Slated For Demolition

The surrealist IF game about trauma is a sufficiently well-represented subgenre that by this point I have a standard bit of patter I trot out for my reviews: these pieces often have spikily compelling writing and can be engaging on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but they also run the risk of being too idiosyncratic to resonate with the audience, as it’s very easy for an author to present snatches of imagery, language, and events that are incredibly personally meaningful, but which lack enough context to ground them in lived experience. No matter how great your prose or vivid your imagination, if the player can’t connect to what they’re reading, there’s a limit to how much impact your game can have.

Slated for Demolition is a very good Twine game in this vein, and as if to prove how little I know, one of the two things holding it back from being really great is that at a climactic moment, it reaches for universality rather than staying rooted in the subjective. At least the other thing is the more conventional challenge of underexplaining a key metaphor.

Before circling back to those issues, though, it’s worth dwelling on the ways that Slated for Demolition really works. While the subject-matter here is pretty familiar – early-20s anomie interrupted by sexual assault – the authorial voice is immediately confident, equally at ease describing the bleakness of a late-night suburb, the degrading consequences of alcohol dependence, and magical-realist irruptions of beauty and terror. The sentences have rhythm, the anecdotes have enlivening details, and the tone never stays stuck too long in one place, preventing the player from being desensitized through repetition. An example, more or less at random:

"Once when you were 18, you went to a party and drank your entire personality away all night long. You managed a few passed-out hours of sleep, and then you had to wake up and go to work for the early shift.

"It was your turn to stock the freezers. You knelt on the hard concrete floor, gingerly placing TGI Fridays-brand meals and trying your hardest not to vomit absolutely everywhere."

The gameplay also knows how to change things up. The overall structure is that of a quest, or a shaggy dog story – you leave your house in search of a Slurpee, but compulsions keep dragging you into more errands, and memory drags you back into reveries, leading to distinct set-pieces as you pass a long dark night of the soul. Some of these involve straightforward choice-based branching, but others require the player to move through or explore a persistent space; a stand-out vignette is more or less an extended puzzle, as you try to figure out which apartment an acquaintance lives in when all you know is the building’s address.

This kind of variety could risk undermining the game’s sense of progression, but one of its conceits is that in each scene, you’re collecting items to satisfy an obscure shopping list you find in your pocket. While the significance of each is typically unclear, wanting to complete the collection kept me engaged in the details of what was happening even in the strangest of the sequences, and provided a sense of pacing across the game’s almost-two-hour running time (the list is also rather forgiving – even if you miss something, just before the endgame you’re given a chance to zoom back to pick up the items you lost).

That endgame is where Slated for Demolition attempts something surprising and audacious, which I can’t help admire even though it didn’t quite work for me (I admire it enough to spoiler-block it, in fact, but the short version is that it makes a move for the universal rather than the particular, when the particular had previously served it very well indeed). (Spoiler - click to show)After doing a lot of work to situate the player in the protagonist’s subjectivity and revealing the details of the traumatic event exerting its gravitational pull throughout the rest of the game, the protagonist begins a ritual to attain closure – except before performing it, the player is invited to think about some pain they’ve experienced and use the ritual structure to fill in details for their own exorcism. It’s a lovely idea for bridging the gap between author and player, and I made a good-faith effort to engage with it, but I found the exercise deeply uncomfortable, because it felt like I was overwriting the protagonist’s, and perhaps the author’s, experiences with my own. Trauma is trauma, to a certain degree, but as the rest of the game demonstrates, the specific details of what was done by whom, to whom, and how, make an enormous difference – and that’s especially the case when dealing with sexual assault, given the role gender and power dynamics play. For some players, I’m sure, the details of the ritual would resonate deeply and the memories it evokes would be congruent with the game’s themes. But for me, even making the attempt felt like overstepping.

My other complaint is that the strongest image in the game didn’t cohere in a satisfying way. I also don’t want to spoil this too much, but the blurb and cover art give away that every once in a while, the protagonist feels like she’s dissolving into pasta and red sauce, and while that sounds silly, in fact it’s written to be the most upsetting piece of body horror I’ve come across in years. I was delighted by how much these sequences made me squirm, but while there are a few hints for how they connect to the game’s broader concerns, the hints are rather thin and ultimately the metaphor doesn’t connect very neatly with the title and framing idea about a house fated for destruction. It’s a textbook example of surrealism that needs a bit more connective tissue, so while Slated for Demolition definitely challenges my theory for what makes these kinds of games succeed, at least I don’t need to throw it out entirely.