Temptation in the Village

I don’t mean to be controversial here, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: Kafka was a great author. Oh, I know some might disagree – including the man himself, who famously wanted all his writing to be burned after his death – but for all that he’s not great at interiority and he’s better at situations than plot, he sure nailed the 20th century. But beyond his ideas (bureaucracy, alienation, the absurd), he sure could sling a sentence even when working in a more mundane register. Temptation in the Village is an interactive rendering of one of his fragments, and where the game sticks close to his prose, there’s something about it that makes me squirm in my seat with glee:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you. You try to convey this in the way you greet the people standing at the gates; their replies are friendly, though a little reserved."

I can’t easily articulate why this delights me, but it does: the simple words, the emotional immediacy, the accumulation of simple clauses creating a momentum belied by the fact that nothing in particular is happening, the small note of unease at the end… Sure, this borders on the pastoral, but when we get down to the grubby business of human interaction, the distinctively Kafkaesque note begins to emerge. For example, after you decide to take lodgings in the village and bandy some words with a curiously-hostile passerby, a supercilious young man pops atop a wall to tell you you can stay at a farmhouse:

“That’s right,” he replies, with the same arrogance in his reply that there is in all his behavior. He sits above like a master, you stand down below like a petty servant; you have a great desire to stir him up a little by whirling a stone at him.

“Beds for the night are furnished here, not to everyone, but only to those to whom they are offered,” the young man continues.

The near-tautology at the end: lovely.

The gameplay here is pretty minimal – just moving about the map and taking simple actions (talking, sleeping) according to the game’s prompts, which lend a minimal interactivity to the fragment. Sometimes the suggestions can get pretty bald, telling you exactly what the protagonist is feeling and what you should do next, and while these can feel intrusive, I think that’s forgivable due the exigencies of adaptation, especially of a piece so light on plot as this: without clear narrative stakes or character goals to structure things, a heavier authorial hand helps the player avoid flailing.

The trouble is that this is just a fragment, and the author’s given in to the temptation to finish it. It’s hopefully no major critique to note that the writing in this section isn’t as good as Kafka’s, and both the plot and the structure open up a bit: the bit Kafka wrote breaks off after the protagonist experiences an odd incident upon awakening in the farmhouse in the middle of the night, but from there the game’s narrative has you deciding to work as a farmhand for a while, which requires you to perform some chores to prove that you’re up to the task. This involves some satisfying but very typical parser-puzzle business – you need to oil a rusty wheel, things of that nature – and while there’s a consistent undercurrent suggesting that things aren’t right, this comes across more as the locals playing a practical joke on an outsider, which doesn’t contrast well with the more uncanny, slightly-off vibe of the first half. And then the ending strikes the least Kafkaesque note I can imagine:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

Still, a too-pat finale can’t negate how engaging I found the first part of the piece; I do wish the author had been more willing to let narrative uncertainty lie and end the game the same place Kafka did, but that’s not because the second half is bad, just comparatively banal. And heck, compared to the various forgettable-at-best attempts at adding closure to incomplete narratives – stabs at solving the Mystery of Edwin Drood or bringing Sanditon in for a landing or the last seasons of Game of Thrones – it could have been a lot worse.