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Review
ALL CAPS titles can reel me in or repel me quickly. This did the first. It suggests not just nonviolence but enforced nonviolence. After all, the sleeping beast hasn’t killed you yet! Um, at all. Who are you to strike the first blow? You're in no shape right now! And if you need to kill it, maybe you are being melodramatic about your problem? Maybe you have to admit you have a problem? Maybe you're ignoring the people with the real problems, or maybe you think you're too good to have real problems!
Yes, this is about addiction, or it can be, which you might infer from the cover art with beer bottles. Works about addiction always take a lot out of me, considering whether or not it works. So be warned. They can put me into a pensive rage about things I was told were good for me but in fact put me at serious risk of substance addiction. And I think I’ve discussed before how, say, playing games I don’t enjoy any more (or games just to say I completed reviewing everything for a comp/jam) is sometimes an anodyne that hides my fear of pushing ahead with something I've meant to do for a while. "Well, it’s not lethal," you hear. But there are less horrible sleeping beasts on the surface that can keep their hooks in you longer. That I thought about having to write reviews for every single entry, and writing a review for DNKTSB anyway--one that might even eclipse the 500 word jam limit!--tells you what I thought about this entry.
I think Twine works like this have definitely matured over the years. They’re a lot less in-your-face and feel a lot less like they have to prove a point or be exciting or exemplify the pinnacle of a certain art form. (Maybe I’ve mellowed on my views towards them, too, because there is less of a choice vs parser war than before.) But the fact is--this is surreal without being crazy, and it left me thinking yes, this is an addictive pattern I had, and this is something I couldn't break away from. Addiction is the easy one, but I also remember people who genuinely wanted to help me but I felt I couldn't pull away from some others. As if I didn't want to ruin the happy people's time. These people trying to help are the King in the story, who can be interpreted several different ways. His willingness to help and good intents and even his contempt for your situation are up for interpretation, as is the beast. Having a King and beast also, for me, left me with the question "doesn't someone else deserve to slay a beast first?" It's a nonsense question--you do what you can, and you can never be sure you've slain the beast. But it's one we've all had, if we're reflective.
As for the mechanics, there are a few questions with the same response. So this doesn’t especially branch, but I think (and this may be an old choice trope by now) it doesn’t matter, and you’re stuck. Here you ask how likable you are but are pretty convinced you’re not being objective, and if anyone really cared, or you were worth caring about, they’d help you out. It’s a heckuva dilemma to be in. Certainly I got to imagining "well, I-the-character am less likable for having an addiction, and I probably can’t get back to where I was, which wasn’t great anyway, or I would bring down the average happiness in the room there but not here."
The level of fantasy with the king, the knight (you) and the beast was not too in-my-face and gave me leeway to think of a lot of things. And it captured well how addiction/depression etc. is like a cycle where you say you don’t have the energy to tackle THAT yet, or it isn’t quite SO bad, or it could be worse. Then you have stretches where things go right and you wonder if they really are that right, or you feel dumb not breaking out in the first place.
It reminded me, too, of other things, such as comments by my family about how (paraphrased) druggies hang together. So don’t hang with the wrong crowd or you will get into drugs! And the isolation this presents turns that bit of nasty prejudice on its head because, as research has found, isolation increases the risk of drug use. No, it's not necessarily loud parties, etc. And this character is certainly alone in the game context.
While I prefer comedic works, or ones with a strong vein of comedy, I didn't want to pass up that DNKTSB was effective for me. It asked for a lot, but it helped address a few unfunny things that were tricky for me. I tend not to like kitchen-sink works about trauma. Perhaps I, like the hero in the story, just can't quite kill the beast today, so I settle for less. But on the other hand, a lot of side beasts can get killed with works like DNKTSB.
For what it's worth, after playing DNKTSB, which takes place at night when you're alone, I stayed up late, thinking about things that were broken and things I wanted to fix. It felt constructive. I made a small commitment to avoid some old beasts I didn't have to kill, I hope. So it was practical for me, too.
