Let Me Play!

When I was in law school, one of my favorite classes was a law and philosophy course that went into some of the dominant schools of thought about what law is and how it should be understood: I don’t mean bunkum like “originalism”, but actual philosophies like legal realism (law doesn’t exist as an abstract set of rules but rather is an expression of social interests and public policy) or legal positivism (law doesn’t gain its validity by expressing moral truths, but simply because it has the weight of the sovereign behind it). Our professor, being something of a Marxist, also had us read some Thorstein Veblen. As someone whose undergraduate major was astrophysics and had gotten through a smattering of Sartre and Foucault and not much else, this was fun stuff – but one day, as I was gushing excitedly to one of my fellow students about how much I was getting out of the class, they stifled a yawn: they were a poli-sci/English double major and been doing theory stuff like this since sophomore year, so most of what we were going over was old hat.

This is my attempt to be charitable and acknowledge that no audience is a monolith, players come from a broad variety of experiences and perspectives, and ideas that come off as stale to one person can easily be a breath of fresh air to another. So when I say that it feels like Let Me Play! is aimed at someone who was super impressed by the twist in Bioshock, and then fell into a coma for almost 20 years, I’m aware that’s an unfair judgment: I’m sure there are some players somewhere who’ll find its dramatization of the paradoxes of player agency to have some heft. But even they, I’d wager, would find its glacial pacing intensely frustrating: say what you will about Uninteractive Fiction 2, at least it respects its players’ time.

LMP is presented as a sort of visual novel: there are attractive pixel graphics dramatizing the story, which is draped in theatrical trappings. Act I, Scene I sees a man and a woman collide on their way into an elevator; as it turns out, this isn’t so much a meet-cute as a meet-awkward, as the woman is on her way up to her office to be fired from a job the man is applying for. Inevitably, the elevator breaks, stranding them, allowing them space to express their feelings, reveal some low-key secrets, and bond over their shared desire to escape the corporate grind and be actors.

When laid out in summary form, that sounds like a reasonable enough topic for a game, but sadly, that’s not what Let Me Play! is about. You see, while the scene occasionally stops to present you with a trio of dialogue options for both the man and the woman, your input is never registered – the hand cursor glides between the choices before finally setting on a pre-ordained outcome that allows the scene to continue. Yes, the ability of players to influence the narrative is what LMP is actually concerned with, in a story that gets increasingly heavy-handed as it goes – and gets increasingly snail-like, too. It doesn’t take long before almost every interaction requires a choice, and that whole hand-gliding-around rigmarole takes five or six seconds each time, and the text slowly prints to the screen character by character – but doesn’t pause when it finishes a line, meaning that the poor player is constantly caught on the horns of a dilemma: do you just sit there waiting for the text to update, feeling the minutes of your life slip away like sand through the hourglass, or do you alt-tab away or mess around with your phone and miss what’s actually being said?

This conflict is way more exciting than anything that actually happens in LMP. Every once in a while a special icon pops up, and if you click on that, you can eventually get into some more fourth-wall breaking scenes where the director gets involved in arguing with you about whether this is a play or a game, and every once in a while you’re actually given the opportunity to make some choices. But it’s all pretty bone-dry, going to exactly the places you’d imagine, without any characters or theme or anything specific to establish stakes or a reason to care about these arid pronouncements about what players can, or should, alter in an interactive narrative. It seems aimed at a video-game culture centered on player entitlement, which circa 2012 amid the Mass Effect 3 ending-rewriting controversy and the first stirrings of Gamergate might have felt somewhat on point; entered into an IF contest in 2025, it feels like Rip Van Winkle. And again, the delivery mechanism is more drawn-out than you can imagine – god help me, I went through the game without clicking on the icon to see what happens if you just let things play out, and it’s both uninspiring and excruciating. Of course I’m sure this is part of how the game is dramatizing the unpleasantness of being denied agency, but there are other ways to make withholding more engaging (come back Violent Delight, all is forgiven!) I don’t mind seeing an old argument re-presented, and for a player who hasn’t considered any of these ideas before it could be a gateway into a rich vein of theory and criticism, but I felt like LMP didn’t have much to say to me, and was in no hurry at all to say it.