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Review
It’s by far one of the least-destructive elements of the patriarchy, but ever since I became a dad (four years ago yesterday!) I’ve been irritated by the absurdly low bar society sets for fatherhood. Like, in some sense I suppose it’s nice that when I’m at the park with my son and people see that it’s just the two of us and I’m playing with him, not just staring at my phone, passersby are visibly surprised, or when I’m chatting with one of the teachers at his day care and it comes out that it’s almost always me who makes his lunches and snacks, I get an “oh, that’s so nice.” It’s meant well, I’m sure, but it can feel almost insultingly condescending – these are bare minimum parental tasks, but because I’m a dad, not a mom, I get graded on a curve that would shame the Matterhorn.
But as annoying as that can be, A winter morning on the beach goes one step farther in the low-expectations sweepstakes. Initially, it doesn’t seem like it has much to do with parenthood, presenting itself as a meditative little parser game where you walk on a beach for a while (the protagonist is getting older and is trying to get more exercise on their doctor’s advice). I’ve played a reasonable number of these sorts of games, and found that I kept getting wrong-footed, feeling like it was sometimes undercutting itself: there’s not much scenery beyond the sea and sand, for one thing, and while the implementation of what’s there is fairly deep and engaging all the senses, the descriptions are relatively flat in a way that doesn’t provide much in the way of reward for trying to enjoy the environment:
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"It smells like nothing: water is notoriously odourless."
My experience is that beaches have a lot of smells, with the water in particular having a salty tang and sometimes the odor of seaweed, fresh or rotting – but even if that were a realistic response, it’s not a very interesting one. A sharper challenge to slowly taking in the sights as you stroll down the beach is the world’s most poop-happy seagull; if you spend more than a couple turns in any location, one shows up to ruin your jacket and end your playthrough, which is the grossest ticking clock imaginable. The aesthetics are also not conducive to a lazy stroll; the game’s played in Vorple, and displays in a retro font and color scheme that I found a bit jarring (in fairness, the Vorple integration does enable a convenient hyperlink-based interface, though I mostly played by typing rather than clicking).
The impetus to hurry, the lack of sightseeing, and maybe even the eyestrain-inducing interface are intentional, though, since as it turns out the game wants you to get to the story rather than linger and smell the roses. After a lot of walking through near-identical locations, you finally reach the end of the beach, and here’s where the plot kicks in, though it’s rather slight: you find a toy car, then one location over find the kid to whom the car belongs, bawling his eyes out over losing it. If you do the obvious thing, you muse to yourself that you’ve just proven that you have what it takes to be a wonderful grandfather, at which point you receive a phone call from your kid with news you’ll never be able to guess.
In some ways this makes for a nice ending; the protagonist seems legitimately happy to be a new grandfather. But at the same time, going back to what I said earlier it makes me shake my head that he appears to think this scenario constituted any kind of crucible: if as a grown-up you steal a toy from a child for no reason, the issue isn’t that you might not get a World’s Best Grandpa mug, the issue is that you’re a motivelessly-evil Iago figure. If the lost-car vignette had been one of several low-key encounters on a more crowded beach, I think the revelation at the end could have been more effective, recontextualizing what had come before in a way that had some genuine surprise. But since the environment and exploration elements are so thin, everything hangs on this one small moment, and just isn’t a big enough deal to bear even this relatively light weight.
