A Mouse Speaks to Death

What is this?

In A Mouse Speaks to Death, you’re a mouse at the end of your life. Death has come for you, but before you go he asks you to reminisce about the life you led. From there you go through several rounds of choosing a memory to experience (from a group of three available, all randomly selected from a bigger pool) and then playing through it. Each memory is a self-contained storylet with branching choices, so you if the cards are in your favor you can play through any given one multiple times to “remember” it differently.

The overall result is a slice-of-life (or to be more accurate, several small slices of life) of what it’s like to be a mouse in the author’s rodent world. The mice farm, hunt, live, love, gather, experiment, and die all under the feet of the mysterious Eaters (i.e., us) and the player can focus on what interests them the most.

What did I like?

This work is part of a greater universe that the author has written and that I’m not familiar with. I’m always nervous when approaching games like this because making them independently accessible to a newbie is a real challenge – trust me, I would know! So I’m happy to report that AMST pulls this off flawlessly. The world of the mice is a fascinating echo of ours high above, but just different enough to feel new and exciting. The vignettes frequently focus on something new and exciting to our mouse, thus giving them a perfect excuse to explain them to our player. Sometimes these things are basic parts of mousedom that they encounter for the first time growing up, and sometimes they’re more unusual experiences like finding human artefacts, but no two are alike and there’s always joy in seeing something new. I didn’t find myself repeating storylets because I was much more curious about both this world and about the life of our hero.

Also, I couldn’t bring myself to click on any of the obviously signposted negative outcomes for our player mouse, so clearly 1) I was engaged from the word go and 2) I am a huge weenie.

What could use improvement?

There’s no counter telling you how many stories you get to go through, and by about 2/3 through I started to both get confused (should I be doing something to advance besides looking at storylets?) and also they started to wear out their welcome. A visible turn counter, an option to end your reminiscence early, or just a lower turn limit would have been a great help here. The storylet variety also wasn’t great enough to support the number of turns you get unless you’re interested in replaying them, which (as above) I wasn’t. There was also an issue where you could get duplicates of the same storylet in the same turn, thus cutting down your available options

Other thoughts

I see you, fellow Terry Pratchett fan! I love the Death of Rats so this was a real treat.

Conclusion

This was a real treat, and a great game to start off the Review-a-thon. I hope this is a good indicator of what’s to come!

A creative look at a different world in this vignette-based game where you play as a sentient mouse. The vignettes were well written and interesting, the worldbuilding and mouse culture were particular highlights. I would have liked it if your choices affected the rest of the game more, and if there were more choices of vignette (often you would be forced to take ones you didn’t want, which made exploring the larger plot threads cumbersome).

In this game, you play as a recently-deceased mouse who’s been given the opportunity to recall your life before Death takes you away. Each round (a single playthrough is comprised of eight), you have a choice between three possible memories, presented as cards with titles and brief descriptions. The game’s paratext says that there are a whopping 46 of these total! I’ve played through five or six times now and have still only seen 26 (I didn’t always get new-to-me cards, and sometimes purposely chose repeat memories so I could make different choices within them).

As I often do, I’ll start by talking about the UI, which is lovely; it includes a non-standard font that I still found perfectly readable, as well as lightly drawn background art depicting the space where the mice live, complete with cute isopods. There’s also a menu with a glossary and a handy setting to change the font size (although it took me a bit to realize that it existed, because the isopod drawing that opens it blends into the background a bit—and I'm pretty sure the font resets to the default every time you replay, which is a bit annoying). And in the interstitial sequences there’s an illustration of Death themself, a fittingly skeletal, hooded mouse. I wrote recently that I don’t care a lot about art in IF games, but this is a nice touch, elegant in its simplicity, and allows Death’s dialogue to be presented in speech bubbles. It helps set the “conversation with Death” mood better than text-only would, I think. Certain memories also trigger the addition of significant items to the background art, which was both fun and useful as my subsequent playthroughs began to blend together; these unique illustrations were good reminders of what important memories I had experienced that go-round.

I quite enjoyed the storylets themselves, too. The worldbuilding is great—details like the mice having a fungus farm and Floki the Tinker helping make mobility aids for your daughter particularly stood out to me—and you learn more and more on repeated playthroughs; it’s also fun to see NPCs recur in different memories. There’s a good variety to the memories, too, with spectrums from adventurous to domestic, solitary to social, nature-focused to human-focused. As mentioned, within each memory you have several choices, too, which help characterize the PC. I found the game emotionally engaging, in both the general poignancy of looking back on your life, and in specific moments in the memories—such as (Spoiler - click to show)my friend Mip dying because of a choice I made, and the storylines about having pups. I enjoyed the experience enough to play multiple times, and intend to play more to uncover the hinted-at larger plot!

There were some things that made it less smooth than it could have been, though. There are typos throughout (never anything major, but fairly pervasive); several terms I went to look up in the glossary weren’t there (“nest rot” being one); and on my first playthrough, I thought I was getting accidental repeated cards when “Nestmouse” kept coming up after I’d already picked it (I did later discover that it’s just that this same title is used for several different memories, though). Another thing is that in the middle portion of the game, the interstitial dialogue with Death gets repetitive; I would have liked if it varied more. And then I’m torn about the adjectives that appear at the end based on what choices you made in each storylet—in a way it’s a nice summary, and I enjoyed the contrast or even contradiction between them—even mice contain multitudes!—and the way that illustrates your growth/change over time. On the other hand, each memory being summed up by one or two adjectives seems a bit reductive, and the animation of the words dropping away was much too slow.

My other main critique is that I wanted more of a sense of continuity. The author explained on the Intfiction forum that you’re getting one memory for each year of your life, but I hadn’t realized that while playing (although I’ve since noticed that it's kind of indicated by one line of Death’s dialogue), as there wasn’t a sense of the arc of a life; the memories didn’t necessarily seem to build on each other, save for a few that were clearly unlocked by having seen a certain prior one. While on the one hand I liked the isolated snapshots, how you're picking out these few individual incidents to reflect on, the lack of continuity was jarring sometimes, with the endings of some memories feeling like cliffhangers that never resolved. I might prefer a structure where each set of memories you get to pick from is related in some way to the prior chosen memory, as I think the playthroughs I enjoyed most were the ones that had more of a throughline.

Finally, this is the tiniest thing, but as a rat lover I must protest the portrayal of rats as speaking in broken English! Rats are very smart, and having had both pet rats and mice, rats are definitely the smarter of the two. But all my quibbles aside, it’s an impressive and well done game, and I'm certainly going to return to visit some more mousey memories.