A Quiet Scurry

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

Love that opening passage, the stark truth of the first sentence, the proceeding sentences written like zooming in birds-eye-view style on this random little mouse. The writing continues to be simple and short, emphasizing the animal senses and traits without making them overbearing, and I could visualize what it could feel like to be in this viewpoint.

The mouse is hungry. So is are its predators. Its life can end in many ways, the moments thankfully brief and not drawn-out. There is no back button and every death means starting from the beginning. Each playthrough is very short, so I personally didn’t find this to be an issue.

A excellent vignette of nature observation rather than a character study, one worth your time. It reminded me of the short chapter book pamphlets I read when I was a child that talked about the basic facts of the animal with diagrams and photos included.

The opening of this short Twine sounds a little bit like a children’s picture book, except the first important word is “violence”.

You are a harvest mouse, and your task is to get through the night, find something to eat and drink without attracting predators, and then find somewhere to curl up and sleep for the day.

The mouse and its environment are described beautifully, but it is a vulnerable creature in a dangerous world: there are various other creatures, mostly hostile, threatening you. Most of the endings I found led to (Spoiler - click to show)being eaten by another animal or squashed by a car. On at least one occasion I ended by (Spoiler - click to show)finding a safe place to sleep for the day. But even then the mouse will have to do the same again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

It’s a very short little game, but very effective: I think I did get an insight into the constant fear of what it is like to be a harvest mouse.

There was a year when I was in middle school that the Redwall series were my favorite books. As with so many artifacts of one’s youth, I’ve no idea how they hold up today, but I remember them as King Arthur meets Brambly Hedge: action-packed medievalish adventure, with sieges and abbeys and ancient swords, and a cast of animal characters that followed what in retrospect is slightly uncomfortable species-based determinism. Like, the vicious, untrustworthy baddies were stoats and weasels, badgers were all strong and kinda prickly, and the main characters were mice – humble, clever, kind, and always underestimated by those around them. They were a lot of fun, but I have to say, there’s something profoundly un-mouse-like about an epic, isn’t there? Like, the metaphors all work well enough, but those were stories that had mice in them, not mouse-shaped stories.

A Quiet Scurry illustrates the difference: this choice-based look at the nightly gauntlet a British mouse must run to survive until its next morning is wholly concerned with rodent business, and beyond that its small, focused size make the choice of subjects entirely apropos. Short, near-poetic bursts of text introduce each of your basic needs in turn: first, satiating your hunger, next, finding something to drink, and lastly, scouting out a safe place to rest. So far so cozy, but mice are vulnerable, and danger is always near, whether from hungry predators or the uncaring human world. While you’re not overwhelmed with choices, the game does a good job of presenting three or four plausible-sounding alternatives at each juncture; while careful thought got me to a good ending on my first playthrough, I replayed Quiet Scurry a few times (it only takes about five minutes) and confirmed that even small lapses of judgment can have deadly consequences.

The prose does a good job of situating you in a mouse’s-eye view of the world, neither needlessly obfuscating what’s happening nor giving the player-mouse more understanding than seems reasonable. It’s all conveyed through quick, concrete details:

"Now safe within the roots of the hedgerow your thirst tugs at your mouth, the dryness of the oats worsening the need."

The one place where the writing gets less precise is the various bad ends; here, the merciful veils of indirection and metaphor conceal the violence that the player intuits must have happened, but isn’t forced to confront. I suppose this means Quiet Scurry shies away from the full nature-documentary experience, but I was glad of it – along with the game, I’d prefer to dwell on the plucky, indomitable spirit of the mouse that succeeds than the violence that befalls those who fail.

I don’t have much more to say about the game than this – it has modest ambitions, it realizes them well, and its form follows its function. Part of me wonders what a more robust take on the subject matter would look like, perhaps digging into the social world of mice, or expanding the timeline to examine their different stages of life. But that risks getting us back to the oxymoronic mouse epic: part of what’s appealing about mice is that they seem small and contented, so let us be contented that Quiet Scurry is small.