Spiral

i have mixed feelings about Spiral. when i first began playing i was sincerely impressed; it opens on a very compelling and intriguing situation, with two people bound and gagged facing each other and occasionally assailed by sprays of insecticide. i was immediately curious about how they ended up in this situation and what the connection between the two of them might be. the ability to swap between characters indicated i might be in for some cooperative puzzle-solving, for instance working out how to get out of our bindings and escape.

this was, unfortunately, not to be.

very quickly the characters find themselves transported into their dreams. in (Spoiler - click to show)eco-activist Ross's dreams, a giant machine is destroying the earth to feed a Beast; in the other, Helen has been condemned to hell (and i've been playing IF long enough for that latter to draw an instant eye-roll from me).

note that i had a single-word tag to describe Ross, but none to describe Helen. that's because at no point in this story did i manage to put together any kind of picture of Helen, who she was, what she liked ((Spoiler - click to show)besides meth), or what was important to her. she was a complete cipher.

Ross is sketched out in more detail, but while we hear about his family and friends and learn (Spoiler - click to show)one of them went past "activist" to "terrorist" I still never got a real idea of what kind of person he was.

the shallowness of the protagonists isn't helped by the hollowness of their dream-worlds. there are puzzles, but only one of them, (Spoiler - click to show)working out how the sticker and sickle work, seemed clever or original (and i can remember another game with that puzzle off the top of my head).

one "puzzle" is self-evident and still needs to be done repeatedly. one character has to gather seven treasures -- that's what they are, so that's what i'm calling them -- and most are either sitting in the open or only require you to search a specific obviously-searchable object. there's a potentially intriguing gimmick, (Spoiler - click to show)passing the items between characters, but it's only signaled by one clue that's easy to miss, and i ended up needing to use the walkthrough to find it.

there's also a softlock for Helen where you must have a specific object to get out of a given location, and if you went there without it, hope you saved. the location is ominous, to be sure, but it's no more ominous than literally everything else in the game.

Ross's dreamscape at least has resonance with his personality and beliefs. Helen's seems to come from being (Spoiler - click to show)non-religious in a Christian family with a Christian boyfriend. that could leave these kinds of scars, but given the events of what the game calls "the fateful day" something more related to (Spoiler - click to show)having her stillborn child removed would have made more sense.

the ending was the biggest disappointment. (Spoiler - click to show)it's completely nonsensical. helen and ross are in a train car; whichever character you collected the treasures for first has to use a weapon to kill a misshapen infant. this obviously makes no sense as a resolution for Ross, and doesn't really work for Helen either -- she didn't have an abortion, she had a stillborn baby removed. that is very much not the same thing. this apparently kills one character, then you briefly play as a wasp, and then all meaning goes out the window for a nonsense ending.

also, (Spoiler - click to show)the connection between the two of them was that there was none, nor is there any hint of how they got into this predicament or what any of it meant.

the writing is good and the initial presentation is terrific. but the characters are ultimately shallow, most of the puzzles are lackluster or completely absent, and the ending makes it hard to care about anything that's happened so far.