WATT

Okay, let's get one thing out of the way. Getting a math PhD has rarely proven to be a useful choice in my life, so I wanted to try it here. But the integral is wrong! The two curves intersect at whole numbers (-1 and 3). Integrating 7-2x gives 7x-2x^2, so plugging in the bounds gives whole numbers. Integratings (x-2)^2 gives 1/3(x-2)^3, and neither bound gives a multiple of 3 when plugged in, so the answer should have 3 in the denominator. I thought there were supposed to be some impossible questions, like Baldi's Basics, but all the others were possible.

Anyway, this game made me think of 5 other pieces of media as I played: Deltarune, for the character creation screen; Ezekiel 16, for being a baby cast out into the wide world; an evil version of Phantom Tollbooth, with all of its unusual and allegorical characters; No End House, the creepypasta, for its succession of rooms that take an increasing toll on our protagonist; and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, my favorite opera and one where Bluebeard unlocks seven doors to show his wife that become increasingly disturbing.

In this game, you have to obtain seven keys from various challenges in order to restore a lighthouse. This world is weird; at one point you're a baby that walks around and grows bigger in seconds, and at another you have a mom you grew up with who raised you. So a lot of things are allegorical.

Each key that you get requires something different. One has a quiz; another requires you to get closer to someone. Many involve self-reflection of some kind. The pattern breaks down a bit at the end when things get more hectic.

Overall, I loved the visuals and the feel of the story. Much of the story was impactful; slowing down the text at the end kind of lessened the impact for me, as if the author wasn't sure that the text alone would be weighty enough. I think it was! It was also a lesson for me because I'm working on a short twine game and had imagined slowing down the most dramatic moments.

The game uses multimedia in an effective way, and overall gives off a highly polished feel. The writing is the kind I would think of if someone said 'What's an example of good writing in a recent IFComp?'

One of the weirder experiences of my reading life was a couple years ago, when I wound up spending most of the night at the ER with my wife – she wound up being fine, but it was stressful and there was a lot of that hurry-up-and-wait that always happens in hospitals, so I wound up reading all the way through the short book I’d thrown into the go-bag since it was next on my to-read pile: The Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, this is already a bit of an odd duck of a book; it’s an allegory from the late 17th century depicting a soul’s progress towards salvation, taking much of its surface incident from the stuff of chivalric romance but its structure, and deeper meaning, from the radical strains of Protestant theology that briefly flourished during the chaos of the English Civil War before being inevitably quashed as order was restored. I’m reasonably well versed in the milieu for a layperson, but it definitely still feels like an alien text to me – and that’s before accounting for the fact that I read it in one sitting, in the middle of the night, trying to distract myself from anxiety.

It’s not just a critique and not just a compliment that playing WATT reminded me of that experience: just as the eponymous Pilgrim is called to abandon his family to seek salvation, the eponymous WATT hears a voice ordering him to leave his home in order to save it; just as Pilgrim undergoes allegorical trials as he struggles with despair, fear, and other sins, WATT visits seven houses that each host a challenge focusing on aging, anxiety, or the difficulty of making a human connection; just as the locations in the Progress have excessively-literal names, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Doubting Castle, WATT’s journey sets from a town that’s just “Penance” spelled backwards; just as I sometimes found the early-modern text alternately uncommonly lyrical rough going, some of the prose in WATT is really good and some verges on doggerel; and just as I felt flipping to the end of the book in the ER, I finished WATT rather unmoored and unsure of what had just went down.

