You

I was glad to see the name ‘Carter Gwertzman’ because their (one’s? zher? the pronouns do seem to matter after playing this game, but I don’t see them listed anywhere) games are generally imaginative, creative, and not too hard to complete.

This is perhaps my favorite of this author’s games so far. It uses the idea of fairies or similar creatures stealing names and identities, a very old concept that was popularized in recent years by stories like SCP-4000. I made a game about it this year called Faery: Swapped.

Carter Gwertzman’s game is a color-focused Twine game that makes clever use of CSS styling. You (and the name ‘You’ is important) are someone who has lost their identity in a strange forest. To get help, you have to explore and help others in an attempt to recover your true identity.

There are various mushrooms in the game that can affect your size and color, which directly changes the text in the game. Pronouns can be modified, too.

The game openly operates as well as a metaphor for personal change and growth, where sometimes our self-identity becomes something different than we thought it would be. It reminds me of myself, where I planned for years on becoming a professor at a specific school, and when I didn’t achieve that goal I fell into deep depression (and started reviewing IF as a coping mechanism) and spent the next few years rewriting who I wanted to be in life.

Very glad to have the experience playing this!

I’m pretty ecumenical in my IF tastes, I think, but I admit I sometimes stifle a groan when I see an entry in that most challenging of genres, the allegorical game, coming up in the queue. Possibly that’s just down to personal preference, but I do think it’s a hard nut to crack: how do you come up with a scenario that’s comprehensible to the player, but obscure enough not to be obvious? How do you engender connection to the material when the plot might not be happening in a literal sense? How do you take advantage of the freedom allegory offers while retaining enough cause-and-effect logic to establish stakes?

Well. You know that saying about how every hard problem, there’s a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong? At the risk of running afoul of the adage, let me speculate a way to resolve the many issues raised by this vexed genre: don’t worry about being too simple or too obvious, pick something nice and straightforward, and concentrate on building enough texture into your allegory so that it doesn’t feel glib.

If that’s not a fully generalizable answer, don’t blame me, blame You, because that’s the tack it takes and it’s an entirely successful one. It doesn’t take much chin-scratching to understand what the game is getting at – you leave school only to find yourself lost in an unfamiliar forest, and finding that you feel curiously alien to yourself, a sense of disconnection that’s tied to the pronouns you use for yourself not feeling right. This could apply to many an adolescent identity crisis, but the conflict here clearly has a lot to do with gender, which is reinforced by the central action of the game: casting about for a way home, you come across a crow and goat who offer to help you if you assist them with gathering the items they need for the wedding (something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…)

This is all accomplished via a light parserlike interface; there’s compass navigation around a small map, all handled with inline links, and a modest inventory available through a backpack link in the sidebar. There’s pretty much just a general “use” verb, but You has an additional cool narrative-mechanical gimmick up its sleeve: many of the actions you take or items you use alter your pronouns. You’re always “you”, but the font can be bigger or smaller, or boast an underline or an accent, or be subject to other transformations, and while some of the puzzles involve straightforward inventory manipulation, most of them require mastering these typographical manipulations, and understanding how they’ll translate narratively. I won’t spoil the specifics, since I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises given the game’s short running time, but there are at least two or three puzzles that I found both entirely intuitive, and entirely delightful.

I also found the writing as satisfying as the design. The fantasy world isn’t especially memorable by itself, but again, it’s got neat little details that lend it just enough weight – the aforementioned crow/goat couple are especially charming:

“Not feeling quite yourself lately?” One nods. “One understands. It was barely a month ago that one’s own self was lost down a waterfall.”

Zhe laughs at the memory. “It’s true,” zhe adds. “Had to go down to the mud flats with a net. But it got back where it needed to be in short order.” Zhe taps a talon against zher chin thoughtfully. “THEY helped greatly with the task. THEY might be able to help you too, if you ask THEM.”

THEY do indeed wind up helping, once you’re able to get the pair what they need, in a climactic sequence that does a lovely job of presenting the player with a no-wrong-answers choice that nonetheless has real weight – I wound up stopping to think for two or three minutes before I finally selected how I wanted to go about creating my new self.

So yes, as allegories go, this one is quite straightforward but that doesn’t make it any less effective. You presents a dilemma that’s admittedly not especially novel in IF these days, even for a boring old cis guy like myself, but uses its fantastical conceit to present the situation from a bit of an angle, which somehow makes it come through more clearly. That’s the power of allegory when done well, and You does it well enough that I really do think it’s something of a blueprint.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a quasi-Fairy Tale-esque story about rediscovering the protagonist’s identity, helpfully identified as ‘You.’ It starts with a sharp edged encroaching alternate reality erasing YOUr identity, but quickly settles into a peppier, almost welcoming tale of talking animals, fanciful mushroom-based transformations and… not sure what else.

Let’s start with the graphic design of the thing. I am always pumped when authors leverage even simple color/font/graphic tricks in service of their narrative. Here it was mostly successful, though some font/background choices clashed in a way that made it hard to read. I didn’t mind that SO much, as it certainly conveyed a sense of protagonist being at odds with the environment, which was very much my player experience as well. It ALSO consistently and intriguingly foregrounded the changing nature of YOU. It was a nice, subtle way of keeping the central mystery and tension in play. On nearly every screen, some graphic trick was reminding you of the core challenge of the piece - resolving the mystery of yourself. Ok, the more I think about it, the more it is clearly NOT subtle, it is brightly spot-lit on every page. This need not be a criticism.

Elsewhere I have observed that two common puzzle-based choice-select stumbles are devolving into obvious success paths or obtuse lawn mowering. This may be the first time I experienced both in a single work. An early puzzle is to secure four items for a whimsical in-matrimony-res couple. Follows a pretty clearly signposted/almost railroaded series of mushroom-object juggling. The first three fell without much problem, or, frankly, challenge. The work was super clear on what needed to happen to advance.

Then the fourth item stopped me in my tracks. There was definitely a remaining mushroom area that felt necessary to advance, but there was no clue how. FTR, I speak of the ‘something new’ item. The world was tight enough, and objects sparse enough, that I devolved to lawn mowering every combination I could think of. Twice. And was foiled at every turn. Clearly, I was missing something, as it is inconceivable that a bug this prominent would make release. Just in case I fell into a weird unwinnable state bug though, I restarted and tried to vary my formula. I ended up in the same “I feel like I have tried everything, yet am stuck back in a loop” state.

Do I put this on the game? I honestly don’t know. It FEELS like, as seems so often true, it is my problem as a player overloooking the obvious. Given the obviousness of the previous puzzles, it feels particularly damning of my intellect. The one charge I COULD level at the game is that this puzzle’s cluing paradigm shifted quite dramatically relative its predecessors. If I’m not just a dummy of epic proportions. For sure it was a breaking point for me. Prior to this state, I enjoyed the graphic flourishes, but the story felt too thin (it was probably just starting!) and puzzle play too mechanical to compensate. Hitting a roadblock at this early state, with no guiding hints available, guaranteed this would be the only impression I could develop.

Had I progressed deeper before this point, the work might have accumulated enough good will to jockey up higher in my mindshare. Certainly the portent attached to YOU felt like it would build to some payoff. But to hit this so early - twice in just over half an hour – left me in the unenviable position of halting my play with tons of clock left. And simply not being motivated enough to break my review-bubble to search out unblocking solutions.

Yeah, I’m not really satisfied with this either.

Played: 9/29/24
Playtime: 35m, 2 loops, seemingly stuck both times on ‘something new’
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/intrusive puzzle design? or player shortcomings?
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