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Review
We don’t actually know where Tituba was born. She was indigenous, native to somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, but 17th-Century recordkeeping was not exactly scrupulous about documenting who enslaved people were, once the legally-significant fact of their enslavement had been established. Regardless, by the time she becomes legible to history, the property of the minister of Salem, Massachusetts, she was a long way from home, and there was no one there to speak for her when she became the first person accused in the year-long paroxysm of madness that convulsed the village. After multiple beatings inflicted by her godly master, she confessed to her crimes in lurid detail: witch cakes, soothsaying, the Black Man, a black dog, a black rat, aerial rides upon sticks. Her testimony saved her life; she was spared where others who protested their innocence were hanged. And then she was sold on from her imprisonment, and history falls mute again.
Many women are harmed in One (More) Week in Dolcett – so many women, impaled upon spits, boiled in water, locked in ovens, slashed across the throat, shotgunned in the back, on and on and on. And then their bodies are mutilated and consumed by men, and the women who’ve made themselves complicit in this evil, in horrific tableaus that are lavishly and lovingly described, an explicitly pornographic transformation of human into thing. None of them are real, of course, it’s all imaginary, simply a game, these are wisps and phantasms with no moral weight greater than a fly.
Except for Tituba.
It is very tempting to make jokes in this review, because much of what is in the game is laughable – from the revelation that the cannibalism-obsessed protagonist sleeps with a night light that mimics an oven’s pilot-light to her insistently-parochial Nort Carolina pride – and because humor is one of our surest defenses against revulsion. But I am taking this game seriously because that, I take it, is what it is asking. There are, I am sure, places where fetish sex games can be posted and evaluated based on the effectiveness with which they cater to their respective fetishes; IF Comp has not, historically, been one of them (I suppose that was a joke) so entering such a thing here must mean that the author is inviting a different category of response, so I suppose we can take the blurb at its word:
[This] is also a story about growth, perseverance, and self-actualization under the most extreme conditions. It is a story about people, for people, and written entirely by a person in an effort to combine the deepest human emotions with our most primal instincts.
I read that to suggest that the player is meant to focus on the protagonist’s mental journey – that even if (“if”) they don’t share the hyper-specific cannibalism kink that permeates almost every paragraph of this lengthy game, the way in which she is able to work through her barely-sublimated desire to be murdered and eaten in order to save other women from non-consensually suffering that fate is meant to be the primary element of interest.
Having played through the whole plot, I don’t find that claim entirely convincing. The protagonist’s internal struggles are certainly foregrounded: this is the second game in a series, and the summary of the first installment makes clear that after an initial visit to the cannibal society of Dolcett, she found herself sexually enthralled by the idea of being forcibly roasted in an oven and then torn apart and eaten, and since then, her shame over her kink has left her isolated, with fewer and fewer attachments keeping from giving in to that ultimate fantasy of self-abjection. When she discovers that an unknowing woman has been dispatched there through a bureaucratic error, she decides to go back to rescue her, but it’s clear this is partially an excuse to once again put herself in a position to be cannibalized. This tension animates all the external conflict that comes next – even as she’s making contact with an underground network of resistant fighters, raiding the mansion of an aristocrat who’s kidnapped her quarry, or matching wits with a big-game hunter who’s set his sights on her, she’s struggling as much with her submissive desires as with these external obstacles.
If you zoom very far out, this kind of conflict between selfish and possibly self-defeating wants and impersonal duties is de rigueur in fiction. The argument for this kind of horror fiction is that building a narrative around a set of wants that are extreme and, to most readers, repulsive, is necessary because the catharsis on offer is likewise extreme, and can only be communicated by going to the utmost limits of the human experience. But this is very much not the case here. The shifts that prompt protagonist’s revelation that she has something to live for and should probably just indulge in roleplay rather than dangle herself in front of actually-existing cannibals to get off are commonplace, banal: she meets a man who likes her (likes her enough not to want to eat her, though he’s got the same sexual obsession), and she helps teach the woman she’s rescuing to be brave and stand up for herself, which helps her internalize the lesson herself. These are familiar tropes that aren’t especially deepened by their association with cannibalism, nor are they rendered here with any particular verve or elegance (in fact the prose is clumsy throughout, with awkwardly repeated words and typos that get noticeably denser in the sex scenes).
