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About the StoryAfter your estranged sister's death, you face difficulty sorting through her personal belongings. As you navigate your grief through these objects, you begin to reminisce about old times and learn about her life years after she left. Where can you find your sister? Who was she through all those years? (The game contains topics such as grief and death) Game Details |
Awards
53rd Place - tie - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)
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| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
An over-generic take on loss, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife has a sweatshirt that used to belong to my sister. We live in California, and she lived in Maryland, so one September when we were visiting and it got cold, she noticed that my wife was shivering in her SoCal-appropriate outfit, and lent her a hoody. I forgot to give it back before we left, and a month later we found out Liz’s cancer had come back, so returning a sweatshirt wasn’t ever a priority in the time we had left. And now that sweatshirt isn’t just a sweatshirt.
There can be an unbearable poignancy to the artifacts our loved ones leave behind when they die; the books they read and wrote in, the glasses that let them see, the tchotchkes they’d look at and smile. Trivial, everyday objects that were barely worth a second of thought are transmuted to relics, bearing the last impress of someone’s now-finished time in the world.
Lonehouse engages with that poignancy, in ways that were occasionally quite arresting for me to encounter – the protagonist is visiting the apartment of her recently-deceased sister, named Liv, to help clean it out and take away some keepsakes. As you explore using Texture’s drag-verbs-to-nouns interface, you get snatches of the history between them – it’s not fully explained, but it seems like the sisters hadn’t been in touch, and perhaps there’d been a falling out – and identify the things that seem to have the most Liv-ness to them: a jacket, a favored plushie, a photo.
Despite the strong personal resonance of the premise, though, I didn’t wind up feeling like Lonehouse was truly compelling. Partially this is because the writing is often awkward. The style is generally unadorned and matter-of-fact, which I think is appropriate to communicating grief, but some of the author’s word choices undermine the simple power of this approach. Partially though it’s because the writing never gets especially specific. The general experience of death is one we’ve all had or will have, of course, but it’s unique details that turn this from a vague sense of loss to heart-rending tragedy, and Lonehouse doesn’t usually try to work in this register. Upon seeing that Liv saved an old Christmas gift that the protagonist made her, for example, we’re told that “[a] complicated feeling stirs in you” – but what feeling is that? Again, we aren’t given much detail of the prior relationship between the two, so it’s hard to place this in context.
The Texture engine also makes experiencing the story less engaging than I would have liked. I ran into what appears to be a bug with the system, since I came across it in another game too, where the buttons holding each scene’s verbs displayed their text in a tiny font – that’s not the author’s fault, but it did mean that I was often taken out of the story as I tried to decode my options. The interface also made it challenging to figure out which actions would allow me to explore or get more detail, and which would progress to the next sequence; several times in this short game, I wound up accidentally speeding through rooms I’m not sure I was finished with.
This is a short game that takes on some compelling issues; I’m not sure whether it’s the author’s debut, but if so I think it’s a more than respectable start. My key feedback for next time (and hopefully there’ll be a next time!) is to lean into the concrete, grounded style displayed here, but not to sacrifice the particular in the vain hope of making a piece of writing universal: otherwise, a sweatshirt will remain just a sweatshirt.
A texture game about siblings and loss, November 22, 2023This is a brief Texture game, one where you drag actions over verbs. It looks like several of the Texture games in this comp were written by authors who supported each other, as they retweet each other on twitter, use similar verbs in their games (like THINK and INSPECT) and one mentioned a writing circle. If it’s true, then that’s cool, because having people to bounce ideas off of can make for much stronger games.
This is a compelling game about someone receiving a text about a sister who died. You must go to your sister’s apartment and inspect her things, deciding what to do with them.
While they are unrelated, I kind of saw this as a counterpoint to My Brother, the Parasite. That was a dark and unpleasant game about a brother who was very close to the protagonist but also very violent. This is a bittersweet game about a sister who is distant from the protagonist yet left behind a lot of sweet memories. While you can’t see everything on one playthrough, I most enjoyed the moments about the big red jacket, as it was a striking visual and a sweet way to remember someone.
Sorting through your feelings..., November 22, 2023Lonehouse is an emotionally charged piece about facings reality, processing one's grief, and finding ways to remember passed loved ones. The entry feels very personal albeit short. Following the passing of your estranged sister, you find yourself sorting through her belonging, reminiscing about the past, and learning new things about the time spent apart.
The entry takes you through different rooms of your sister's place, each giving the player the same actions (inspect, move, thing). It feels methodical, as if you had to force yourself going through the things your sister left behind. But, in each room, you discover a special item, triggering a memory or thought - each showing a different facet of the person you (thought you) once knew.
Grief can be a heart breaking and complex feeling, rendered even more complicated when the situation is itself a complicated thing (there's a lot of unsaid things in the entry about how it got to this point). I felt like this entry showed maybe a more detached look to that feeling.