Repeat the Ending

by Drew Cook profile

Slice of life
2023

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Quarter-century look-back at a flawed game., February 2, 2024
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

---> Our learned co-contributor to Intfiction and writer of the comprehensive IF and Infocom-related blog Gold Machine has unearthed an interesting work from the early modern ages of Interactive Fiction in the form of one of his own old games. In a considerable labour of IF-related textual archaeology, he has published a Critical Edition of the seriously flawed 1996 Inform 5 game Repeat the Ending. It consists of an edited version of the original source text (i.e. the game itself), supplemented and supported with in-game annotations and a separate Reader's Companion (referred to together as the paratext.)

This Critical Edition collects a series of contemporary and new essays on a wide range of topics such as the genesis of the original and the edited game, exploration of the themes in the work, the (supposed) development of authorial intent, the evolution of language-use, and the shift to a more player-friendly version of the high Zarfian Cruely level of the original. The articles found in the Reader's Companion were contributed by P. Searcy, D. S. Collins, C. A. Smythe, A. H. Montague, and Drew Cook himself. Each imparts their own emphasis on topics viewed from their personal field of interest.

Along with these scholarly texts are included a number of reviews, both contemporary and of later dates. These give a nice insight not only into the reception of the game, but also into the IF-ecosystem at the time of their writing. An interview with the author is also attached, although the vagueness of the answers to pertinent questions means that it hardly contributes more than some amiable atmosphere to the discussion.

Reading the entire Reader's Companion requires a fair amount of time and focused attention. It's worth it though, since its contents give the player a life-line to guide their interpretation of the sometimes obscure storyline and design-choices in the game proper.

More easily accessible are the annotations scattered throughout the game-text. They clarify, raise questions about, or merely point out notable or confusing responses and features the player may encounter, and may then choose to delve into further in the Companion. The footnotes double as much-needed tutorial information for new and experienced IF-players alike where such guidance for tackling the game is absent from the source text.

In the combined paratext, much attention is directed toward the differences between the 1996 original work and this 2023 edition. The authors views on a number of topics seem to have, if not radivally changed, then certainly noticeably shifted in the two-and-a-half decades since first writing Repeat the Ending in 1996. Interestingly, on many occasions, both in his own words and when paraphrased by the other contributors, the author vehemently denies any such shift has indeed taken place. He claims that this new version is the one he always intended to create, putting aside any real differences as artefacts of his inadequate proficiency in Inform 5 coding at the time. This is hard to believe, to say the least. When studying the essays, and comparing the new edition's text with a transcript of the original game that was circulated in 2003, it becomes clear that the 2023 "definitive" version is close to a complete remake.

An important caveat, and an in my view critical flaw of this Critical Edition is that the original source material, i.e. the 1996 version is not included in the package, neither as playable game, nor as source-code. All comparisons between the original and the new versions therefore rely on second-hand references, the word of the author, and the text of the 2003 transcript. The veracity of this last bit of data is problematic to say the least, as all acounts regarding it characterise it as implausible, misleadingly edited at the very least, perhaps even dishonestly doctored in full. The results, statements, and deductions found in the so-called "Critical" Edition's essays are all built on loose sand because of this omission of the original source text.
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--->Apart from analysis and clarification, the paratext serves an important, if secondary, role when viewing the work as a whole, i.e. the totality of game, essays and footnotes. Careful, measured perusal of the analytical asides while playing leads to greater involvement and deeper engagement with the game as the player is experiencing it. The paratext delivers a conceptual framework for attempting to understand the game's meaning, it opens an intellectual pathway to the strong emotional impact of the game's story.

Conversely, and at the same time, the scholarly approach provides protective distance from the distressing themes and actions. This certainly applies to the player who can withdraw into a more reflective state of participation when direct experience becomes overwhelming. It is hard not to speculate if the author chose this scholarly approach for the same reason, not to be confronted too directly with the hard themes of the game, but to have a roundabout way of writing about them when immediate handling of them became too painful...

When the paratext messages are disabled in the final chapter of the game, this protective effect becomes very clear. Here, the player has no choice but to experience the unfolding of the story directly, without the option of circumventing, avoiding, or delaying the emotional intensity of the story.
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--->And here, now, dear patient reader, I must abandon all pretense of engaging in distanced scholarly debate. For I have to speak of the source itself, the heart of the work, the game Repeat the Ending.

I am dead serious about the defensive qualities of the scholarly diversions in the paratext. This game hits hard, and is brutally vulnerable at the same time. The protection offered by the distanced paratext seems to work in the other direction too. An intellectual wall shields the sensitive heart of the work. It's cradled in an analytical nest to keep whatever harm at bay.

The elaborate room descriptions in Repeat the Ending are interspersed with personal comments from the point of view of the protagonist. Interacting with the contents of the locations through the habitual IF-commands quickly runs into a frustrating wall.
Unproductive, unimportant, unsuccessful commands (of which there are many!) are met with plaintive, self-pitying, or even hostile responses.

