House of Wolves

Since prehistoric times, people loved anthropomorphic animals; one of the reasons is a huge potential for generalization.

When watching movie actors with certain facial features, hair color, skin color, this human concreteness of detail somewhat impedes seeing in them our friends, our relatives, ourselves - and, thereby, somewhat hinders our understanding of universal things the movie is trying to say. But Judy Hopps, an anthropomorphic rabbit, looks like many and many different young girls from different parts of the world.

Aesop's fables are always about humans - but not about specific humans. Even when they feature human characters, those are always extremely abstract figures with minimum individuality: "a shepherd", "a fisher".

House of Wolves is a very short game about a young human who is being raised by eponymous talking canines. The wolves fit here especially well: on one hand, they're dangerous predators, long feared and associated with cruelty; on the other hand, there are many stories of wolves adopting human children. And they are similar to dogs, so familiar to us and so capable of loving us... in their own way.

I personally find wolves wonderful and beautiful creatures, but it doesn't really matter in this game - because, in truth, it's not about wolves at all. It's about humans, just like an Aesop's fable. About parents abusing their children and trying to shape them into something they could never be. There are many ways to understand it; you can read it as a fable about being transgender, or about being vegetarian, or about many and many other things. There's a huge potential for generalization.

The story mechanics is of a particular interest. (Major spoilers follow.)

(Spoiler - click to show)The game gives you an illusion of choice and then takes it from you. It's a technique used in several classical games such as Rameses. Although it may seem to make a story resemble static fiction, it's actually a powerful twist that only IF can manage. Never having freedom of choice from the start and having freedom forcefully taken away are two completely different experiences.

Your life has looked almost exactly the same for every day of the past however-many months. You wake up, do the bare minimum to keep yourself presentable, and then usually sit at your computer half-watching a man hundreds of miles away from you draw on his computer. Presumably these drawings are important. Sometimes, you even write down the words he says; this is generally considered to be a good use of your time.

You’ve found it hard to believe you’re a person, lately. You have a vague idea that people are supposed to go outside, see their friends, take walks in parks, et cetera. Instead you just sit at home, and go through the motions of study. Stagnating.

This is a short, heartfelt Twine game about a remote student who feels isolation while also being forced to eat slabs of meat every day due to being a wolf.

It's a nice blend of anxious mundanity and stressful metaphor that reminds me a lot of Early Twine.

The story itself is pretty simple, a daily routine of boredom and suffering mixed with longing and hope for something better one day.

The writing is where it shines; I loved the explanation of encapsulation and abstraction (which I constantly have to remind students about for IB exams, since they often forget what it means) and how it ties neatly into the other themes of the story. So I think that's by far the best part of the game, how expressively and neatly it's written.

This presents as a graphically handsome choice-select, of the (Spoiler - click to show)choices don’t matter subgenre. Like most of this genre, its effectiveness comes down to its thematic resonance and its use of interactivity to enhance that. These works typically flirt openly with devolution to short fiction, which is not as prejudicial as it sounds.

I found the interactivity here effective when it leapt beyond the page-turning-link default. Presenting illusory choice, click-to-continue as a way to convey the tension of forced progress were both used effectively, if sparingly. They ably underscored the central point of the work - and the protagonist’s duress.

The theme I found a little too light. Its most obvious interpretation seemed to be of (Spoiler - click to show)a home-schooled vegetarian child with aggressively contrarian parents, with all the deep and despairing angst that scenario produces. There were some interesting comparisons drawn between software constructs and life in this state that were a highlight for me. The education level there did call into question a young child’s experiences and maybe pointed to a more sinister (paranormal question mark?) adult situation. It was all left so unclear and implicit though, that any number of interpretations could fit. Clearly the player is aligned with the protagonist, and meant to feel the despair and coercion. Coercion bad, right?! It also felt… overly dramatic? In a way that spoke to perhaps some immaturity of the protagonist?

I did a mental exercise. What if the coercion in question was vegetables, broccoli say, with the protagonist determined to eat nothing but twinkies. The angst and despair of a young PC would still feel completely of a piece and would require almost no changes to text. But boy would it change the theme of the piece, no? Look, I am absolutely NOT drawing an equivalence between vegetarian ethics and immaturity. I am saying that the theme here was unfocused enough to allow both interpretations and by extension that distasteful connection. The work’s heightened melodrama, coupled with the spare underlying details, called its premise into question in a way that was kind of interesting but begged all kinds of questions it couldn’t answer. And it was certainly undermining to the narrative presented.

Ultimately, this disconnect was too great to move me beyond a mechanical engagement with the piece. Ambiguity in art is very interesting, if that ambiguity swirls around a core central theme. Ambiguity OF that theme is not as compelling, and can drive some actively objectionable connections.

Played: 9/2/24
Playtime: 5 min
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

(This is an edited version of a review that first appeared in my IF blog during IFComp 2024.)

My clinical-sounding and admittedly cynical summation of House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo might be, "Depression Quest but shorter and with you forced to suffer at others' hands as well." I had predicted what kind of experience was ahead when the first choice I picked of three basically said, "You can't do that yet, pick a different choice." Then the second choice I picked said, "You can't do that either, pick a different choice."

This is a Twine piece with an unclear metaphor that could be about being completely depressed, broken and non-functional, hiding these facts from the world, and also being in an environment of zero care or flexibility, and where you are forced to go against your own wishes in terms of what you want to do, or when, or even what to eat. This manifests as having a round of chores to do each day, forced eating supervised by an unspecified They at night, and the visiting of three other storylets on the way.

The storylets were the best parts, I thought, because they offered specificity. They approached character and situation. Learning, friends, college, those kinds of things. Returning to the House Of Wolves at night returns the prose to a pained but too generic dirge of hopelessness. That is what I most disliked about this piece in the end, its non-specific version of all-out hopelessness. I have made this same criticism of many other works of this type over time.

I don't understand the wolf metaphor of the title. It would be disingenuous of me to say I have no idea what it could be about. The trouble is it, and the work, could be about almost anything. Conformity. Vegetarianism. Mental illness. Abusive families. Society. Hunting (wolves hunt). Pack mentality. Metaphorical realism. Symbolic fantasy. What is actually going on with the protagonist? I found no motivation or evidence to throw down in any particular direction. Specifics can suggest forms and forms can suggest specifics. House of Wolves is in the grey zone of this relationship.

I was glad (in a broad way) that it ended on a note of hope, but really, it didn't feel like it should. There's not much hope on the way, so the end feels like a deus ex.

This piece gives Trigger warnings. They are exhaustive for its short length, and really do it no favours. Too long, too much detail, robbing the piece of surprise, overstimulating the listed effects before they've even been attempted to be executed by art.

There is also a paradox with warnings that encompass the whole of something of this size that they amount to a message saying, 'If you relate to any of this (the entire listed content of the game), maybe you shouldn't play this game.' Which is taking the target audience and turning them away.

House Of Wolves is plainly not my cup of tea, but it does have a simple grace of execution and presentation on its own terms.