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Average Rating: based on 9 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 7
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
a chinese family dinner moment for a very specific definition of chinese, November 7, 2024
by pieartsy (New York)
Related reviews: review a thon

When I played this game, I expected a single choice (given what Jam it was for), not no choice, so when I finished, I was pretty surprised. I replayed it a few times to see if there was literally anything else I could do, and read a few reviews to see if I was missing anything. I don't think I am...? The closest thing I can think of is that you can kind of hop between listening and looking during the leg moment, which seems to delay the leg moment progression, but nothing changes because of this and I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't an Inform implementation bug.

Past my initial confusion-- I think that this game is very good at depicting the moment and feeling it's trying to convey, a profoundly uncomfortable family dinner trapped within the bonds of social/familial norms and the echoes of past abuse, both gender and sexuality based in the text, and possibly more. The lack of agency throughout the whole game is a simple and perfect execution of ludonarrative harmony, where our own lack of agency as players reflects the lack of agency of the protagonist. I also found it poignant and sad that this feeling of having no right to voice their problems extended past their family dinner to their attempt at a social media escape, which only seemed to hurry on the death of their willpower.

I just played Repeat the Ending today as well, and in the metatext, the author comments that while his game may seem like a miseryfest, sometimes life is just abject shit for people. This seems to reflect that sort of approach. This isn't a fun game, it isn't particularly fulfilling, but it's not trying to be fun or fulfilling, it's trying to depict a very specific experience, and it does quite a bit thematically with very few words.

However, I have to admit that I am not rating it very highly, though for an extremely subjective reason.

I am Chinese, however I am specifically a Chinese-American adoptee. I really don't relate to most stories, anecdotes, memes, or anything that other Chinese people tend to use as cultural touchpoints (whether those living in China or those in the diaspora). Nothing currently makes me feel more alienated from my ethnicity than Chinese (and honestly, East Asian diaspora people in general) people talking about "subtle asian traits" or the relatability of having Tiger Moms or whatever.

While I *fully acknowledge* that this game is not trying to claim that Every Chinese Person Has Had This Experience, and in fact the protagonist appears to be *incredibly* specific (being, presumably, a trans person who was AMAB, along with other particular details), and I also fully acknowledge that this is an "i am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?" take of mine, I can't help but feel a little cold about this game labeling the experience as a Chinese™️ Family™️ Dinner™️ Moment™️. I didn't have a Chinese Family™️, I've never had a Chinese Family Dinner™️, and I've certainly never had a Chinese Family Dinner Moment™️ , so this game is definitively Not About Me, and it's not trying to be about me, but the labelling sure does remind me that I am not Chinese™️. (I also know that this was not Kastel's intention. It's just a subjective feeling of mine.)

An extra dimension of it is that I did not know my birth parents, and I get a little horrified at the idea that this is what I was ""missing out on"". It seems a little flattening, because I think, surely not all Chinese Family's Dinners are like this? But then I remember that I do not actually, and will never actually know, so it gets me feeling weird.

I will lastly note there are a few verbs that get Inform standard responses, like "jump", "hit (or any violence term)" "eat", and "touch" which kind of ruin the agency-robbing effect to a degree, when everything else points you toward one thing.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The illusion of choice, October 23, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

I mentioned in my review of Remembrance that a straightforward structure for Single Choice Jam games is to reserve the choice for the final bit of the game, using the opening and middle to establish stakes and build up to the drama of the one place where there’s player agency, and then ramify the endings according to the path the player opts to take. There’s nothing wrong with that approach at all, but it’s also interesting to see another entry in the jam subvert that structure and call into question whatever this “agency” thing it is we think we’re talking about. Chinese Family Dinner Moment also stands out from its peers in the jam by being a parser game; the very concept of “choices” fits awkwardly into the standard parser game format, inasmuch as typically they offer quite a large range of potential inputs (you can type anything you want, and might get a customized response) but also often constrain the player to a stultifyingly-linear plot. So what, exactly, counts as a choice and what doesn’t?

Let’s put in a pin in that; don’t worry, we’ll be circling back soon enough.

Shifting from structure to themes, CFDM makes no bones about the fact that it’s about alienation. The protagonist is a young Chinese person who’s recently come back from studying abroad in the U.S., which their parents have used as an occasion to throw a bigger Lunar New Year party than usual. And on every level they feel disconnected: from the casually racist attitudes of their family and family friends, from their narrowly-materialist view of what matters, from their choice of food to serve (they’ve gone vegan), even from the plausibly-deniable sexual assault they endure and from their own physical reality:

">X ME

"You don’t like your body."

Make no mistake, this is a downbeat game; there’s some humor, but it’s almost all dark and derives from how unselfconsciously awful the other characters are. Here’s some dating advice from an aunt:

“You better not get a white woman since white women can’t cook. And you definitely don’t want to get a black woman because they’re criminals … or an Indian because their cooking smells.