The author subverts the traditional expectations of who the parser/narrator is speaking to or about, and uses them to blur the lines between the player and the protagonist on different perceived levels of reality.

The dramatic, mentally unstable state of mind of the main character, his lack of control over his life-direction is directed outward, ascribed to unrelenting external forces such as abuse in his childhood or poverty in his current situation. Or it is attributed to uncontrollable internal influences, the driving urges and voices in his mind. The latter is very effectively conveyed through the dissociation in the mental monologue of the character between the narrator and the actor. The ambiguous use of pronouns (we, I, you) points to the in-game confusion and powerless state of the protagonist. However, once the player realises she is controlling the character's actions through her input of commands, this ambiguousness extends outward to encompass the player at the keyboard. It pulls her into a complicit, even guilty role since she is the one responsible for the protagonist's decisions.

Throughout the game, there are two seemingly straightforward objectives. The main character must pick up his medications from the pharmacy, and visit his mother in the hospital. However, it soon becomes clear that none of the successful steps in the direction of these objectives raises the player's score. Indeed, it is only when the method of increasing the score becomes apparent that the true underlying goal of this piece reveals itself. While there is a straight pathway through the story that succeeds in both superficial objectives, real "progress" depends on rebelling against the railroad. Taking actions that go against the narrow definition of success, that take the protagonist outside of his automatic routine often lead to failure and death. However, these actions do signify desperate attempts of the main character to fight back, to regain some measure of control, some small grasp on life.

A telling insight into the dismal state of mind of the protagonist is offered by the confusing, disjointed images. They seem to come straight from a dream or some other, more terrifying subconscious process. Despite their surreal quality, the rough-scribbled outlines, splashes of colour, skewed perspective, and, most touchingly, their choice of details depicted lend an impact surpassing that of any realistic depiction of the scenes.

Repeat the Ending features an innovative magic system that exemplifies some deeper point of the game. Instead of the usual fixation on object-manipulation, this game is about recognising processes, changing states of the surrounding world (and of the mind). The deeper meaning of the work is reflected in this focus of the magic system: pushing against and redirecting the laws of reality to change the circumstances. Finding a way over or through the predetermination of the protagonist's life.

The multiple endings that can be reached are in line with both the struggle to break free of the railroad, and the depressed and dissociative mental state of the main character. They are a measure not of success, but of steadfastly reaching outside the limits of perceived set-in-stone possibilities while failing.
No matter which way the heartbreaking final scene plays out, the story will end on at best a bittersweet note. The best both player and protagonist can (and should!) hope for is a small sense of regained control, of personal responsability, of self-knowledge.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
The Meaning of Interactive Fiction, August 20, 2023

Of the many retrospectives on interactive fiction (some of them being outright games themselves), Repeat the Ending seems to be the one that gets to the essence of why people write and tell interactive fiction.

The "meta" premise is simple: this is supposedly a "critical edition" of a parser game that came out the same time as In the End and it predates influential puzzle-less and linear works like Rameses and Photopia, but it was so buggy and people weren't into these kinds of "personal games" that it was largely forgotten -- until people started talking about it again in interactive fiction Usenet groups and a "2003 transcript". This led to some interest from academics and critics to resurrect the game and publish it in Spring Thing 2023, with one of those critics lamenting it as part of "the unfortunate critical phenomenon of 'rediscovering forgotten classics' for retroactive canonization".

The "actual" 2023 game itself meanwhile is a pretty personal story. Think the works of Porpentine, especially their angelical understanding. The protagonist is on medication, poor, and he's learned that his mother is gravely ill. He needs to go to the hospital, but it seems that the text parser isn't very cooperative. You could simply type > WIN, but the game gives you a speedrun of the game with no catharsis. Instead, you are asked to contemplate the scenery and interact (more like dawdle around) with the objects. In fact, the game rewards you by finding fail states, usually ridiculous death sequences. There's some Enchanter-like magic systems to solve some puzzles, but it's a surprisingly grounded work.

Each puzzle, like wearing your clothes, is just an everyday task but rendered far more complicated by the introduction of a magic system that deals with entropy. While your protagonist can be a superhero, they're usually just trying to get things done on their end. I was somewhat familiar with the period of interactive fiction the game purported to be from and I imagined how players saw this then. To these players, they probably saw it as a puzzle. To me, the magic system feels like an interesting allegory on disabilities, much like the oft-touted "spoon theory". Am I reading this too deeply, like one of the many critics that is sapping the enjoyment of playing this game? Who knows, it's not my game.

The way I interpreted this story has little to do with subjectivity, class, (good) criticism, game design, or even the history of interactive fiction. Instead, I'm more enamored by the need to express a story through interactive fiction.

