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

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?!)