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Good characters, slow pacing, December 12, 2020This one was not what I expected. Based on the overenthusiastic title punctuation, the bright, pop-art cover, and the listed genre, I went into TMMEWaD ready for over-the-top zaniness. That’s not at all what’s on offer here, though – the game is actually very grounded, basically a relationship-driven slice of life story both in terms of its main concerns and its pacing. Even leaving aside my mismatched expectations, I’m not convinced it fully works, but I found it very pleasant to play through, and really liked the way it delved into some concerns rather far afield from the typical meat-and-potatoes of interactive fiction.
So we’re dealing here with two protagonists (or maybe a protagonist and her antagonist)? You alternate between playing Lightbearer, a duly-licensed heroine protecting Garden City, and Promethium, her mad-scientist archnemesis. Things start out with an effective in medias res superhero operation, as Lightbearer flies to the rescue of a kidnapped ballet troupe. And at the end of the grabby, kinetic introductory fight, she manages to beat Promethium and get her in handcuffs.
So far so normal, except that a few curveballs get thrown (these are signposted pretty clearly in the blurb, so I’m not marking them as spoilers): Promethium has an anxiety attack at the prospect of being subjected to the death penalty, and then Lightbearer releases her on condition that Promethium throws all her fights moving forward. The meat of the game consists of the two characters meeting up to plan out how they’ll pretend to clash, while choreographing the results so no one get hurts; meanwhile, you have the option to have them slowly open up to each other (in choices clearly marked with a TRUST TIME graphic sting).
These deviations from genre expectations work to arouse interest, but I think they also feel underexplained in a way that took me out of the story. In general, the worldbuilding is vague, in favor of emphasizing the characters. That’s a fine choice, but some of the questions the game raises but doesn’t clearly resolve – do villains routinely get executed? How exactly does Lightbearer’s superhero job work? – are pretty integral to making sense of the characters’ motivations and decision-making. Some small spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)Promethium’s fear of death seems like it’s tied to an anxiety disorder, but not knowing that makes the introduction of that note jarring, and I wondered whether this was going to be more of a dystopian take on supers. Similarly, Promethium’s accusation that the Hero Agency is all about money goes unanswered, and it’s unclear how realistic Lightbearer is when she worries that if she succeeds in beating her nemesis, her employers will heartlessly transfer her away without giving her two months to let her daughter graduate from high school! Most problematically, Promethium’s big speech about how villains are people trying to change the world and make it a better place completely fails to connect her ostensible social-justice goals to her actual actions of poisoning ballet dancers. As a result of the occasionally sketchy worldbuilding, there were times when the characters’ thought processes or decision-making didn’t really come together.
The pacing also slows down quite a lot in this main section of the game. The structure never really changes – you get brief interludes of the two protagonists living their lives, their biweekly coffee-shop meetings, and then their planned-out fights, a sequence that’s repeated five or six times. There’s not much of a sense of escalation, or any real narrative avenues besides the central question of whether or not they’re growing to trust each other (I opted for all the trust options – I was rooting for the two of them, they seemed nice! – so maybe this is different if you intentionally seed more dissent). And the prose can get a little stodgy at times, with repeated exposition (Lightbearer says some version of “so, you’re graduating from high school in two months!” to her daughter like three or four times) and a lack of real, lived-in detail to fully flesh out the characters’ lives (as a minor example, at one point the protagonists talk about TV shows they like – this could have been an opportunity to flesh out what art resonates with each character and how that relates to their personalities, but they basically just say “I like Adventure Time”/”I think the Big Bang Theory is good”).
On the flip side, some of the conversations between Promethium and Lightbearer do go to interesting places. Promethium is dealing with some mental-health trauma, (Spoiler - click to show)partially stemming from a cleverly-realized side-effect of how her powers first manifested. Lightbearer, even more atypically, is a somewhat older character, dealing with incipient empty-nest syndrome (Spoiler - click to show)and the onset of menopause. It’s nice to see topics like this drawn out, and I was invested in seeing how the two of them, both very alone in their own ways, could become friends. As a result, all the superhero business often felt like a low-stakes distraction, and as I played I was eager to get back to their civilian-world meetings, because that’s where the heart of the thing really lies. So what’s good here is good, and while the full impact is held back by some pacing issues and fuzzy worldbuilding that compromises the generally-strong character work, and I’m still glad I got a chance to play it.