Shanidar, Safe Return

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Shanidar, Safe Return, has a compelling setting that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a work of IF before – Clan of the Cave Bear style prehistory. Jumping back 40,000 years ago, this choice-based game tasks you with guiding a small band of Neanderthals who’ve suffered an attack from some aggressive Cro-Magnons first to immediate safety, and then to a far-off sanctuary where they can hopefully flourish. It’s enriched with compelling details that appear to be the fruit of quite a lot of research – I really felt the texture of these people’s way of life. While the author made a few choices that I found worked somewhat at cross purposes and lessened the impact of the work overall, I was still glad to experience this story.

The game admittedly doesn’t make the best first impression – instead of a play online link or a game file available for download, instead you need to open up a pdf that contains a link to the actual website where Shanidar, Safe Return is hosted. For something that appears to be a conventional Twine game in format, this feels needlessly convoluted. The landing page includes a quick summary of the setup, but then lists links without providing any context – I wasn’t sure at first whether these were ways of jumping to different sections of the story, but as it turned out the game gives you an option of which of three story vignettes to start out with.

There’s a cast of characters page there too, but I found it hard to digest. The names aren’t drawn from any language I’m familiar with, a lot of characters have names that begin with the same letter, and you can’t refer back to the cast list once the game starts, which really wished I could do once I’d clicked through: immediately, there are a lot of different people to keep track of, and their basic information and relationships with each other aren’t always communicated. I was deep into the game’s second act before I realized that Uda, one of the major recurring characters, was actually the father of the main character’s son, but I think I was supposed to know that from the beginning.

Admittedly, some of this confusion may be due to the fact that the game is a sequel to an earlier instalment – those who’ve played that one might find this introduction smoother. Still, since I don’t believe the prequel was an IF Comp game, I think the author could have probably been more mindful of the likelihood that there’d be a lot of new players who were coming to the series fresh.

It didn’t take me too long to get into the groove of things, though, since the initial setup of fleeing from danger was clear and compelling. The game’s written in a very simple prose style that feels like a good fit for the subject matter, too; the characters are never dehumanized by forcing them to adopt stereotypical “cave man” speech, but it does make sense to keep the language from getting too flowery. Here’s an early passage:

"Oihana carries Eneko in a soft leather sling on his back. Eneko is never a burden. Eneko falls asleep in the safety of Oihana’s sling. He drops the doll, Pala, along the way. The forest canopy protects the band of refugees from the rain. They leave a trail of wet prints in the mud, most of which are washed away by morning. Dawn approaches. The rain stops."

There’s a kind of mythic, elemental resonance to this kind of writing, and when it combined with those well-observed details about how the characters found and prepared food, or gathered supplies for travel, or engaged in group decision-making, Shanidar, Safe Return works very well in a unique, anthropological vein.

Unfortunately, pretty soon after the initial act came to a close, I once again started feeling disoriented. The game started introducing more and more characters, and I realized that its idiosyncratic approach to choices – each passage ends with two or three links summarizing something different people are doing, and clicking on one will skip you over to that part of the plot, without any interstitial narration to make the transition less jarring – was actually skipping me over important information or plot developments; for example, in the first act, I found it most compelling to follow the thread involving an orphaned toddler and watchdog finding their way back to the larger group, but as a result I didn’t wind up clicking on any of Uda’s links, and as mentioned above, didn’t understand who he was or why he was playing such an important role in Act 2.

This sense of the game skipping around was exacerbated in the final act, where, their preparations complete, the group embarks on an epic journey of thousands of kilometers. I was deeply curious about how they were going to cross mountains, pass over the Bosporous, and explore unfamiliar lands – but since Act 3 also introduced a whole new set of characters, who appeared to be ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, I was curious about them, and by the time I’d gotten a handle on who they were and switched back to the original group, they were already just about at their destination! This isn’t a modernist story, where fractured timelines and incomplete information are thematically important – again, I feel like the game is most effective when it’s working in National Geographic mode – so I feel like a more linear approach to the material would have worked better.

The other authorial choice that didn’t resonate especially strongly for me is the use of some narrative elements that felt YA-inspired; there are some tropey romances, and the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon conflict is characterized in a fairly Manichean, diversity vs. intolerance sort of way. I’ve got no objections to any of that, but I felt like they didn’t mesh well with the dry prose style, and injected some notes of anachronism into what was otherwise an engaging window into a long-forgotten past.

For all that not all the strands here come together seamlessly, though, many of them do. I liked getting to follow Eneko’s coming of age, and learning about how the people’s foraging practices changed as they came to the Middle East from their original home in Europe. I’d gladly play a third game in this series – but would hope that it would be a bit more accessible to newcomers, and not lose sight of the primary threads of its story.