take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die is a neat little game that I enjoyed, and one that I immediately started over again as soon as I finished it. (Partly because it was relatively short, and partly because it is a game that invites another replay once you reach the end.) It took about 15 minutes to play, and it is an entirely linear adventure -- the only interaction from the player is clicking a button to see the next line of text.

I think the graphics and aesthetics were super cool and very polished. They definitely added to the atmosphere -- and most importantly supported the "twisting" nature of this IF due to the implications of the graphics. The shadowy figure on the shore, the stark and sometimes unsettling fonts/text, all gave off this "evil, brooding villain" kind of vibe, which fits with (Spoiler - click to show)what the writing implies in the first quarter of the game. At the start, it is made to seem as if the narrator is some kind of stalker or jilted ex-lover... someone who was obsessed with Elizabeth and might have actually killed her out of jealousy or resentment. But that couldn't be further from the truth, and it was fun to discover that as I progressed through the game.

Part of the fun of this piece was the way it toyed with the player's expectations. What the story was -- what I thought had actually happened to the narrator and to Elizabeth -- kept changing and changing as the game progressed and as I got more information about the both of them. This is entirely intentional, and a neat way to keep the player engaged in what is essentially just a click-through game. The game we are actually playing is a game of our own expectations -- the game of figuring out what really happened to the characters.

I liked the prose, and found that it fit the vibe of the game: stark, sharp, desolate... and rather barebones at times, but in that good way where it's intentional and lets the emotions shine through rather than having the author show off with some fancy flourish of words.

Another part I really loved -- my favorite aspect of the game in fact -- are the themes it deals with, and one theme in specific that I really resonated with. And that theme was (Spoiler - click to show)a discomfort with the expectations of others -- and one line in the game suggests it's also gendered expectations specifically, which I really related to and appreciated the author's treatment of. I think it's pretty common to feel constrained by others and how they perceive you: what they expect of you and what they want from you -- and most importantly how you feel you don't match up... Or even worse, you do match up, but you don't want to, and you horrible about it. I appreciate Elizabeth because she's not necessarily a character who hated herself... (though you can view it this way, I think that's a valid interpretation.) But my view was more that she hated the person other people saw her as. And that's who she wanted to kill... this twisted version of herself that wasn't really her. She wanted to be "reborn" as the person she felt she was deep inside. Which I personally found very relatable and I loved the author's emotional, exploratory treatment of such a theme.

All in all, very nice experience that I enjoyed. Definitely a game I'm glad I played.

This is a heavily styled kinetic experience about being obsessed with someone from afar.

Or at least, that's what it looks like at first. (Spoilers, and discussions of suicide.)

(Spoiler - click to show)Our anonymous narrator is obsessed with a girl named Elizabeth Flanagan, who has recently drowned in Lake Dioscuri. The first part of the game is set up to make you think that, jealous of perfect Elizabeth and her perfect girlfriend and perfect life, they drowned her - but (as the mythologically minded may have caught) their relationship is more complicated than that.

The Dioscuri is the collective term for the twin Greek gods Castor and Pollux – technically half-twins, as they share the same (mortal) mother but have different fathers (traditionally one mortal and one divine). They were the patron gods of sailors, with the power to rescue them from storms, and also associated with death and immortality. When Castor (the mortal twin) was mortally wounded, Pollux (the divine twin) gave up half his immortality to save him, leaving them both as half-divine and half-alive. (They were also really good at horseback riding, but I don’t think that’s thematically relevant here.)

All of this is resonant because it turns out that the narrator and Elizabeth are the same person, or at least parts of the same person. The narrator’s complicated relationship with Elizabeth is actually her complicated relationship with herself and with how the world sees her. The perfect and divine Elizabeth Flanagan that others see is constricting and artificial to the real, messy, decidedly mortal Elizabeth, and has created a relationship where everyone expects, everyone takes, but nobody gives or understands. Overwhelmed with the pressure, she throws herself (or at least the “divine” part of herself) into the waters of the lake, leaving the narrator as the mortal and real part of herself behind. The waters rescue her from herself, or at least that was the goal.