“Between you and me,” she continues, whispering in your ear, “Chinese women are a bit better, but have you read the news? That lady tricked her husband into giving up his cash. That’s why you shouldn’t trust us devious Chinese women. Get a Japanese woman. They are polite and deferential to their husbands — unlike me!”

The picture being painted here is very specific to a particular socioeconomic cultural stratum, of course, but I have a friend who was subject to almost this same tirade, word for word, except he got it from a Persian woman warning him off of other Iranian-Americans. So while the details are all well-chosen to root the game in its milieu, I think it also succeeds in creating resonance with anyone who’s ever chafed at the chauvinistic, greedy, blinkered principles of friends and family after starting to be exposed to a broader understanding of the world, and questioning what received wisdom tells them is their place in it (Chinese people, of course, don’t have a monopoly on either side of this equation).

I use “picture” advisedly here, since the player’s role in CFDM is largely a passive one, but one that requires the player’s active complicity. There are conversations that play out, uncomfortable situations that occur, and an unsuccessful attempt to take refuge by retreating to social media (if you thought your relatives were shallow and transactional…), but while you might expect these to be implemented as events that occur according to a timer system that ticks onward regardless of what you do, in fact by default scenes are mostly static. Instead, time generally advances only when you type LISTEN; this is a canny design decision, because of course your silence means that your interlocutors feel free to fill the air with their discriminatory nonsense or otherwise play out their anti-human pathologies. But since you’re allowing them, if not inviting them, to do so, can you say that you’re so much better? There’s even a late-game sequence that makes this explicit, as LISTEN leads to you actually speaking up, though not for yourself, as it leads you to repeat your relatives’ prejudices about poor people and black folks and trans people right back to them, validating and reifying their biases.

This is of course deeply unpleasant, but as I said above, I played through the game expecting that it was building to a point where I’d finally have a choice to rebel. As it came close to the end, I thought I’d spotted the moment: there’s a family picture to wrap up the evening, and as everyone prompted me to say cheese, I saw the opportunity for a gesture of quiet dissent, at least FROWNing to create some visible distance. But no, I was surprised to see, that wasn’t an option: again, all there was to do was LISTEN, and go along with the crowd.

Is CFDM a zero-choice game instead of a single-choice one, then? Well, no; after finishing I checked out the source code and saw that there’s one other option that’s always available: the out-of-world command QUIT is altered to have diegetic effect here, and you can invoke it at any time. It doesn’t exactly let you achieve catharsis, though – instead of a self-righteous denunciation of your family’s reactionary values that validates your identity and maybe starts to change their minds, you get a response indicating that running out of the restaurant caused a small scandal that impacts both you and the rest of your family. No matter what, you’re in this together.

What are we to make of the moral universe thus established? Per the implementation of LISTEN, allowing yourself to be a victim makes you culpable in the small-minded bigotries of your family; per the implementation of QUIT, refusing to be culpable makes you a victim and tars your family with guilt by association. Some might say this is no choice at all, since both ends are so bad, but are choices just about outcomes? And does the possibility of even an unguessable choice that doesn’t wind up changing anything somehow still bestow freedom? For all that Chinese Family Dinner Moment is studiously anchored to its context, it’s nonetheless one of the most Existentialist pieces of IF I’ve encountered – we can hope that material circumstances will change and liberate the protagonist from their subaltern status, but even that won’t blunt the horns of the dilemma that’s depicted here.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Short game, big punch, August 27, 2024
by Tabitha
Related reviews: IF Review-a-thon 2024

I played this game last year when it was first released. Replaying it today, I found it even shorter than I remembered, which I think speaks to the punch it packed on that first playthrough. I remember starting it up and trying the usual initial parser commands—“x me”, “inventory”, “x [mentioned noun]”—and trying to reply to the woman who’s speaking to the PC, only to find that most commands have been rendered ineffective. The descriptions of you and your inventory are brief and atmospheric, but the responses you get when you try to speak, examine anything, or travel in any direction are all explanations of why the PC can’t or won’t do those things.

It’s of a piece with Rameses and other games with an agency denial mechanic, a game where the point is what you can’t do rather than what you can. Figuring out how to advance CFDM’s story as the parser rebuffs you at seemingly every turn (both through custom error messages and the Inform defaults—rewriting the latter or remapping those commands to the game’s custom catch-all message would take the polish to gleaming, to borrow from JJMcC) could be considered a mini puzzle, one that’s satisfying to solve even as discovering the solution brings on a sinking sense of despair.

This constrained parser format is an excellent choice for conveying the protagonist’s circumstances and frame of mind—they aren’t going to push back against their situation at all, no matter what the player might attempt to have them do. The title is apt, as this really is just a brief moment, a snapshot in this person’s life, but one that’s rendered effectively enough to be visceral and memorable. I felt for this nameless protagonist and understood their choices, even as I wished they would stop sitting back and accepting the harassment, racism, and transphobia happening around and to them.