Why did the in-game author create this game in a community that wouldn't understand the kind of storytelling he's trying to do back then? Honestly, even today, people still see parser games as that outdated mode of presentation with puzzles that boomers would only adore (oh, the Infocom trauma). We can only wonder what the in-game author was thinking when he made this game. In one footnote, he even joked about wanting a time machine to study Photopia. If we simply consider it in the realm of alternative history shenanigans, then this game would indeed be considered a classic. Or even better, if the in-game author saw what the Twine revolution was doing and picked that as a time traveling spot too. But, would it be the same story that shook the interactive fiction community? Would it just be something else entirely, the autobiographical work that we descendants of the "personal games" movement actually want but not the work that in-game Drew Cook made? Would it be Repeat the Ending?

I don't know. And I think that's the main point I got from the game. Whatever that in-game Drew Cook made was something special -- a parser game that seems to hate its own construction/self and revels in this paradox of identities -- and the academics and us the reviewers are trying to turn it into something more understandable at the risk of ruining its own uniqueness. It almost feels like canonization of something so personal and expressive to Cook can strip that away. That even the "personal games" movement can turn what is really a heartfelt game into a talking point about game design should raise some eyebrows.

I am reminded of nonlinear literature like House of Leaves that explore the (academic) obsession of a text to the point the text consumes those who read it.

But Repeat the Ending isn't interested in that angle: it is concerned about why people write these kinds of personal interactive fiction regardless of trends, canonization, or legacies. It takes the lessons of interactive fiction before and after to tell a story so therapeutic that it must be fulfilling for the author: "The never-ending discourse on fate vs free will in IF? Let's use that to tell the story I want to write."

The game is rich with rabbit holes that would excite the academics (indeed, that's the point of the paratext), but it eludes them that perhaps notions of "escaping the narrative" may simply come from Drew Cook's drive and not some grand theory on interactive fiction. Beneath all this claptrap lies a simple message from Cook: he wants to be heard.

Cook may devise stories based on witty narrative tricks, but in the end he's trying to write some story. He found an engine and played some games, so he's using it to explore his trauma and history. We don't know if we can understand what he is going through, but we get a sense that he found something cathartic and resonant doing this journey. All he is asking is to be heard, to be taken seriously not as some work on IFDB but as his own expression.

How do you hear a voice like Cook? Do you do close readings of his game like the critics before? Remake his game like the academics? Write a review that's meandering like this one?

It's difficult to know for sure, but I think this game gets to the heart of why people keep coming back to interactive fiction, including text parser games. There's something very powerful about playing a text parser game because you are interacting as someone else in a different world. For a few hours of your day, you are in this person's clothes and you are screwing around in this world. This simulation is what makes expression in interactive fiction so utterly fascinating and beautiful.

But for the designer, it is even more poignant: they are envisioning worlds they can interact with. There are limitations (and the game acknowledges that), but text parser games can be powerful essays that mean a lot to the creator (and nothing to the reader). While we readers may scratch our head and write analytical articles on it, the creative process of the game is the real reward for the creator of this game. It's why game making can be (and is) therapeutic.

In a way, the most important "reader" is the creator of the title themselves. That's the meaning of interactive fiction in my eyes: a mode of self-expression undaunted by what reviewers and critics think. Everyone else clarifies and obscures this self-expression from the author and we are surely important in this ecosystem, but the essayistic creator knows what the process has giveth and taketh away. Those who create and express themselves so purely must be commended, not simply "canonized".

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I'm Not Worthy, July 12, 2023
by JJ McC
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2023

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/17/23
Playtime: 4.25hrs score 23/33

I, ah, wow.

Boy do I owe my randomizer an apology. Deferring this particular work to the end absolves whatever sins I attributed to it. The Thing would have been an altogether different experience if chance had front loaded RTE. This is an incredibly layered work, taking on a broad collection of themes and commentary with some central conceits that I found… deeply dispiriting in that it kind of shamed any similar artistic ambitions of my own.

But because I am a heroic reviewer of Epic Scale I must cast all that aside to describe what a wonder Repeat the Ending is. The game purports to be a “25th Anniversary, Critical Directors Cut Rerelease” of a technically crippled but thematically unique 1996 IFComp game. The remainder of this review takes that claim at face value.

There are at least 5 layers to this work: 1) the original troubled magical realist/mental health focused game (itself with several layers!); 2) the historical context of psychological narrative IF and its reception 3) the updated version of the game, most especially the significance of the modern changes; 4) tropes of IF, including “post-puzzle” tropes; and 5) the critical analysis of all that.

