Summit

I remember discovering this game in high school, years ago. I showed it to all my friends, and fishstomachs became a brief inside joke among our group for a few weeks.

I played it through twice then, and I just played it again now, years later. Even knowing the general shape of things, it's still as good as I remember. There are enough branching paths and alternate possibilities that I still encountered new parts of the story.

That my friends, who were generally uninterested in IF, still played this game to the end speaks to how compelling it is. And how weird. It's a surreal fantasy setting at least one parallel universe away from ours, and I think a major part of what keeps it engaging is how easy it is to travel and explore. In the 21st century world I know, moving somewhere else involves finding a job there and dealing with renting an apartment and so on. This is what my mind focuses on, the logistics of packing up and starting a new life, and the potential financial difficulties, but the game glosses over that aspect. The journey, though it takes place in a richly detailed fantasy setting, is symbolic, and this kind of symbolism has no time to spend on the main character comparing the monthly rent prices of different apartments.

Another reason the minutiae gets skipped is because this is a game about life viewed from a distance. It skips over years in a few paragraph, summarizing parts of your life with a deft hand moving across time. It goes from scene to scene, from year to year, and those years are tied together with summaries of what happened in the interleaving time. At the end of it all, they paint the portrait of a strange life richly lived. Like Alter Ego, maybe, but much more surreal and fantastical, and rooted in symbolism.

One of the hardest-hitting parts for me was (Spoiler - click to show)going back to your hometown, where you spent your childhood, and realizing it's unrecognizable now and your parents are dead. That feeling of going to a place you used to know and realizing it's different now. Everything's changed. Time passes, and the world as it is now will be lost forever, and you can't do anything about it.

Talking about the symbolism: the summit is clearly symbolic to me, symbolizing an unreachable ideal of complete happiness in life or total fulfillment or self-attainment or whatever people are always striving for and in a Sisyphean way failing to get. The hedonic treadmill renders it unreachable. In none of my three playthroughs did I ever reach the actual summit, and there are details in the game that make me wonder if reaching it is impossible. For example, sometimes you wonder if the summit is real at all, and at the end it appears just as distant as it was during the beginning. You're guided by the shadow of this transcendental thing to seek, to search, to live and love, and in the end it does all come to nothing, because you're dying, but maybe the real summit was the friends we made on the way and so on. You could insert a million cliches here, but the story expresses this sentiment with a beauty more worthwhile than any trite saying.

The fishstomachs are wonderful. They're allegorical for a rich range of human experiences, while being, as other reviewers have said, not a 1:1 metaphor for anything. Death and ecstasy, the ecstasy of life moving inevitably towards death, or maybe the union of Freud's two drives. I'm spitballing here, though.

The writing is revealed in tiny chunks, often sentence by sentence, and the "click to reveal more" provides a constant level of interaction that keeps you engaged. No walls of text. It's a few short paragraphs at most before a click to continue prompt appears, in the form of an odd symbol or sometimes a period at the end of the sentence that shows you new text when clicked. (The period ones messed with me briefly, since normal periods and clickable periods look nigh-identical, and for a minute I couldn't figure out what to do, but I noticed it eventually.) I think this is the most Porpentine-esque part of the game, since I noticed a similar writing/interaction style in Porpentine's games. Single sentences broken up by click-to-proceed interaction, minimal visuals besides CSS color effects. A Porpentine kind of laconism. Weirdness that goes unexplained, worldbuilding that doesn't feel the need to spread itself dead and diagrammed before you but just exists as a part of the ambient tone, texture, setting. The surreal setting could be considered a Porpentine similarity, but Porpentine didn't invent surrealism, and there's a rich tradition of fantasy writers creating bizarre settings in weird lit and so on.

It's a good game. I will note that the music doesn't work anymore, which is a shame since multiple reviews praised the music.

I haven't talked to any of my friends who played the game for years. I think about them sometimes.