Taking the one alternate choice you can make, (Spoiler - click to show)simply leaving the restaurant where this is all going down (by typing “quit”), is just as unsatisfying as playing through to the end, which I think is the point. There aren’t any good choices here; maybe, under the looming specter of familial obligations, disassociation and passivity are the best you can do.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
An uncomfortable moment, April 20, 2024
by EJ
Related reviews: Short Games Showcase 2023

In Chinese Family Dinner Moment, the PC, a closeted AMAB trans person who has been away at college in the US, reunites with their Chinese Indonesian family for a Lunar New Year dinner. (Whether the character is a woman or nonbinary is not stated.) On one side is an auntie who wants to chatter inanely about family members the PC barely knows; on the other an uncle with unsavory intentions. The PC can't eat the food (they're a vegetarian), can't reveal too much about themself, can't stomach engaging with their family's conservative political opinions and general bigotry. In such a situation, what can you do? As anyone who's been through this kind of family dinner might guess, not much...

This is a very quick game, but it works perfectly at the length that it is, because it zooms in on this single moment and really makes the player feel the PC's acute discomfort and sense of being trapped, (Spoiler - click to show)as well as their self-disgust when they finally cave and starts parroting what their family wants to hear. Much of this is accomplished through the use of a strictly limited parser--a great illustration of how "interactivity" doesn't have to mean "making choices" or "solving puzzles." A static short story of a similar word count would not have nearly the impact that this has.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A constrained parser game with a family dinner, December 5, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This is a parser game entered in the single choice jam, which requires that games only allow a single choice throughout the game.

This takes a clever spin on things by making you only capable of one real action at a time. There are many small things you can do: looking around, taking inventory, etc. But only one action really works.

It took me a bit to find what it was, which was frustrating at first.

Once I did, the game took on new dimensions, basically showing everything that could go wrong with a family party when your values and self-concept don't align with theirs.

Short and constrained, but impactful.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Family Dinners, am I right?, August 25, 2023
by manonamora
Related reviews: singlechoice

We’ve all been stuck in one of those dinners, the one you don’t want to be at but have to, the one where the host mainly organised it to show off, the one where guests came there to make themselves look better than the rest, the one where snide comments are thrown left and right… and the food? well… usually not worth it…

You really want to leave but can’t really, not for a while. You could participate more, but it would mean pretending to be someone you are not (like a man or a meat eater), and that’s exhausting. So you quietly sit through and maybe mumble a few words, or clench your jaw when an aunt tells you your degree is probably useless, or an uncle reminds you never to trust [insert minority/other ethnic group]. Or maybe you just listen, drifting your thoughts somewhere else, or finding refuge on your phone for a while.

Even through this very linear parser, and the short prose, this game manages to encapsulate all these murky feelings of uncomfortableness, stress, and exhaustion. The error messages when trying to engage with others or yourself or the meal is humourous, even if at time self-deprecating (I saw the influence of the Pageantverse in there too). There is not much to do, mainly because you don’t want to do much as the character either…

And this worked quite well as the author’s first try in parser and Inform!

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A true-blue hard-core Single Choice Jam entrant, August 21, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

The Single Choice Jam allowed for one actual choice of branches, with the rest being just pushing through with the equivalent of "next." That's not to say you had to put a choice of two or more paths in, though of course it'd be a risk to.

CFDM takes this risk and is, I think, successful. Perhaps you have little in common with the narrator. You're not a member of any group that's discriminated against. But it's still easy to understand their helplessness, as well as the final climax, which wasn't dramatic but I can see how it's something you might be dreading all evening.

The setting is a family dinner where banal things seem to be discussed. Except in context they are not banal and you have a right to feel very ugly listening to them. Family members are either negligent towards this or actively trying to make things more uncomfortable. It's not a very long dinner, thankfully for the reader, and it doesn't need to be to get the point across. The final bit hit home for me, as it forced the narrator to go along with the whole charade of normality one last time. I found it effective. I suspect most readers have been in the narrator's position before. The alternative seems to be that they have not, because they have created that sort of position for others, which is obviously worse.

This entry was written by someone looking to try Inform for the first time after showing they were handy with Twine and narrative things. It's neat to see this crossover on general principles, being someone who used these jams to look into Twine after learning Inform. And I think it adds a new perspective--based on other potential entrants' notes, I don't think the way through the game would've been something someone experienced with Inform would've gravitated to. It's relatively simple, but it hits a good spot between standard Inform verbs and what to do in this sort of situation.

Also, given the restrictions of the comp, it seemed like a great time to learn something new--"don't do too much," a general good idea for learning something new, is really baked into the comp rules. Plus you have a buffer or ready-made excuse if things don't work out. CFDM did not need one.

I've had a few painful family dinners of my own, with the whole "just sit through it" ethos. Sometimes it would be rehashed afterwards once guests left, with "perhaps you could have participated more, maybe next time, they'll think something is wrong." The author mentions they hadn't had such a dinner for three years due to COVID, which is a small mercy for all the bad things that happened, and I was grateful to be able to add their perspective at this sort of thing to my own. I can say "yikes" now without going into a tailspin, and I appreciated this from CFDM, and I hope the main character gets there sooner than I did.

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