It is a collected work, a collage, the playable portion of which is the minority. There is companion text in separate pdf-eelies and integrated into the hint/GUIDE system. There are context-building historical blog posts, critical essays and reviews. Exhaustive explications of the limitations of the original game that act as stealth training. Deep annotations by a trio of critics that act as hints as well as context builders. I was over a half hour in before typing my first command. I was still reading for 45 minutes after typing my last command. It is deeply effective in portraying a body of discourse surrounding the work, compelling in its breadth and vision. Each component of the patchwork has a distinctive voice, especially the trio of critics that are our guides (with varying levels of esteem for the project), and the author themself whose wry commentary peppers everything with suspect honesty.

All of it tonally perfect, from the erudite critiques, the playful and perhaps disingenuous hints, to the raw sometimes immature game play at the heart of the work. As I do, I grabbed a few lines that tickled me early on, before the scope of the work overwhelmed me and I just clung to the dashboard for the rest of the ride.

"In a recent survey of parser IF fans, four out of five respondents were found to care far less about mimesis than they initially believed."

"author's hegemony" (which you are conseled to fight)

"Cook's use of 'score' is almost certainly ironic. Audiences who consider themselves too sophisticated for such outdated narrative features might better enjoy themselves by referring to it as a 'failure index,' 'success deficit,' 'flop quotient,' or, more portentously, a 'present assessment of counter-narrative guerrilla action.' "

It would be easy to just grab funny/well-written/cutting quotes, but man, out of context they are insufficient, and even somewhat deceptive, in conveying the scope of the work.

There is so much to latch onto here. The historical context stuff was a clever, yet melancholy series of observations about artistic endeavor. The way the author subverted his own game, by layering a counter-narrative motivation that started funny but got increasingly unpleasant. The critical commentary that was in some ways a gentle parody of facile criticism, of the insufficiency of both fawning and ‘takedown’ critiques. Girded with legitimate caveats and observations that acknowledge the simultaneous importance and unachievability of full perspective.

(Sidebar: I topped out my “flop quotient” at 23/33 by choice. While my completist nature initially pushed to get all the ‘soft’ endings reflected in the score, the tongue in cheek humor sublimated to something altogether uncomfortable as time went on and made completism less attractive. This seems a deliberate, and effective, artistic choice.)

Awash in all that, to me the most compelling thread was the contrast between the original work and the 25-year-later revision. The early work rings like the work of a young artist - in love with their narrative conceits, possessed by a powerful emotion demanding documentation, convinced of the importance of their artistic vision to the exclusion of mundane craftsmanship. And fraught with an epic helplessness, a not uncommon youthful preoccupation. The modern revisions (some small, some dramatic) showcase a more mature artist, actively rebutting his younger self with nuance, generosity and insight. "Yes, and"ing his earlier work, both acknowledging its power, and offering additional perspective. And, not for nothing, smoother game play. The picture is a compelling one, most especially in the progressive ‘new’ endings created for the later revision, suggesting a final gift of freedom from the raw suffering inherent in the original work. (Spoiler - click to show)It’s not just the devastatingly gentle rebuke of those alternate endings, but the fact that the way to achieve them is to actively resist the defeatist track of the main story. UNTIL THAT RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES DEFEATIST! How perfect is that?? Yeah, I don’t know why that observation deserves a spoiler and not the whole rest of it, but that’s just where my head’s at twisting over this thing.

The work is simultaneously super controlled and shaggy as life. As a reader/player, you can bounce around this vast creative space engaging any or all of these themes as your mood strikes. It is a rich environment, with many ecosystems, each with their own marvels - some standalone and no less compelling for it, others that shed new light on previously superficially understood areas.

It is a compelling achievement. Deeply immersive. Demanding a lot from the reader, but pretty consistently rewarding for it. I hate how much I love it.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Psychological Meta
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If this were my project I would burn it to the ground, and deny its existence forward. I’d probably take legal action to silence the beta testers and even the cast of Spring Thing 23. Just expunge this thing from the record and people’s memories. I wouldn’t want this impossible miracle to POISON THE GROUND FOR THOSE THAT MIGHT COME LATER.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
"Love Follows Knowledge", indeed, June 9, 2023

To someone with sensibilities like mine, Repeat the Ending makes quite the poor first impression. From the very beginning, the footnotes already work to constantly interrupt the game's natural pacing, and the extradiegetic nature of the tutorials is puzzling, to say the least. This inability to leave the player alone speaks to a complete lack of faith in the text's ability to speak for itself, and is especially baffling coming from those who supposedly respected the original enough to help make a new version of it. That these people could have thought so much about this game and still ended up thinking so little of it strains believability.

But then I wondered if maybe, if it's so unbelievable, I'm not actually supposed to believe it — and that's when Repeat hooked me.

There's so much that could be said about this game, and what comes to me most easily are thoughts on its portrayal of trauma and mental illness. The scoring system that tracks game overs rather than progress is the mechanical highlight here, and the failure-obsessed playstyle it engenders in the player ties perfectly into those themes. Just as higher scores will lead to increasingly better endings for D, so too does surmounting his trauma require him to, through "us", look at his own pain, understand it, acknowledge it. As painful as this process can be (and it's certainly uniquely painful to him), only from that knowledge can love follow.