There are two ways you can assess an allegorical journey like this, I think – the first is how well the overall arc functions, and the second is weighing up the individual steps in the path. The former is where WATT is unfortunately least successful. Not to extend the Pilgrim’s Progress comparisons past the point of reason, but while the opening there is similarly abrupt and disorienting, it’s drawing on centuries of Christian teaching; we know what salvation is, we know roughly what is needed to attain it, and we know that, at least within that worldview, it’s the most important thing there is. The Pilgrim, who’s actually called Christian, is an intentional everyman figure, from his generic name to his lack of backstory beyond a consciousness of sin. In WATT, we’re not given much to understand who this voice is or how credible it is, and what if any metaphysical significance the task it gives to the protagonist – finding seven keys to unlock and activate a lighthouse – is meant to have, which makes the game’s feints towards religious issues unsatisfying: there’s just not much substance here to engage with. And while WATT initially seems to be a blank slate, down to an opening “character creation” section that aborts, telling you that you don’t have the power to make such choices, he eventually develops a very specific history that might have impacted how I understood the first half of the game. And the ending exacerbates this lack of coherence, both by introducing an unnecessary twist that further undermined my investment in the overall arc, and concluding the story in a way that I didn’t think tied off the various threads of the plot.

The other side of that criticism, though, is that there were threads of that plot that I was invested in, because some of those individual steps are quite good. Oh, there are some clunkers, especially in the first half – there’s a contextless school quiz, a dialogue with a naïve woman that moves too quickly to establish a forced emotional connection, a workplace simulator that doesn’t have much to say about capitalism – but they’re all over relatively quickly and, except for that second one, work fine for what they are. But the latter set of vignettes boast less standard setups: there’s more about WATT’s regret at having never met his mother, a miserabilist flash-forward to a failing marriage, and a long slog of a climb that uses timed text to defensible purposes. But the real standout is a section where you’re playing the role of the emperor in a classical Chinese opera, choosing how to govern your nation and your household but always aware of the audience’s expectations, and the way they push you into playing a specific role that holds emotions in reserve and never commits to anything (that the audience might only exist in your head is a nice grace-note). The writing here also gets more lyrical:

"She enters the front yard of your chambers, perfumed in jasmine and rogue. Her silk trails behind her like a serpent, the colour of dusk after rain – deep, warm and aching."

The momentum the game builds through the back half of its journey was strong enough that even the disappointing ending I mentioned above wasn’t enough to blunt my enjoyment – and after all, Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t memorable for where it ends up (one vision of heaven is much like another, and Christian’s redemption is pretty much guaranteed from the get-go) but for the vividness of the obstacles in the path, and how they relate to moments of moral struggle we’ve all experienced. So on that front, WATT is in good company.

The eponymous protagonist of WATT wakes up on an island, his memories somewhat fuzzy, and is told he has to collect six keys to get into a lighthouse to perform a task that will save everyone. This could be a setup for a classic puzzle game, but WATT is instead a slow, meditative, lightly interactive experience (I’m not sure there’s more than one meaningful choice) that muses on life, priorities, grief, and regret. Its dreamy vagueness was sometimes hard for me to connect with emotionally, but that could be my problem more than the game’s. It still had moments I found evocative and moments I found amusing. I especially liked the Chinese opera segment, which explores a man trying to find a balance between caring for his family and meeting societal expectations of masculinity in a way that’s metaphorical but also specific and unusual.

I did, however, find the work a little unwieldy to interact with. WATT tells you that to move forward, you should click on the colored text if there is any, and if there isn’t you should just click anywhere. This is fine; the problem is that sometimes it isn’t quite true. First, the game also makes heavy use of text styling, sometimes including color, for effect, which means sometimes it’s unclear which colored text is actually clickable and which isn’t. Second, sometimes the links did not seem to be colored—given that when they were visibly colored they were usually blue, it’s possible that the ones that seemed black were actually a very dark blue that my blue light filter was sucking the color out of, but they didn’t look different from the surrounding text to me. In addition, text effects (including colors) did sometimes get in the way of readability, and there was some timed text, particularly towards the end, that I found frustrating.

The visual design is otherwise very nice—including the use of text effects when they don't affect readability too badly—and the original artwork done for the game is excellent. I just wish I'd been able to spend more time thinking about what the game was trying to say and less time thinking about where I was supposed to click or trying to make out low-contrast text.