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Review
The 2023 Comp was notoriously a festival of murder-mysteries and boats, and while we’ve seen our share of the former this year, maritime adventure has been rather thinner on the ground (er). There’s a bit of sea-going amongst the general phantasmagoria of Us Too, and you take ship right at the end of Warrior-Poet, but aside from the inevitable spaceship stuff – which is a different category, to my mind – but that’s pretty much it. So I’m excited that two thirds of the way through the Comp, things are looking up on the boat front! Crescent Sea Story boasts its boatiness in its title, of course, and also offers a lovely watercolor map to trace your progress about its blue-water archipelago.
That’s about the only loveliness to be found, however, since this is a dark story. The protagonist is an amnesiac wizard in a world where people and spirits live in symbiosis – or, as you begin to intuit as you recover your memories, perhaps the relationship is more parasitic than that. As you sail to one island or another, you enter flashbacks that illustrate key moments in your life, jumbled out of order, so beyond the individual challenges in each episode, there’s a metapuzzle of putting them into their proper sequence to suss out who exactly you are, and what you were doing that led you to forget yourself.
This is an engaging structure, and there’s a nice variety to the individual sequences: one starts as a slice of life, with choices primarily keyed to navigating high-school relationship drama, before taking a turn for the macabre, while another sees you performing monotonous task after monotonous task for a sorcerous mentor who seems more focused on getting you to do his chores than teaching you magic. And beyond the shifts in subject matter, the length is also pretty variable, which helps keep things well-paced all the way through to the inevitable climax.
The prose also makes things go down easy. It’s smooth throughout, equally adept at the high-fantasy moments as the quiet, bucolic ones; the style shifts slightly to accommodate these different moods, but not so much as to cause whiplash. I personally like a bit of friction to my writing, especially for fantasy stories, as there are moments when things feel a bit flatter and more contemporary than I’d like – but that’s purely a subjective preference, and the presence of computers and other anachronistic touches indicate that Crescent Sea Stories isn’t actually going for a traditionalist fantasy vibe.
One commonality between the memory-vignettes is that they end with assigning you a character trait, usually based on some climactic choice: the fact that none of these are positive traits (you have your pick of rage, despair, or coldness) is one of many clues that the protagonist’s viewpoint might not be an unbiased one. While your grudge against the gods has its reasons, there are definitely hints that you’ve been shown an incomplete picture – and that regardless of the ends you’ve pursued, the means you’ve employed have put you beyond the moral horizon.
It all makes for a satisfying package, albeit not one without its blemishes. The hardest to ignore of these is the timed text; much of the story requires you to click links to get more text to display, and there’s a noticeable lag before the next paragraphs appear. Meanwhile, choices aren’t offered in list form, but rather via a widget requiring you to click a button to cycle through options, at which point you can click to lock one in. It’s just a little slower and a little fiddlier than you want it to be. Some of the design can exacerbate this sluggishness, especially the training sequence, which has you trudging through a maze and performing repetitive jobs through clicking the same links over and over; it’s thematically appropriate that the protagonist’s impatience would be bubbling over, but I’m not sure the player needed to experience quite so much bleed-through.
These are small quibbles though; Crescent Sea Story is a nicely put-together package, tracking an anti-hero’s journey through engaging reveals and without getting too grimdark. And while the ending shows you triumphant, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re headed for comeuppance in some sequel or spin-off that delves into the folly of your actions – definitely sign me up for that, especially if there are more boats involved.
