Number of Reviews: 5
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Outside the Circle of Trust, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Last year I thoroughly embarrassed myself tossing around a “My Little Pony” reference in reviewing a work without any real understanding of the property. This year, my first impulse was to repeat my mistake by calling this work 'anime-inspired.' From a guy whose son is in the weeds with Anime, but whose only personal exposure was Starblazers/Spaceship Yamato (do I need to say decades ago?), this felt to me like a strongly Anime-influenced work. I have been subsequently informed by folks more knowledgable than me that this is not a compelling analog. *whew* embarrassment averted!
The setup is a persecution-turned-war between humanity and the titular Beat Witches: girls that at some point in their lives (tradition would say ‘onset of puberty’ but the work declines to specify) become mute psychic vampires, undone by music. Pretty cool, and to my untrained eye, could easily be an anime premise. (Also rife with potential metaphorical interpretation, though maybe kind of toxic. To be fair to the work, this does not seem to be its intent.) It is billed as ‘an interactive loneliness’ which is an intriguing blurb to be sure, though ultimately feels tangential to the goals of the work.
The opening is a pretty effective fakeout, though it does trade heavily on player knowledge lagging protagonist knowledge. I am always fascinated by this choice in IF. While this often work like gangbusters in movies - where what we think we see turns out to be surprisingly wrong – its use in IF carries more burden. When we are invited to inhabit the protagonist, there is a presumption of agency and alignment on the player’s part. When the twist is revealed it immediately creates a break between player and PC. It is a betrayal of sorts, made personal to the player rather than something they appreciated dispassionately. If the work leverages this frisson it can be quite interesting. If it apes movie tropes without understanding the difference, it cedes a goal in the first minute of play, and is playing catch up from there.
In the case of Beat Witch, it doesn’t feel intentional in the sense of deliberate player effect, but it is super consistent with gameplay. The game continually denies player agency to distancing effect. Mainstream puzzle IF can be uncharitably characterized as ‘on rails’ (narrative IF typically even more so). The author is positing a problem to which they have a solution in mind, and until the player regurgitates that solution they are blocked. But if the intent is to put the player in the driver’s seat this must be offset by real or perceived autonomy. The act of puzzle solving itself is one method, one of the first. Enabling multiple paths/solutions is another. Really deft wordsmithing to make the player feel autonomous and not detect the strings being pulled is yet another. Even something as simple as ‘open world exploration’ can give the player a flavor of it. Sure, to advance you have to do the specific framistat jiggering the author wants, but at least you can do it on your own time.
For my playthrough, none of these were in evidence. The vibe the piece is striving for is a hyperactive enhanced reality of action set pieces and cool visuals. Pace is absolutely a key element of all that, but the author refuses (maybe justifiably so) to trust the player to play along. Instead, the play space is constrained, choices are telegraphed the moment they’re needed and rejected any other time. A sequence that drove this home for me played out as follows:
- aah! bad things are happening, let me look around and see what I can leverage in the environment!
- (para) “Wow things are bad, but nothing is revealing itself”
- yikes! ok, let me try this other thing
- (para) “Well that didn’t work. You should probably look around now.”
- really, game? should I? should I look around now? ok, >L
- (para) “Hey! Here is this thing that is the only thing that will help you now!”
Even when I have the right idea, legitimately arrived at through player initiative, the game rejects my input because it prefers to LEAD me. That was particularly enraging, but the work makes these choices all the time. It is common that you only have one cardinal direction to move from place to place. The protagonist has unspecified ‘powers’ of some sort, and the game is super-ready to tell you ‘sadly that is not one of your powers’ but never tells nor provides a mechanism to define what those powers are! Then, powers (most especially super strength) that might have opened doors for you earlier are suddenly revealed. But wait, there are two powers the game explicitly tells you about, but almost never rewards their application! Except when the game DEMANDS their application. Even what may be the only legitimate choice you as a player have, how aggressive to be with the villain, is undermined because you are asked to specify it before you’ve actually met the villain. As a player I mean. The protagonist sure has a backstory that could inform things, but that is opaque to the player at the time of selection.
So, how much do you like the specific vibe I am describing? Because if you do like it, there are things to enjoy here. There are some effective, over the top horror and action set pieces. The pace is often frenetic and twisty. Physics is routinely sacrificed for a cool visual, things like teeth flying over modest impacts, glass shards defying physics. There are fun plot twists and a monologuing villain that falls short of even a single dimension but is so committed to their one note as to be entertaining. Even the details of the Beat Witches are just strange and specific enough to ring some bells. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sole gameplay moment that landed for me: (Spoiler - click to show)a death scene and the subsequent, standard RESTART, RESTORE, UNDO or QUIT prompt was recontextualized in a delightful way. Unblur with caution, you probably want to experience that for yourself.
For me, it was not enough. I chafed at the author’s heavy hand too much to enjoy the rest. Mechanical and I’m going to call rejected player agency as Notably Intrusive. On top of that, I am THIS CLOSE to a penalty point for the line: “squeeze you like a juicy fart” but will refrain.
Played: 10/6/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Score: 4 (Mechanical, Notably on rails)
Would Play After Comp?: No, not what I come to IF for