Well, that's the easy part of thinking about this game. The hard part is reckoning with all the fictional commentary on the game itself that's been included with it — commentary that, in my understanding, ranges from misguided at best to insultingly ignorant at worst. Most of it is content with merely ruining the play experience, as mentioned in the first paragraph, but the most egregious read so unnecessarily deeply into the material circumstances of the characters that they absurdly come to the conclusion the work is cruel for its own sake, and also misogynistic, ableist, classist, etc., which of course reflects quite poorly on the author.

Where does this leave me, the real-world critic? I'd like to say that I'm not like those commentators. That I'm above them; that I always approach texts sincerely, with an open mind, not seeking to impose my own view upon them. But do I really? Always? Can I truly say that I've never looked at something through the wrong lens, or dismissed a work due to having an incomplete view of it? I... can't. I just can't.

In a stroke of genius, the scoring system is relevant here as well, as it's said to also function as "a measure of [a reviewer's] engagement with the text". (For what it's worth, mine was 33/33, though I'll admit to liberally checking the hints.) A reminder for me to never take my critical process for granted, then. Even art that initially seems so confused and bad as to strain believability deserves the benefit of the doubt. To be looked at closely, understood, acknowledged. It's a laborious process, and it might reveal something of value, or it might not; but either way, only from that knowledge can love follow.

So here's my own contribution to the game's paratext. I'm a very slow writer, so was initially not planning on doing this... but then I saw the contemporary reviews of this, the Real real version of the game, also included with it, and I couldn't resist. Thank you for trusting your players and critics in this manner, Mr. Cook; I hope I've managed to return that trust in kind. (And, given that this is my first time writing a review here, that I've not unknowingly committed some unforgiveable faux pas.)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Spring Thing 2023: Repeat the Ending, May 27, 2023
by kaemi
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2023

Of the unstably mediated manuscript genre, let’s select The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago as our analogue: an initial idea is intervened upon by a cascading negative that creates a complex call and response between the text and the lived experience of its creation. Similarly, here we have a notional IF game from 1996, represented as a 2003 edited transcript, that encounters a cascading negative response, represented as a series of commentaries which assume a scholarly authority from which to belittle, delimit, and assail, which causes a revised IF game with renewed endings. Crucially, like Saramago’s novel, there aren’t delineated layers, which is why we should steer away from the decomposing mediator before the intractable artwork Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, but rather the vivacity thrives in the interplay, with a seething of paratexts and a dizzying chronology destabilizing the only complete layer, the parser game, into a melange of multideterminate frays.

Which compounds the complexity of our already heady with subversion traversal of the acupunctured text. The game is structured around identifying failstates before progressing to the required action. In each phase of the game, you get points for discovering alternative endings, with different final endings depending on how many points you’ve collected along the way, with the normative ending, as represented in the 2003 transcript, is itself a failstate that you need to subvert, sloshing us nauseously back where we began: “You open your eyes and stare at the pocked expanse of sheet rock before you. “Not this shit again,” you say, referring expansively to the totality of matter, movement, and time. You keep turning up for these days, again and again, and the best that you can say is that things haven’t gone downhill. Well, unless you die, 1996 is going to be better than 1995. You know what? It will be better even if you do die.” The goal, then, is to break the cycle, find some way to invest the disparate energies around you with enough rebellious reinvention to eschew the repeated ending, the increasing certainty of closure against which we must rebel in defiant expressions of agency, writhing of the wounded animal opposed to the depressive selfloop to decay, banging desperately at the edges of possibility to rearc your terminal momentum.

