Shrapnel

I'm of two minds about this game. First, the good. It is undoubtedly creative and successful in its goal of destroying all the perceptions of IF that a player might have had back when it was first released in 2000. The fact that it features graphic violence, strong language, and lots of shocking content would have made it unique at the time; that this is paired with formal experimentation to such a high degree that it barely qualifies as a "game" would have made it doubly striking. Add to this that it takes place in a debased parody of text adventure milestone Zork's iconic white house? Our expectations have been gleefully shattered. I think this accounts for a lot of the praise it received at the time, but even beyond its innovations Shrapnel remains an interesting and entertaining experiment.

Now, the bad. Like most of Adam Cadre's old interactive fiction that I've replayed recently, Shrapnel feels juvenile. The game's shocking Southern Gothic content is kind of a red herring and does not actually have much bearing once a certain narrative twist is revealed, which to me cheapens all the trauma we are required to wade through. If an author is going to go so far as to drop multiple racial slurs in such a short game, I'm expecting and hoping that it's going to lead somewhere important. Here, it does not.

If we were allowed to play through some of the interesting narrative threads that are only described to us second-hand; if the characters were developed further than as mere accumulations of violence and trauma; if the graphic content felt like it had more purpose than shock value; if the ending twist were given room to breathe rather than being presented as an interaction-free info dump; we would have a much longer game that loses some of its iconoclastic punch in exchange for a deeper and more meaningful experience. As is, Shrapnel is memorable but unfortunately slight.