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Review
Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review
A pleasant, slice-of-life work about two young people vacationing in the mountains, poised to enjoy beautiful views, hikes, and each other. What monster is going to be negatively disposed to that? I know it feels like me asking that question is setting up a ‘ooh, look at me, I’m a monster’ turn, but no. I’m on board.
Well, for all of five minutes. There is a class of parser puzzle that has always rubbed me the wrong way - the PLAYER needing tiresome trial and error to ‘solve’ a mundane interaction that the CHARACTER has full knowledge and competence in. These fall into three broad categories:
1. Endlessly searching for objects the protagonist has full knowledge of
2. Determining magic verbs to accomplish obvious tasks
3. Difficult world interactions that working sight would render trivial
Actually, there is a fourth - cluelessly exploring environs the protagonist is well familiar with. That is the one category we are NOT treated to here. Yes, this is ‘Stumble Through the Obvious: the Game.’
When I encounter these puzzles in the wild, my only real defense is to think, ‘ok, this is a gameplay compromise. I need to discover X on my own, to catch up to character knowledge.’ If the game quietly creates an atmospheric bubble around this information gathering, I can pause my engagement to get spun up on background, then reengage the main puzzles, pretending that dissonance never happened. Not great, but a compromise I have agreed to over time.
But when the game proceeds to punish or CHIDE me for this lack of knowledge? “S’matter player? Just show your passport!” >look for passport in drawer “Nope. You’re a moron player, just give me the passport.” >look for passport in jacket “Nope. I swear you are just awful at this.” Then it was (Spoiler - click to show)IN YOUR POCKET THE WHOLE TIME??? Screw you game, you’re just having a go at me. It feels like the game is being deliberately provocative here, by refusing to (Spoiler - click to show)list inventory in your pockets then MAKING YOU (Spoiler - click to show)SEARCH THEM ONE BY ONE. This is clearly a deliberate choice, as once you discover items (Spoiler - click to show)in your pockets, they are dutifully listed going forward.
Another mechanism that compounds this is stingy inventory management. You spend so much time juggling things in things in things, just to get them to your hand and use. This is not fun when it injects friction into unrelated puzzles. Here, it seems to be conceived of AS the puzzle itself! I don’t struggle this hard in real life, why should I here? More importantly, why is this fun?
With a work a this committed to blocking progress at the most trivial interactions, incomplete implementation effects are magnified. Being told repeatedly that you cannot (Spoiler - click to show)take a knife, but the only way to progress is to (Spoiler - click to show)>cut X with knife is next level progress-trolling. This moment actually brought unintended laughter as I pictured an observer’s view of the PC fumbling his hands all over a juice bar, ineptly unable to work objects in plain sight. Another laughable moment was being trapped in a bathroom because environmental descriptions omitted details that were necessary to progress. I imagined my game-partner outside, hearing me bang about for a half hour before escaping… a closed door.
If you think the game could not be MORE confrontive about its labored choice architecture, hoo boy it’s got a card left to play. This game really ups the ante by pairing you with an impatient romantic partner that will chide you repeatedly for NOT doing the simple things the game makes difficult. Then up it further by ominously noting ‘Your partner has asked you this X times.’ Is there anything more portentous than “I’ve asked you this three times, young man!” She was unsympathetic to my cries of “I’m trying, it’s not me, it’s the game!” At one point, the narrator describes the partner as ‘shrewish.’ In the moment I rebelled at that - that is a LOADED word narrator, surely that’s not what you meant?! By endgame I was forced to conclude, no, that was a pretty deliberate application. When you are fumbling to do the simplest thing, having someone repeatedly OBSERVE that to you is just the worst.
The crowning indignity of the game is that after subjecting me to a series of unforgiving, inadequately clued and implemented puzzles of mundane activity… after all that, the game ended BEFORE OUR FIRST NATURE HIKE. It was the triple crown of low stakes, high difficulty and no payoff.
Part of me actually admires this. The idea of gamifying an unspoken clumsy trope of parsers, of leaning it into it so hard it is the WHOLE GAME, there is a subversive charge to that. Marrying it to prose that is light, warm, and perfectly conveys the pleasant anticipation of holiday with great company makes its chutzpah GREATER. I can see the same wry playfulness of its prose in the game’s central conception. There is a difference though between ‘playing along’ and ‘being played’ and for me, this experience was so much the latter not the former. So yes, I can admire the conceit, but that admiration doesn’t make the playing of it less Mechanical.
Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 1hr, got out of bathroom
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive fussiness
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