But as I said, I don’t think the blurb’s suggestion is convincing, because the game also stages a parallel drama of catharsis and transformation at the social level. Throughout, much hay is made of the customs, mores, and institutions of Dolcett, and the protagonist’s triumph is not simply that she escapes, but that in the course of her rescue mission she manages to inspire a movement to bring the whole rotten place down. The sequences of sexual peril alternate with moments of yasss-queen girl-power, and men are either clear antagonists or very secondary supporting characters. This is, I think, the other claim the game is making for itself: that while it’s presenting a misogynistic hell, its sympathies lie with the underdogs, and a key satisfaction for the reader is seeing evil receive its just deserts.
But the Handmaid’s Tale this is not: at best One (More) Week in Dolcett offers pop-feminism, but it fails to reliably deliver even gruel as thin as that. The social reckoning on offer here is decidedly non-apocalyptic: in the “true ending” that I received, a woman took power, sure, and even decreed that cannibalism henceforth must be truly consensual (to the game’s credit, it’s clear-eyed about the ways systems of power can coerce a superficial “yes”), but her message is entirely about the need for healing and cooperation moving forward. Beyond a short aside about one named character being jailed, there are no trials, there is no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, none of the dozens of men who, in the game’s bad endings as well as its canonical paths, rape and murder and enslave and devour, face a single moment of consequences.
That’s not the only way the game fails to actually situate patriarchy as the fundamental villain of the piece. It’s notable that the big fight against the hunter antagonist is only the first of three climactic encounters – the other two are against female opponents whose reasons for wanting to kill and eat the protagonist are much more personal, and beating them doesn’t align with any claims of social justice (the first is an indigenous warrior who’s lost sight of the teachings of her ancestors, and acknowledges at her defeat that the white woman has learned their lessons far better than she ever could; the second is a predatory lesbian who can mind-control any woman she finger-bangs). And to return to that confrontation with the hunter, there’s a moment where, after successfully out-fighting him, he’s able to turn the tables by pulling down his pants, and the sight of his engorged, alpha-male cock is enough to turn you into a slobbering, lust-filled animal; if you succeed at a challenging minigame, you can master yourself just in time to defeat him, but regardless of which outcome the player experiences, the sequence as a whole reifies the misogynistic assumptions of the male-supremacist worldview it wants to be seen as rebuking.
As I’ve said, this is of course all words on a page, with a notionally humanistic and even pro-woman ending attempting to redeem all the abuse these fictional constructs suffered along the way, even if I don’t think the execution of the piece delivers on that premise. But this is where we return, finally, to Tituba. Because she’s in here, too: at one point you’re given a choice of paths and if you decide to go through a mysterious forest, you wind up in the house of a witch named “Abutit”, who – like everyone else in the game – tries to cook and eat you. Once you defeat her, a heavy-handed hint is dropped about trying to read her name backwards, and one of the souls you free from torment at her hands says it’s been trapped for 334 years – the difference between 2026 and 1692, the year when the Salem witch-panic started. What’s worse, the game earlier implied that the cannibalism endemic in Dolcett might have a supernatural source, and that that source might be linked to the forests: and so, either intentionally or out of reckless disregard, the game enlists this enslaved victim of patriarchal and paternalistic violence as the original sin that gave rise to all the desecration of women’s bodies that has been paraded before the reader, hour after hour, crimes the story’s men commit in service of urges implanted in them by this Native witch who is thus truly at fault.
And if that is how it treats the one real woman in this story, forgive my skepticism about its solicitousness towards all the others.
