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Branches and branches, November 24, 2015You have no other options. That's why you've come to the woods to meet with a witch. She can perform a ritual for you, and what she performs will depend on your emotional state, your motivation, what you want to accomplish, and what you've brought with you.
All these variables can be changed, and the story is presented as a choose-your-own-adventure where you make your selections and then find out what ritual you're going to experience. What happens will be radically different depending on your choices. I played to three endings, none were anything like one another, and there were even more variables I could have tinkered with to find who knows how many additional outcomes.
There's an irony in the fact that a game where the premise is "you have no other options" gives you so many options, which is the whole idea. I wasn't even sure whether I was playing as the same protagonist all the time, or whether my choices had retroactively altered the past to shape a different narrative going forward. And I'm not even talking about the parts where the protagonist tries to alter the past.
This muddy understanding about the evolving game state is both a strength and a weakness. It really makes everything feel dynamic, but things are so dynamic that I wasn't always sure how I was affecting the story. At one point, as the witch was guiding me through the forest, there was a snake attacking a mouse beside the path and I had the chance to intervene before continuing with the witch. How did this tangent tie into the final ritual? Did my decision mean anything? It probably did, judging by how flexible the game is, but I couldn't begin to guess the impact or why this tangent should have had an impact. Other decisions give you much more obvious results with logical cause-and-effect chains, but you have the sense that there are hidden, magical mechanics under the surface too, and you never quite grasp them.
In the end, the game's ultimate irony is that even with all these options, you still don't really have any options. The universe is out of your control. Maybe a very dedicated player who's willing to explore every single branch would come to another conclusion, but when I reached this interpretation I felt as though the game had rounded itself off.