Charging us to defy this progression is the notional maxim the author supplies us to refuse their construction: “Refusing the tyranny of the author” unites the metafictional edge around the narrator’s ability to confront himself, resulting in the deconstructive moment that unarms the patterns that have crowded out the blank page’s freedom. You can escape the laws of ever increasing entropy to suture a sense of moreness you have been bleeding all the while, resurging lost energy to achieve some equilibrium sustainable against the worldcrashing loss of your mother, a newfound capacity to believe in alternatives to recapitulation that sustains the endings we freshly envision against those preprogrammed: “The author of my troubles stands before me. How many times have I entered that hospital room? As many times as I have entered, I have never once left. Not really. Not like this. I have never been here, talking to him. I have been in the dark, but I have never been in this dark. It belongs to him, not me. I never had the courage to escape this day. I only ever tried to run past it as if it were a cemetery at night. I wanted to end what I ought to have overcome instead. This day, repeated endlessly, is a thing he has done to himself: a trap he has laid for himself. Everything, all of it, has always been about him. “I want to apologize,” he says. “I haven’t been kind to you. My own father was educated. He had a doctorate in American Studies. I grew up surrounded by books, reading them and talking about them. I took that from you. I never let you have that. My own father went around cleaning up after my mother his entire adult life. With his help, she was able to live a long time. Have a career, even. Almost everyone that she knew considered her a success.” / I stare at him, this dimension-hopping non-uncle of mine. “Why did you do it? How could you do it? You made me and my mother so sick. How could you force someone to be that way? What’s wrong with you?’ As soon as I say it, I know that there’s no answer. He’s even more messed up than I am. He is driven to relive his shitty childhood in a loop, again and again… he can’t help but repeat the ending. / “My boy,” he says, “my son. That’s why I am here. I am setting you free. You’ve found the edge of this simulation, of this narrative. You’ve broken through. You’re free to push beyond it now, to do what you will. To live.” He turns, and begins walking away, into the void.” The healing moebius twist occurs through a beginning, a path that leads beyond where all else ends. The repetitions are revised in a new reflection, no longer collapsing upon itself, but capable of believing external to its textual recursions. Crawling through the metafictional layers from 1980 to 2019, we supersede the prayer for cessation “If you had the whole thing to do over again, you wouldn’t” with a redemptive second chance: “I am deeply grateful to all who have given Repeat the Ending a second chance; perhaps this phenomenon is better called a kind of grace.” The torment from the original ending can be overcome, we can become someone new.

This therapeutic selfdialogue isn’t quite so easy, of course, repeatedly battered as it is by a relentless hurricane of voices, endotextually through the demoness and paratextually through various reviewers and scholars, infusing various strains of disdain into the process. For a game that generated enough interest to warrant a critical edition, basically everyone seems to hate it. Layers of (self)loathing compress basically every feature: we invest order into a pile of clothes, and the resulting cleanliness shimmers a brief reprieve: “For the first time in a month or more, we feel a profound sense of peace disrupt the unending yammer of hateful self-talk that runs through our brain.” Except essayist A.H. Montague bursts in to characterize the scene as miserabilist and classist, and before this metafictional harangue dissolves both scene and critique into a new direction, Montague launches a critique against this very metafictional direction, spinning everything into allencompassing rage: “Many objects in the trailer can be invested with the SEETHING ORDER, and each case leads to a different, fatal outcome. The narrator, who seems to be the “body” of the protagonist, blames his thinking, agentic counterpart for his suffering. This second half of an agonistic dyad is more than likely meant to represent the player. It is reasonable to interpret Cook’s narrative structure as an accusation directed at audiences, who are not merely passive observers but partners in accountability. Naturally, this tactic conveniently shifts blame away from Cook’s own self-loathing ableism.” No reprieve obtains, negativity reenforces the collapse, everything back into chaos, psychic bleed of the game’s own selfawareness. This cocooning negation oozes numerous paratextual layers, becoming rather baroque in its intricate selfdisstory, including even a surprise passage featuring Mike Russo as antagonist reviewer.

While these inflows of selfloathing form a core emotive thread in the work which helps establish the breathlessness of the struggle, the recurring impulse in the work to bury itself results in you always being held at arms’ length from any genuine textual engagement. Whenever you encounter an idea, the metafiction jumps two steps ahead of you to desecrate each step before you get there. For instance, the opening scene has us play as the demoness, and we siphon a psychic bleed from the mother, which leads into the core gameplay conceit that you can invest people and objects with intangible energies. Readers will encounter this idea, and go, okay, the game is saying something about how trauma effects trauma, and maybe that plays into whatever is going on with the endings and progress, except then a footnote immediately slaps it out of your hand and goes yeah obviously, what a level one insight, don’t you realize how much more is going on? “Given Cook’s interest in themes pertaining to mental illness, it is tempting to see the cycle of loss and inheritance dramatized here as metaphoric, but his own comments have been characteristically cagey.” In your traversal of the dense layers of metafictional reference, you are constantly playing catchup, which prevents you from bathing in any of the streams you cross. To untie the knots into narrative, you start mining your way down through the metafictional chronology, which keeps talking about instead of you inhabiting, but then by the time you get to the bottom and start working your way up through the metafictional narrative, you’re climbing back up all that talking about instead of you inhabiting. This happens with the point system, the hint system, the magic system, any moment which on its own could be an interesting artistic turn in itself is immediately turned on itself through layers of ironic distance and precipitative dismissal, a haughty cleverness that harangues the reader with how it has already read itself reading itself and so you reading it has nothing to offer. Combined with the relentless layers of selfloathing, it can often feel like you’re being mocked for trying to work your way through the complexities: “Though your decision was foolish, I cannot fault you for pressing against the edges of this oppressive narrative. / This outcome has earned a rating of Rage Against the Machine/10.” Okay, but it has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime, so what better place than here, what better time than now?

Which of course is the point, right, this is a game that hates its own construction, which consistently assumes the position of the other to harangue its features, so insofar as we are located within the text, we’re grappling with all the doubt and dismay pouring in from everywhere, sure; metafictional inclusion, where every experience of the experience is incorporated into it as intent; but that comes with a cost, which is that the hyperpermeability of the plasmatic layer loosens its richness into the voids above and below, freezing over. Given how much is going on at any given textual layer, sometimes I think the full extent of its genuine originality can be blunted. For instance, the concept of manipulating entropy to navigate an introspective journey against recursive tendencies to decay is particularly poignant and is rendered deeply engaging through high concept nodes like the demoness and the psychic wounds. I want to dive into these, explore their emotive and intellectual depths! Features compelling in themselves without the layers and layers of also and/or despite. I even enjoyed its simple pleasures like “an adolescent primeoid gazes into a brightly glowing scrybox” translating a child at a computer. Even at the metafictional layer, the parallel of Drew Cook the narrator and Drew Cook the ingame author with Drew Cook the metafictional author of the 1996 game and Drew Cook the metafictional author of the 2019 revision is redolent with echoes and could have been the propulsion of an entirely new approach to the paratextual whole. So many of the ideas here don’t require repeated selfreferential undermining in order to spark into meaning.

So I’m going to rebel against the tyranny of the author and talk about something once said by Drew Cook, whose work we have not yet mentioned: “it seems clear that the defining, necessary trait of interactive fiction is its capacity for simulating subjectivity and the experiences of the Other.” The player, entangled into the triangle of self, narrator, and agent, accepts the trajectory of the Other as experiential unfolding, subjected into their worldline, but what happens when the subjectivity includes itself as rupture? In the Nelsonian nineties, reveling in the undead possibilities of Infocom’s reanimated Z Machine, how can our experience of agency effect our expectations of forward, accumulative motion? “Zork has countless choices, but only two endings: death and victory (the many deaths are treated the same way). What is the relationship between agency and empathy in interactive fiction?” Zork allows us forward only as we assume the characteristics of its adventurer persona, until the dungeon yields itself to us as master, treasures accumulating your points to your ended according to its rule. The alternation of death and continued subjection, in either endings accepted into simulational oblivion or recursion into victoriously wrought into recursion, a brittle point tapering experience to which we return and return, unable to break through, what if this isn’t triumph, what if we regret the path, what if we want to go backwards? What if our forward motion is bleeding us into acceptance of an other we increasingly (do (not)) recognize? What if the cascading negative is not the destruction of something, but compulsion towards what elsewise we would write? What if our stories unfold even past the point where the intensifying pressure folds the narrative in on itself? What if there is a tomorrow not reached from all these yesterdays? “It is easy for a game to have an incomplete story if the player considers a fail state the ending.” Is there a game whose completeness elevates beyond the dimness at which it is finished? Amidst this phantom gallery, where do the colors bleed when they fall from the frame? “If meaning-making is a shared effort between artist and audience, then influence is not a family tree. Instead, it is something web-like or even, less determinately, something in the air: an ambiance or a far-away sound.” Desire to reach out, to hear, to finally be here with everyone around you; the agency, the paraempathy, to get there.

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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Read the first footnote first, May 16, 2023

Don't make the mistake I made, of reading all of the written metatext material in the GUIDE before you start playing.

Instead, just start by typing PS 1 to read the first footnote. (Whenever you see footnotes in brackets, e.g. [CAS 1], you can type the text in brackets to read the footnote.)

The first footnote includes a tutorial, allowing you to start playing and familiarize yourself with the characters before you dive into the metatext.

(Unfortunately, some of the metatext implies that you need to read the metatext first, and in particular, that you need to read every page of the metatext just to find out how to read footnotes, to find out how to access the tutorial. IMO, this is a bug in the tutorial, and I hope it gets fixed.)

I, myself, really didn't enjoy this game, because I spent an hour scrutinizing the metatext before engaging with the characters.

But you won't make that mistake. You'll like this game much more than I did, because you read this review.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Metatextual, experimental, narrative stretching and moving parser game, May 16, 2023
by Vivienne Dunstan (Dundee, Scotland)

Wow. I’m not quite sure what to say about this. It’s a parser piece, which can be played to an extent as a traditional parser game, episodic in this case. But it’s also metatextual, highly experimental, and in places for me was profoundly affecting.

The metatextual side is perhaps the least spoilery I can go into. It adds a guide you can interact with, that expands, and provides hints. You can also read in game footnotes. This is reminiscent of some discussion on this forum a while back about how old games could be effectively bundled up in a wider package, providing extra contextualisation etc. It’s really neatly done here.

The traditional parser/puzzle side is arguably the least interesting element. But it’s well done. And uses a neat mechanism throughout, that I won’t spoil.

There is also something very interesting about the narrative structure that the game does. But again I don’t want to spoil it!

