread. Most authors seem to have a handle on the latter, but the former is REALLY HARD TO DO. It requires casting a spell with words that naturally pull the player in a direction, yet still cedes enough control to make it not feel on rails.

Let’s take an example from literature. The Telltale Heart, a classic. You the reader are unlikely to ever murder someone because you didn’t like their face, then be driven insane by it. Uh, spoilers? Poe’s prose is highly stylized and singular, and not something you would encounter in everyday life. However, it magnetically and precisely carries the protagonist’s deteriorating mind in a way that the reader engages despite themselves. It is fully the magic spell of words that accomplishes this, that takes you somewhere you never thought you would go. If you could conceive of an IF version of TTH, would it end any differently? My thesis is NO on the strength of Poe’s prose, and since it is purely hypothetical I can just declare I’m right!

Whale successfully delivers this alchemy for me. I played through four times, each time getting a different result (many threads!), but each time the text led me naturally and hypnotically to some really, objectively speaking, bonkers places. Three of them ended up being really satisfying stories, qualitatively different from each other. (The fourth was blindingly short, so not too discouraging with its comparative shallowness).

Was it perfect? No. As a parser-like experience, I often bemoaned the lack of abbreviations for general commands like ‘continue.’ The illustrations were too large for my window, requiring panning backwards to see them, a screen-slice at a time which kind of ended up fighting the UI. While I liked the ‘Sanity’ score as a gauge of sorts to soft-guide the proceedings, CALLING it ‘sanity’ often felt wrong given the choices we were making and the places it led us. Probably most disappointing to me was not really using the conversation paradigm to serve the narrative. This tool is CRYING for that! A slightly less than seamless experience.

All that said, between the promise of a really cool new IF platform and a compelling story(ies?) told with it, I kind of have to give this a Transcendent nod. Innovator’s privilege! Also, the characterization of dolphins as prankster-assholes of the sea delights me to no end.

The fact that one of this author’s previous projects was a POETRY GUMBALL MACHINE has no sway over my score, but c’mon, there’s gotta be recognition for that somewhere too!

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, four playthroughs, sanity 8/10/10/21
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but interested to see other works in this format


Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless