Beat Witch

A crazy story with some extremely vivid moments (the bridge of bodies, falling, and the immediate aftermath with LIVE. I loved that.) and a strong sense of madness to it. Unfortunately I didn’t understand the whole bit from the eating of the headphones to the bridge (who was that other person? What was actually happening?) but overall pretty good.
An extra bonus point for the US Government speech. That was really, really good and I think people need to read it. It gives off a strong vibe with lots of meaning: people who have been born with no voice in the world (no say in what they can do), and are not even treated like people because others know they have the power to fight back.

Song: Paranoid Android. Personally my favourite song. Some of the lyrics relate really well.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Beat Witch is something I haven’t seen before: a parser game imagined as a series of high-octane action set pieces. It makes for a propulsive, pacey experience that’s easy to imagine seeing as a blockbuster movie, with sudden reversals, twists, and explosive climaxes coming one after the other. This approach isn’t without its downsides – the traditional parser pleasures of exploring an environment at one’s leisure and carefully thinking through the solutions to a smorgasbord of puzzles are completely absent, as the game pushes you from one adrenaline-fueled sequence to the next – but it makes for a unique change of pace.

Unsurprisingly given the game’s design ethos, Beat Witch starts in medias res, as you jostle your way into a safehouse alongside a bunch of hazmat-suit clad rescue workers dealing with a deadly plague. And just as you start to sort out what’s going on, you’re in for further rug-pulls; as it turns out, you’re not actually part of the team, and there isn’t actually a plague. The ABOUT menu fills you in on the situation through a neat bit of worldbuilding – it offers you the table of contents of a book about the eponymous “beat witches”, dangerous women who have the supernatural ability to siphon off and invest life energy, as well as a fatal vulnerability to music. Just giving the title of each chapter establishes the setting with admirable concision; I was way engaged contemplating “The Choral Uprising and why it failed” or “The phonograph, the radio, and the Great Extermination” than I would have been by a traditional lore-dump.

It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re one of the eponymous witches – but you’re a good witch, not a bad witch, with an angsty backstory from having accidentally hurt members of your family and striving for redemption by taking out the especially evil beat witch who’s made the city her hunting grounds. Of course, once the rest of the hazmat team realizes what you are, they aren’t going to take any chances or ask any questions before trying to kill you – in only a few turns, you’re faced with deadly danger, and once you solve that puzzle, there’s only a fleeting moment to catch your breath before you make it to the bad witch’s skyscraper lair and find the next desperate situation from which you need to extricate yourself.

The game never really stops, shunting you from one well-implemented sequence to the next – sometimes literally, as if you dawdle too long other characters might force you to move on. In pretty much all of Beat Witch’s scenes, you’re at the brink of death and struggling just to survive; there’s little extraneous scenery to explore, and in a convenient bit of worldbuilding, beat witches like you are mute, so there’s no real conversation system to slow things down. And while you’re powerful, your abilities are relatively straightforward, so you only have a few options in any given situation. As a result, things move quick; the puzzles aren’t especially hard, but it feels good to solve them because they have such high stakes.

Beat Witch does run on action-movie logic; if it explains how you knew about the bad witch you’re trying to stop, I didn’t notice that being established. You zip up, down, and around the skyscraper without being especially bound by the laws of physics (there’s an internal monologue and flashback as you fall from the roof that goes so long it almost becomes funny). And your nemesis is a classic motormouthed villain, cartoonishly evil and incapable of shutting up: when, late in the game, she taunted me by saying “think how much you goofed while I squeeze you like a juicy fart”, I imagined the protagonist was as tired of her BS as I was.

But these are all in keeping with the genre the game is trying to emulate, and may be the price to be paid for some really compelling moments like – I’m going to spoiler-block this one so as not to ruin the surprise – (Spoiler - click to show) sky-bridge of semi-animated bodies connecting the roofs of neighboring skyscrapers, or the LIVE command overwriting the after-death menu and heralding your resurrection. The game does have some unforced missteps, though: having an antagonist named “Dr Steve” is a little too goofy for the mood, and while I understand the intended thematic resonance of the final encounter, I think it comes off a bit anticlimactic. But these are easy to look past.

Reading between the lines of this review, it’s probably not a surprise for me to reveal that I admired Beat Witch more than I enjoyed it. I am an increasingly-old fuddy-duddy who likes to potter around when I play a parser game, and I tend to prioritize things like literary prose, thematic depth, and well-realized characters – none of which Beat Witch has much interest in. But I’m pretty sure that for some folks out there, this will be their favorite game of the Comp, and I can completely understand why; it delivers an experience most parser games don’t even attempt, and does so with elan.

Playing "Beat Witch" was certainly an interesting experience. Somewhat uneven, to be sure. More than once I wondered why the author had made this a parser game, as opposed to a choice-based game; the game advances practically on rails, and is a sequence of scenes that you move along; at the key points (usually the ones where death is a threat) you find the command that lets you go on, but it's so heavily hinted (this is a good thing in a game that's this narrative-focused!) that it might as well be an explicit choice.

Then I realised I was falling into the trap of judging the work by my expectations instead of judging it by what it is. Funny how easy it is to do that. When I realised it, I started to notice how the author uses the conventions of how locations are presented to achieve certain effects, and how the parser really isn't a senseless fit. The sense of exploration that the parser gives, and of experimentation in a game with a few non-standard commands, may be something I've come to take for granted. I shouldn't. It's very much part of the DNA.

The premise is sublimely weird. Beat Witches, mute women who can kill with a thought and are lethally vulnerable to music.

Whoa.

It starts in media res, so you'll soon have to find a way to survive before you know what's going on. And... the whole game is going to be like that, because it'll keep throwing weird shit at you, and the stakes will always be high.

Playing this is quite an experience. Be prepared for lots and lots of text. Not that there's a lot of text overall, but what there is tends to come in large sections.

It is well written. It is a cohese world. Implementation is about right, though there isn't a lot to interact with (by design). The characters are consistent and... well, weird. Everything about this game is weird. In exactly the right way for my tastes.

I did often tune out, as the weirdness became harder to follow. I'm not entirely sure what happened near the end, and I don't think I mind not being sure. At that point I was just experiencing it, not worrying about it too much.

You know how you know you like a game?

When, at the end, it says "Polly Miller will return" and you sit there for a while, and you go "Yeah... yeah, I think I'd like that. Yes, please."