But it was how the game affected me that I found most impactful. This relates to something that happened in my own life almost a year ago (spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)my dad died). And I feel quite shocked after playing the game to be honest. But in a good way.

Kudos to the author for a powerful and innovative piece.

P.S. As I said to Drew elsewhere I could have written so much more about this in my review. I sort of wish I had. But I feel very strongly that this is a game best discovered by each player afresh. And I absolutely didn’t want to spoil things. If anything my review underplays how good it was. There are many more things I could have acknowledged. But that way lies spoilers. And I wanted to avoid them! Try it out anyway folks!

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A fictional game-within-a-game with fictional metacommentary, May 6, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

This is a large, ponderous game with many attachments. The image I had when starting was of a gigantic hamburger, one that you'd get at an artisanal place that is far too large to fit in your mouth. You pick it up; it looks good. You eye it, go to bite, hesitate, turn it. A piece of lettuce drops out. You grab it, but an onion is slipping out the other side. So you just start eating, bits dropping here and there, no longer able or willing to manage it all, just enjoying the burger.

The concept of this game is that there was a (fictional) game released in 1996 that was like Photopia ahead of its time, less focus on puzzles and more on story. But it's intentionally made to be like other games of that period, so I guess less like Photopia and more like In The End, which is referenced several times.

Seven years later, someone releases a transcript of the game, which becomes well-known, so a new round of criticism is generated.

This game, in the fictional history, was buggy and received poor reviews. Then, in 2021, the author was approached by some critics/fans who want to do a critical version of it, which he agrees to while they update it (kind of like the Anchorhead update and the Cragne Manor tribute, I suppose).


This game consists of the 'revised version', with an accompanying booklet with the transcript and some art. The revised version has art as well. An in-game guide consisting of critical materials is available in-game, slowly increasing in scope as you proceed.

The art is one of the highlights; the style is unique and well-executed, and the game may be worth playing for the art alone.

The game concept is that you have the ability to remove entropy from some sources and imbue it into others, having been gifted that power by an orange-eyed demon woman in your youth.

It serves as a metaphor for involuntary inaction, similar to ADHD or depression, where you can only use some external impulse to compel yourself to complete some task.

Your mother is dying in the hospital, and you need to go see her. There are several obstacles in the way, though.

Besides the main goal of the ending, there are many mini-deaths along the way. The more you get before the end, the better ending you get!

Except...even if you only get a few, you can see what the ending would have been for the other options. I only got 6 points, but I wasn't super motivated to see the other 27.

And let's talk about why.

This game is very polished. It had numerous testers, and it feels like it. There were only a few times I felt like there were 'bugs', like trying to (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN DOOR while on the roof and having it say that that's not something you can open. Overall, though, I'd say it has a high level of polish for a game in general, especially one of its size.

Where I found some difficulty was in knowing what to do a lot of times. I felt like the game swung between no details and overfull details for clues sometimes. Like finding deaths; I really couldn't figure out the mechanics behind finding deaths at all. There were no exposed electrical lines or broken glass that could obviously hurt me. And things that were dangerous (like a heavy tree branch) didn't respond to what I thought were death-inducing things (like pushing them). The hint menu has dozens of hints, but none of them at all are for the deaths except for an explicit listing of the exact actions you need. In the main storyline, too, I often found that the things I got most stuck on weren't in the hints at all. I suppose I was just on a different brainwave.

It might have helped to highlight relevant features in some way. For instance, the (Spoiler - click to show)AC unit is mentioned early on in the first line of the paragraph, in the middle of a list of a bunch of non-useful material. Given its significance in the story, it might have merited more prominent place, nearer the end of the paragraph.

Fortunately, the game is implemented well enough that even while struggling there are generally good responses to obtain while looking for something to interact with.

The three layers of Drew Cook (the real one, the author one, the PC one) all blend in interesting ways, positive ones, I feel.

It's hard to evaluate the quality of the in-game writing. I think I would like it, had I found it in the wild; however, all of the in-universe reviews, mostly written by the (real-world) author, praise the quality of the writing. They'll say (paraphrase) 'the writing was excellent, but the bugs were terrible'; it came up more than 4 or 5 times. It's kind of like trying to judge the natural light of the moon when someone has set up a dozen spotlights aiming up at it in an attempt to brighten it. Does this artificial praise really affect my perception of the prose? It's hard to say, and it would have been interesting to see how I felt about the writing quality without simultaneously reading a great deal of manufactured praise for it. However, I do see the reasoning for it, for otherwise why would this game have been preserved?

Overall, I think of lot of people when looking for parser games to play are looking for something that's not super buggy, that responds to most inputs in a helpful manner, and that has a nice outer shell of story, setting and/or (in this case) art. So I think most people will be pleased with this. It made me think quite a bit, and I could see myself revisiting it.

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