My Brother; The Parasite

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Title is relevant, I promise.

Summitting Everest, as a concept, has had a weird journey during my lifetime. It used to be shorthand for “The pinnacle of human achievement, technically doable but laughably out of reach for all but a handful of the best of us.” Now it is, “Yet another achievement available to the sufficiently privileged at unjustifiable and ignored social and ecological cost.” It is a flaw of us, as a species, that it still captures our imagination and cannot completely shake that first symbology. Honestly though, isn’t Everest itself at least partially to blame? C’mon, tallest mountain in the world (yeah, lets not get into technical height minutia, this is a rhetorical device)… Tallest Mountain in the world? It was always going to be more symbol than place. You brought this on yourself, Everest.

So Everest as an achievement. The first phase is getting to base camp, which is a nontrivial physical challenge of its own. Climbers, at least responsible ones, often turn back once hitting it. If there weren’t this haunting peak looming behind it, it could conceivably be a celebrated physical challenge of its own. Except, of course, no one would bother EXCEPT for the peak behind it.

MBTP accomplished the enviable feat of getting me to base camp, but could not get me to the summit behind it. It is an interactive novel, decidedly not a game. The entire purpose of the interactivity is to pace the text for dramatic effect. This is a full on legit use of interactivity, and it often works here. I think I have more patience for timed text than most and by and large its employment here was ok, though there were infrequent moments of ‘I’m waiting, story…’ The presentation is very attractive - blurry graphical backgrounds suggesting the protagonist’s lack of engagement with her surroundings were a really nice touch. The portrait art was very appropriate for the story, grounding its specifics around the characters in an unsettling style. The graphically interesting background that set up the post-death conceit nicely conveyed its “sidebar” deployment.

The text presentation was good, adding and replacing text to nice dramatic effect with one exception that really undid a lot of its good work. Probably due to some default browser settings, sometimes the protagonist’s thoughts or observations were rendered in a dark grey against a black background that was ALMOST impossible to detect, and definitely impossible to read. The only way to consume it was to highlight the text with a cursor, which on my browser meant a color palette deeply at war with the words and mood it was trying to build. If a deliberate artistic choice, I can squint and see why it might be made: to force the reader to probe a bit deeper to get into the protag’s head. But between the clumsy mechanics and mood-disrupting colors it was so not worth it. Maybe a cleaner way to get this effect would be a less fussy mouseover that the author could better control color choice? If it was not deliberate, just really, really unfortunate.

Even so, I would say the presentation was an overall positive, just deeply undermined by the dark font choice that made it rougher than it should have been.

The narrative is about a sister, conversing with her (Spoiler - click to show)abusive brother who through interestingly enough reasons has about a week of post-death pseudo-consciousness. The protagonist relives her (Spoiler - click to show)childhood trauma, inflicted by the brother. The early stages of this story really worked for me. Her deeply conflicted feelings, estrangement, guilt, yearning and poisoning relationship with her mother. It pretty sure-handedly got me to base camp, despite the presentation challenges. In particular the protag’s assertions of love felt deliciously like trying to convince herself of something expected but not felt. Base Camp achieved!

There is a summit to this work, and here I think I got lost on the way. My narrative guide suddenly started leaping ahead miles at a time, like some Kryptonian mountain goat, leaps I couldn’t follow and could barely track with my eyes. I’ll focus on two, and they are super spoilery. After the careful step-by-step buildup we are delivered to a wonderfully conflicted emotional place. Looming large over it all was the question of the mother. (Spoiler - click to show)How did she let it get to this place? What is HER culpability? This was kind of ignored by the text, and in fact seemingly exonerated her without examination. How do I make that jump Supergoat? You have to show me that!

The climax of the piece has a different problem. While I can conceivably head cannon the protagonist’s mental state from base camp to summit, so many precise steps are needed to get me there and none of them were documented. “Here we are at base camp, let me tie my shoe, where did you go Supergoat?, holy crap how did you get THERE?” It doesn’t help, I think, that the central mechanism of the post-death conversation is a pretty shaky construct. If it is a hand-waive, that’s kind of ok when it’s just an excuse to enable the conversation. But when it suddenly needs to carry plot load it is way too fragile, evokes way too many mechanical questions it can’t answer, and collapses under the stress. Thank goodness it was not a ladder bridge over a chasm that the guide marched me onto!

Ok I have officially tortured this metaphor into war crime territory. To sum: really capable emotional setup. Super effective graphical presentation, except disproportionately undermined by one sour choice. Took jumps to climax I couldn’t follow. Sparks of Joy for sure, Notable graphic intrusion.

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably hard to read
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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