The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate

More than any other genre – yes, I’m including you, hard sci-fi – horror depends on rules. This is maybe a counterintuitive position, but hear me out! Much of what makes horror, well, horrible, is watching a seemingly-unavoidable bad outcome come closer and closer to fruition, which works best if you can predict how to get from point A to point B. Similarly, desperate characters are often pushed to take risks or try unorthodox tactics to escape their fates, and their successes and failures feel arbitrary, the stakes are much lower. And of course one of the signature moves in horror is the sinking feeling of despair when suddenly, the rules don’t hold anymore, and the situation is even worse than it seemed – but this is a move that only works if this is an irruption of unreason into a heretofore-logical world, otherwise it’s just yet more weird stuff happening without much of a rationale.

Ethelred Estate boasts some solid horror bona fides, from a premise that entertainingly remixes Fall of the House of Usher (like most people, my first association with “Ethelred” is the misleadingly-nicknamed English king, but the name is also used in Poe’s story) to overwrought Lovecraft-baiting prose:

In my immensurable dreams, I find myself remembering the last night I spent at Ethelred Estate.

In the eternal darkness, it is the only thing I can do. I am doomed to remember, but forget when I doomed myself that night.

It falls down (er, so to speak) when it comes time to bring these strands together, because neither the rules pertaining to the unfortunate protagonist, nor those governing the player’s interactions, are especially clear.

Let’s take the latter point first and talk about the Texture of it all. This drag-and-drop system of combining actions with nouns found in each of a game’s passages in theory opens up quite a lot of space for interactivity, but in practice I find many authors struggle with its affordances, and Ethelred Estate is no exception. Many passages only have one interactable noun, meaning that the player just has two or three choices, like in a simple Twine game, but without as much understanding of what you’re actually deciding on. In fact the game branches substantially based on seemingly innocuous choices, but confusingly also seems to assume multiple branches are true simultaneously. For example, you make an early decision on whether an important ceremony is a funeral (as it turns out, for your brother), or a wedding (as it turns out, yours, to a man who’s already gotten you pregnant), but whichever you choose your brother is dead and you’re about to give birth, you just might not have much explanation of one of those facts depending on which way you went (the husband is also oddly a nonentity no matter what).

There are some sequences that do make good use of the system, most notably a repeated setup where you apply a choice of three adjectives to three nouns to better characterize a scene, which feels like a good way to allow for player expression. On the flip side, I also ran into what seems like a substantial implementation bug, as my first play-through finished prematurely when I wound up a dead end passage where I only had the “listen close” action available, and nothing to attach it to.

Restarting and trying again, I was able to make it through to the end, and proceedings did generally make more sense since I had the added context from the different choices I’d made the first time out. The writing also muddies the waters, either because the author hasn’t decided on what’s going on, or isn’t quite able to clearly convey it. As a small example, take this passage:

In the blue heart of the flame I could the door to my father’s study, austere, inexorable, separating me from my father even in his absence. And yet the door was plain, unlike the foyer of the house, because my father had neglected to spend money on it before he had bled the family coffers dry.

On a ploddingly literal note, “austere” and “inexorable” are odd adjectives for a stationary door that’s plain just because the money ran out, and the game hadn’t previously established that the protagonist had much of a connection with her father at all, making this assertion of separation rather dubious even before we get to the fact that he vanished years ago and there’s not really anything of interest left in the study. There’s also a missing word (probably just “see”, but maybe it’s something else) that doesn’t help matters.

But even as a series of revelations about the familial crimes that were now putting the protagonist at risk played out, I had a hard time understanding how they all were meant to fit together, and their implications for the price she’d have to pay to give her hereditary curse the slip. The climax is a series of shocking events that don’t, to my eye, have much in the way of buildup, so unlike the House of Usher, the collapse of Ethelred Estate felt somewhat arbitrary. So much has happened – the archangel Michael visits! There are weird bug-people! Revenants! – and it’s unclear what’s literal, what’s metaphorical, and why any of this is going on. It makes for a story that begins with promise but goes out as a muddle rather than a tragedy or triumph, all for lack of some rules.