It’s unclear here (purposely) what the actual, literal outcome is here for Elizabeth and the unnamed narrator. (Is one or both of them a ghost? Did anyone actually die? How separate are they now?) But this is all in service of the metaphor and the message about growing up and being the person you want to be, and not the person the world wants you to be. Sometimes those two are radically different. If one is lucky you can grow from one to another, like coloring in someone else’s drawing on your own terms, but sometimes that’s not an option. Sometimes the person you are is so different from the person others want you to be that you have no choice but to take a chance and burst out of the cocoon, unrecognizable to those around you. Sometimes it feels like a death.

I can confirm, having been a closeted and obnoxiously overachieving teenage girl once upon a time – yeah, it’s like that.

Playing this back to back with Method in my Madness has also clarified some things for me about how I feel about kinetic experiences, and in particular what about them I’m looking for. I like kinetic VNs (which are full of art and voice acting to make up for the lack of interactivity), but I’ve struggled with some pieces of kinetic text IF where your only interaction is to click “next” to continue to the next chunk of text. What makes a kinetic game feel good (to me) and why? The answer seems to lie in what exactly the game is doing to take advantage of the medium. With more traditional IF the answer to that is “interactivity”, but with kinetic games I think the answer is “deliberate styling”.

take me to the lakes… is a visual novel in the sense that it has graphics and sound effects, but those are fairly minimal (as expected, given the author made it in 36 hours!!! I am impressed). The important thing about them is that they’re used to great effect. The sound effects and striking black-and-white styling add texture to the experience from the moment you start playing, and
the placement of text and choice of font on every slide is deliberate as to the feelings it wants to evoke in the player. There’s no timed text here but the text is doled out in small chunks with “click to continues” after each one, which helps add friction and deliberateness to a narrative that needs the player to slow down and consider what’s happening. (This is, I suspect, the effect that many authors playing around with timed text are actually going for so I’m taking notes.)

I’ve deviated from my typical review format here (as I do sometimes) because I don’t feel it appropriately fits this game. Some games are better suited to a ramble instead of a more structured review, I think? Anyway, to sum up my thoughts on take me to the lakes… now that I’ve written a review that is I’m pretty sure longer than the game itself:

WOW!

(Also, how did you do this in 36 hours?!)

I would describe take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die as a linear, emotionally heavy, romantic (in the oldest tradition) semi-animated comic book. In black and white. It draws strongly on comic book aesthetics for its effects and is dynamic about it, pulling reader’s eyes through the word-emphasising visuals and punctuating them with sound effects, all via a simple eight or sixteen-bit look.

The experience opens with the deliberately-vaguely-depicted narrating character looking over a lake at night. Stars twinkle as she relates the finding of the drowned corpse of Elizabeth, a girl who wrote poetry and whom she seems to have been obsessed with. But obsessed with how? Up close, from a distance or in some other way? The speculating prose has a few abstracting moves up its sleeves as it goes on.

As each frame of image and thought-square of monologue appears, the mechanic is to click to continue, however the click has to be placed on the current speech bubble or latest ellipses to register. I found this requirement distracting. The small target moves in almost every frame, often just two centimetres down the screen. I was relieved to learn after playing that it's possible to just hit the space bar instead.

The dynamics of the heroine’s monologue, and also of her later dialogue with Elizabeth’s ghost or echo, are really well executed. For me, the whole was still a little unsatisfying because my taste is that emotion-based stories like this one work with specifics rather than archetypes. This story’s characters and ideas revolve around binaries and twinning; love, hate, free, trapped, creation (writing poetry), destruction (suicide), the narrator, the drowned girl. The name of the eponymous lake (Dioscuri) alludes to the Roman twins Castor and Pollux. And poets, of course, are famous for being suicidal, thought the real situation that created the stereotype - the rise of the romantic tradition and novels like Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther (1774) - is obviously far more detailed than the content of the lakes. the lakes takes that end point of the concept of romantic suicide as a symbol without complexity. Still, I feel a churl complaining about the arcehtypal style of a story that pretty much declares, through its allusion to the Dioscuri, that it could be about archetypes. It’s short, establishes a clear visual and editing style during its stay, and is an entirely sound construction of its ideas.