Money for Girls: Amortized

Money for Girls may be my favorite Porpentine game I've ever played. I've played all of their major IF games, though some of it was many years ago and imperfectly remembered by now. Their more recent short stories and novels I'm more familiar with and have read a significant number of. The writing style is dense, elaborate and lurid. There is beauty and grotesquerie intermingled (along with significant sexual references, though nothing explicit in this particular story). MindApe called the writing style Ballardian, but Porpentine's recent fiction always makes me think of the one Poppy Z Brite short story collection I read, Are You Loathsome Tonight?.

I think this may be Porpentine's first Steam game, though I'm not sure. It costs around $10 depending on your location. You could call it Porpentine's return to IF after a while focusing on static fiction, though the game is a visual novel with heavy emphasis on the visuals, so not only pure text.

Porpentine's earlier IF, as I remember it, has a dissociative quality, with characters glimpsed only hazily and never in full, including the protagonists. Not true of this story, where our protagonist, the unfortunately named Cancer Prize, is a full-fleshed character with her own full-fledged relationships to the other characters. There are only five named characters in the cast, by my counting, and the game is long enough that you can spend hours with each of them, gradually learning their quirks and foibles, their dark secrets and shames. Given this is a visual novel, there's emphasis on dialogue and a lot of script-formatted dialogue, but it works. A coming update, planned for October, will hopefully add even more story to the characters who currently don't get so much screen time.

The story is generally slice-of-life, set in a bizarre tropical fantasy setting where parasitic fibers and their aristocratic hosts run rampant, along with the "agents of INNOCENT" trained to counter them. There's a time sim aspect: You have a limited number of weeks to save your mother from debt, and in each week you can choose from two activities to do. An activity might be shopping, or spending time with your crush, or trying to get money through various dubiously legal means. Character customization options add unique dialogue and potential for replay. I especially liked Endometriosis, essentially the "hard mode" option, and something rarely depicted in fiction.

You can really just look at the Steam reviews if you want an idea of what this game is about and whether it will appeal to you. There's a lot more to be said about the game, but it's been said there by people who are more dedicated to it than I could be.

A last note: The protagonist's relationship with her mother is wonderfully depicted and heartfelt. I particularly appreciated that (Spoiler - click to show)Cancer's mother was an emotionally abusive alcoholic in the past, who hurt her daughter very badly but is trying to make amends, and is actually succeeding at being a good parent. As you might expect from Porpentine, the story is told with cold-eyed lucidity and no naivete, without shying away from the darker aspects of what her mother did. Which only makes it better. It's hard here to draw a clear-cut line between 'abusive' and 'non-abusive', hard to reconcile past behavior with present actions. As it should be, because fiction mirrors life.