Go to the game's main page
Review
Repeat the Ending handily includes its own faux history, its own imaginary criticism, and its own projected audience reactions. The majority of these are fictional.
The work offers numerous prefab opinions of itself. Outside discussions of the work generally read like amplifications of ideas seeded by the author's own self-supplied analysis. In effect, the work talks so much about itself that it leaves room for little that is new.
To engage with the work at scale means going through two parallel fictions (the interactive work and the faux historical transcript) plus a third orthogonal fiction (the imagined history of the work and its invented public response). That's a pretty high bar to clear in terms of hours spent just to survey the whole.
One can turn this work round-and-round in one's head for quite some time, trying to find a perspective that makes its various parts line up into a coherent picture. This is tremendously complicated by the constant self-contradiction of the work as a whole. A thing given in one part of the work is most often modified, opposed or canceled by something in another part, leaving the reader always asking: Is depiction A or depiction B the truth, or are both or neither? That can become tiring when no unambiguous answer is on offer.
The total work as presented is akin to a piece of wrinkled origami paper. It's clear that it has been folded into something before -- even unfolded and refolded according to a different design, potentially more than once. The implicit task for the reader is to refold it, but which of the existing creases are clues? If the reader ends up with something that looks vaguely like a frog, is that what it was supposed to be?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the work itself has something to say about this idea. In the (theoretically fictional) voice of "Drew Cook": "I want people to wrestle with it, to decide for themselves what it means. Wouldn't it be ungrateful of me to interfere? To prevent anyone from honoring my work with their time? I'd never do that. I'd never deny them the freedom to interpret my writing as they see fit." Also, as a point of general philosophy: "[the reader's] interpretation is more important than [the author's] intent".
Clarity and self-consistency are not interference when attempting to communicate. It would be ridiculous to believe that Cook does not know that -- so what is the corollary? Is Cook really not trying to communicate, to generate specific ideas and understanding in the mind of the audience? Is the reader supposed to invert or discount these passages because it was "Drew Cook" speaking, not Drew Cook? Or are those passages supposed to be treated as true reflections of the author's thinking in real life, despite the work's insistence that "Drew Cook" is at most partially representative? Is it supposed to be a panda or a koala?
Is the reader supposed to use outside knowledge to validate or invalidate the fiction's assertions? Does its intertextuality extend to reference works? Should one consult the dictionary definition of bipolar disorder (the protagonist's stated ailment), look up the psychiatric usages of lithium in the 1990s, and notice that the list of the protagonist's symptoms is a much closer match to the dictionary definition of schizophrenia ("A severe mental disorder diagnosable by some or all of the following symptoms: blunted emotionality, decay of rational faculties, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions and hallucinations.")? Should one then go on to re-evaluate the narration's reliability in the context of what could be an intentional clue in a work that masquerades as a puzzle game and contains a plethora of subtly significant detail? Hey, look -- I made a giraffe!
The above is not intended to disparage origami, nor texts without clear answers, nor authors who seek only to prompt questions, nor the mentally ill. Highly convoluted works are often favorites of writers, and this work is certain to be satisfying for those who like to grapple with them. Trying to untangle a Gordian knot can be a pastime in itself, even enjoyable if the act of untangling some portions (though it be at the cost of retangling others) is seen as its own reward.
If you're looking to play a game as entertainment, however, you won't find one here, and the star rating I'm giving it is reflective of that. (I won't even bother to lay out a dissection of the pseudo-game; what would be the point? There's every indication that the parts I don't like are there by conscious and well-considered design.) Fortunately, the current version includes a "story mode" that is basically an integrated walkthrough giving the grand tour, and I would personally suggest just starting with that since it allows one at any point to stop and explore for as much or as little as one likes. Rest assured that the significant puzzles to be solved in this work aren't encountered at the command prompt, and if you're worried about completionism you'll end up reading the source code, anyway. I don't do literary criticism, and I don't come to IFDB looking for works of literature, but I will say that this work would make one hell of an assignment for an English class.
The orthogonal fiction looks to be squarely aimed at writers and critics, and it may hold greater interest for those in that more restricted audience than it does for the average player; no doubt one could make a convincing argument that the pseudo-game and transcript are best viewed as supplemental materials to that portion, in effect acting like very elaborate feelies for a printed work -- an argument strengthened by Cook's having added additional paratext since the initial release while leaving the "game" essentially unchanged (other than the addition of story mode). For the record, despite my negative reaction to the pseudo-game, the orthogonal fiction convinces me that the actual Drew Cook is a very capable author.
Because of the total work's many self-contradictions, the ratio of reader to author in any message "discovered" within will be highly variable. It wouldn't be fair to call this aspect a failure in a work so exhaustively honed, especially when there is good reason to believe (via the real world statements of the actual Drew Cook) that the author is not counting the successful communication of any particular message as part of what will define his own evaluation of its success. One could say that the work as a whole offers something for everyone, and also nothing to anyone. Make of that (and this review) what you will.
