A Mouse Speaks to Death

Played: 7/17/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs, 3playthroughs, 23 of 46 memories

I like mice. They have a clear-eyed view of cats.

This work is a choice-select piece, pretty much exactly what the title suggests. You are recalling incidents from a long mouse life to the Murine Reaper before your final curtain. The world is from a mouse based RPG, which, why not? There was a Watership Down one too. The big memory choices present as cards in a hand - you choose what scene to ‘play,’ then refine that scene with a series of subordinate choices. Ultimately, you have created a specific memory of your mousy life. After a series of these, during which a long and varied life is assembled via anecdotes, some pronouncements are made on your mousy character and… well, conversations with Death

I found it to be an interesting, melancholy, and effective construct. The variety of possibilities give some player authority to influence the mouse’s life; the limited number of ‘cards in hand’ effectively represent worldly events outside our control. By contributing to an entire lifespan, the seeming disconnected nature of these anecdotes actually thrive a bit. You could easily take snapshot memories from your own life - a patchwork that is technically accurate, but whose connective tissue is entirely missing and must be inferred. It is not an unsuccessful approach, and encourages the player (as we ourselves do in our own lives) to connect the dots.

But not totally. In life, we can’t help but carry ourselves forward in a continuum. If there is enough space to infer the continuum, great! But when details clash, or seemingly large events get summarily dropped or contradicted later in life (or in the body of the vignette itself!)… the seams show a bit. Most egregiously in two of my playthroughs my gender appeared to change during my life. (If that happens to mice, that is news to me!) Other times, my collection of ‘end words’ seemingly contradicted my life story, like when I was described as lonely after having a successful litter or a passionate first love. Let’s poke at that last one a bit. In presentation, first love was sold as a tremendously powerful event, as first love often is. Certainly for most of us, that first love is important, though need not define every subsequent relationship or even make our end-of-life top 10. But in a patchwork view of life, if it is important enough to BE in the top 10, wouldn’t the subsequent heartbreak/longing/supercession be equally or more important? It’s not that we HAVE to marry our first mouse love. It’s that if it’s important enough to recall on our deathbed, how that turned to loneliness (or lifelong partnership, or subsequent lifelong relationship) is maybe MORE important!?

Similarly, the language and lore of the place was 90% there, but seams showed. When world building with human-adjacent species, the temptation is to try to describe human artifacts through other species’ (here, mice’) eyes. When done well, it is very powerful to the human reader, and can really sell the alternate worldview. When not quite there, descriptions can be bafflingly opaque, where the reader is less drawn into the mouse’s eyes than pulled away to wrangle ‘just WHAT is being described here’??? The other pitfall is to throw up hands and occasionally just call them human things. This latter particularly jars, after the reader has grown accustomed to off-kilter mousey descriptions. The work is like 90/5/5 on those.

In the end, while I can’t shake the seams, the overall construct remains sound. The vignettes themselves are wildly divergent (as you would hope in a long life!), each with their own emotions and resonances. Their variety is fun, well written, and allow for player-driven maturation, trauma and changing approaches to life. (I think my favorite might have been a singular image of water, disconnected from context, that inexplicably stuck in my mousey memory. That kind of incomplete memory rang powerfully true.) The unspoken imperative to stitch these memories together in the player’s head is a powerful gameplay choice. The graphical presentation underscores that somber, reflective tone quite well. And the melancholy they assemble into is affecting, even with seams clearly showing.