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Abstract angst-em-up, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My first year of college, I had a roommate who was super into Dar Williams. He was so into her, in fact, that he would fall asleep every night listening to his playlist of her songs on repeat. This being 1998, though, we were well before the era of Spotify and infinite music availability; that playlist was about fifteen songs he’d managed to snag on Napster. Oh, and our room was pretty small – our beds were about four feet from each other – so when I said he would listen to that playlist every night, I meant we would listen to that playlist every night. And while when I first heard Williams’ stuff, I found her a pleasant enough singer-songwriter who’s recognizably of a piece with a bunch of similar mid-90s folks that I really enjoy, being subjected to the same hourlong loop of music, running over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, did uh not leave that positive first impression intact, through no fault of her own. You might justifiably ask “wait, why didn’t you just ask your roommate to play something else or turn down the volume or wear headphones or something?”, but I was a 17 year old boy, dealing with another 17 year old boy – I did not have nearly the emotional intelligence needed to initiate and negotiate that dialogue, so now something I once kind of liked leaves me twitching with shellshock.
…for once, I am starting a review off with a rambling, overly-specific personal anecdote, and it is precisely on point. The Gift of What You Notice More takes its title from a Dar Williams song, and takes as its subject a failed relationship whose fractures stem in large part from its protagonist’s reluctance to speak up and have direct conversations about their needs and feelings. Rather than an interactive drama, though, this parser-like Twine game explores its emotional terrain through allegory and flashback. After an opening that sees the protagonist ready to leave their apartment, and husband, for good, you visit a strange café where you encounter a trio of poets and an ambiguous angel who arm you with the tools you need to delve into your memories, which you do by entering three photos of pivotal moments in your conjugal lives: the night when your husband proposed, the day you moved away from your hometown to support his career, and your last birthday, when the façade of happiness you showed to him and your friends became too much to bear. By solving inventory-based puzzles in each vignette, you achieve some tentative revelation about one of three key questions that are gnawing at you (where did it all start to go wrong, what do I really need, etc.), and then you can choose which one is most compelling to you when you revisit the poets and unlock the next phase of the game.
I actually really like this structure; it combines things that parser-like IF is really good at (environmental storytelling, light puzzle-solving) with a strong thematic framework that links the gameplay to the overall narrative, while giving the player space to provide specific input about how they’re interpreting the story as they uncover it. And divorce has supported a million novels and movies, hard to go wrong there. The puzzles are solid too, all quite intuitive so they never slow you down, with an inventory system providing the tiniest bit of friction so lawnmowering isn’t that appealing.
And yet, as if it were a Dar Williams song, I found I didn’t quite get on with the game (I repeat, my current antipathy for her music is entirely irrational and undeserved!), I think for two primary reasons. The first is that the allegory is often way too literal for my tastes. This is maybe a Scylla and Charybdis thing, since I also tend to dislike games where the allegory gets too personal and abstruse to be resonant to anyone else, but I still think there’s a generous margin between that sort of thing and the puzzles we get here, where you need to confront the elephant in the room and recover what’s been swept under the rug. As one-off groaners these’d be bad enough, but they’re often the prompts for multi-step puzzles that make you really dwell on how clangingly obvious the imagery is, like the bit where you see that you’re wearing armor in the birthday-party scene, but when you try to take the armor off so you can be vulnerable, a jester comes jumping out from behind the couch to replace your protection. I admit, I’m not sure I can immediately come up with an instantly-readable metaphor for using humor as a defense mechanism that’s any less ridiculous, but perhaps that’s an indication that this whole approach is flawed.
I think I get why the allegory is as on-the-nose as it is, though, which goes to the other reason I didn’t click with the game. There’s very little here that says anything specific about the relationship, or about the character of the husband, or for that matter about the character of the protagonist. We get a very few hints – there’s a short text-message exchange where your husband’s trying to cheer you up ahead of the birthday party, and we see he’s fond of emojis – but when you go to the flashbacks, everything is static; all the characters, your past self included, are frozen, and you can’t engage or interact with any of them. While there would have been ways to keep this element of the design while still getting more concrete details into the picture – the narration could have incorporated more specific bits of dialogue, for example, or spent more time reflecting on what drew the narrator to her husband in the first place – for the most part the authors seemed content to leave both characters largely as ciphers.
As a result, picking apart the reasons why the relationship failed felt too abstract to truly land for me. Like, many of the potential problems listed – saying yes to a commitment when you weren’t 100% sure, moving someplace far away from your home for a partner’s career opportunity – could either be deal-breakers or complete non-issues depending on the specific people and specific circumstances involved. And the others are largely just truisms – yes, addressing challenges as they come up rather than burying them and building up resentment is important! – that, shorn of any particulars, lack the heft to elicit more than a shrug.
The frustrating thing is, in the ending sequence the game is more concrete and specific, and it’s by far the most affecting part of the piece. Calling a friend to come pick you up, washing the dishes one last time before you leave the apartment forever, deciding what to pack in the one suitcase you’re taking with you: the writing here conveys real emotion, and I think would resonate with anyone who’s ever been in a similar situation. After all, as great songwriters know, all the platitudes about love and overwrought metaphors in the world can’t stand up to a single well-chosen detail (again, Dar Williams could certainly be counted among these great songwriters for all I know!)