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Hadean Lands meets Worlds Apart, January 28, 2023My favorite thing about this game is the genre: Games that take philosophy seriously. Be Not Afraid: While this game does deal with a story from the Bible, it is not a work of religiosity. We are not in Jarod's Journey territory.
In fact, the conceit of the work is pretty much to talk back to the Bible, and say, "Hey, buddy, did it ever occur to you that Cain might have had his reasons?" The work's subtext is precisely this idea that heresy is no sin, so don't hesitate to ask the obvious questions that come to mind when attempting to make sense of canonical tracts. The game's internal reference book (">CONSULT X ABOUT Y"), having been written by a Scholastic, contains marginalia that critiques itself regularly, creating a sort of internally-consistent closure to drive home the point.
Like any good religion, the Abrahamic canon has plenty of worthwhile philosophy (and, unfortunately, plenty that any thinking person in the modern period will reject out of hand), but it also has plenty of parables that are so terse as to raise more questions than they answer. Why, exactly, did Cain murder Abel? Despite the marked incompleteness of this Biblical lesson (as if to suggest that even to ask the question is to partake of the sin), we know seeking to understand motives for horrible crimes to be a valuable pursuit. This, after all, is what happens in a courtroom.
The reason, as the player discovers right away, was that Abel turns out to have been a massive jerk.
Okay, well, maybe the answer isn't always edifying. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask.
This did sort of leave me saying to myself, "Well, heck, I could've guessed that much." And if that were the whole story, this review would be over by now. But now we have a new question: Why was Abel a jerk to Cain?
The game rewards the diligent player with an answer to this question too. Multiple answers, actually, of two types. One was a typical family dynamics drama, but the other — Ah! This is where it gets interesting. Abel adopts the self-serving and apparently life-long mindset that his lackadaisical character has a higher purpose, that of teaching his older brother a deep lesson.
(Spoiler - click to show)
Unfortunately — I'm interpreting liberally — Cain considers that his hard work, demonstrably harder than that of his brother, of necessity entitles him to just rewards in this life. Abel, however, not accruing the advantages of being first-born, realizes that if Cain's view were true, those advantages would make Cain more likely to have a good life, and Abel less likely. So Abel acts out in order to prove that doing good work does not entitle Cain to have a servile younger brother; rather, by extension, the best reason for doing good work is the satisfaction of a job well-done, while the reward shall come only after death, where we supposedly discover the absolute truth of our choices, since all we can do is our best in life.
This implies that doing the right thing often requires sacrifice, something that the PC understands all too well by the end.
These themes couldn't be more relevant today, where we struggle with entitlement and meritocracy in a vastly unequal society whose playing field, like the field in the story, is anything but level.
Interestingly, this interpretation contradicts the verse in the Targum Jerusalem, which serves as source material for the game, where Abel argues in no uncertain terms that "in goodness was the world created, and in goodness is it conducted. But according to the fruit of good works is it conducted." The game seems to imply that this speech was insincere, which seems like an odd conclusion to draw. In fact, the brothers' positions in the game seem to be close to the opposite of what they are in scripture — but, hey, I'm no Bible scholar.
Of course, understanding that there was a motive in no way excuses the crime. We discover, at the end, whether Cain himself grasps this point.
But philosophy is not the only subject explored in According to Cain. It also explores very effectively some other questions that arise when thinking about the origin of the species, but don't get asked publicly very often. One thing that comes through strongly is that these characters, while they did make mistakes, even grave ones, were doing the best they could under extraordinary conditions.
This is absolutely not merely a religious point. The population explosion is uncomfortable at this end of it, but extrapolating it backward far enough leads to uncomfortable considerations of a different nature, when our species experienced a bottle-neck in numbers. The African Eve studies bear this out. There must have been many sacrifices made for the good of the species. Even without considering modern technology, the existence of other social groupings meant that people generally had somewhere else to go in case of local clashes and other problems. Smaller population implies fewer social resources, no matter how early or late in our timeline. Having so few individuals to rely on must have been a real hardship, and we should be thankful for those hardy forebears who lived and survived over a thousand centuries ago.
To me, the alchemy stuff was cute but not terribly interesting. The puzzle mechanics were derivative of Hadean Lands, and (Spoiler - click to show)it's never explained why the four primary characters should each have a unique characteristic bodily humour not shared with the others. But I think further that my experience of the work of solving the mystery was harmed by the constant hand-holding and coddling in the parser responses and reference entries. I understand the need and the desire to make the game accessible to newbies, but I think it was taken a bit too far. My success would have felt more meaningful if the difficulty in researching alchemical ingredients had been allowed to stand on its own.
It's as if the author felt that I am entitled to see the ending of the game by virtue of having begun it, just as Cain felt entitled. But good interactive fiction, in my view, does not need to assume that I have this right. It does not appear in Graham Nelson's Player Bill of Rights, and with good reason. Whatever else a game is, finishing one can be considered an accomplishment in a way that completing static fiction can't. Exercising the mind is one of the most important things a person can do for his or herself in life, which is why children are encouraged to do it from an early age. Gaming is, in a sense, noble. Performing noble acts involves delayed gratification — a form of sacrifice. For this reason, I felt that this design choice somewhat marred the game's otherwise impressive philosophical self-consistency.
Okay, putting away the soap box.
While the game may not win awards for the best puzzles, it's also true that the puzzles were written to integrate them tightly into the plot in the manner we've come to expect from the best IF. The writing in general is quite good, as would be expected from a published novelist. And, indeed, my next favorite thing about the game, after the philosophical theme, is the atmosphere it creates. The world does feel cataclysmic, as befits the outrage at such a grievous crime when humanity can so ill afford it. But it also feels new and full of possibility. I can only imagine that this balance must have been a challenge to get right. I became so immersed in the world that, during a break in playing, I went to my spice cabinet and opened and smelled each bottle in turn, imagining that I was experiencing each sensation for the first time ever.
The atmosphere is also enhanced by the game's artwork and its appropriately primitivistic and somber background score, which fit well enough that I was surprised to learn that it was not custom-made for the game. It didn't intrude into my concentration, which, for me, says a lot.
Despite the game's general high standards of craft, though, my emotional response to the game was lacking relative to other games that reveal tragic backstory in a similar way, such as Worlds Apart. I'm not sure why that is, other than that the nature of being an investigator doesn't typically involve being moved by the events under investigation. The PC is a pretty hard-nosed, duty-conscious worker, so maybe I felt I didn't have time for hand-wringing. Just get in, find the answers, write the report, and get back.
Or, failing that, just do the best you can.