Yancy At The End Of The World!

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a 'bucket list' item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you'll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I'm glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the [spoiler]Rainer[/spoiler] path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with 'what if' scenarios and testing them out. That's what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren't the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother's voice and neko's contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it's not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don't feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn't intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It's the same here; I don't think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don't identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!

What if the world ended and everything more or less went on just as it did before? Yancy at the End of the World puts a unique spin on the zombie apocalypse story, starting with a stereotypical oh-no-the-dead-are-rising premise and then seemingly not doing much with it: characters worry about their anxiety and overall mental health, get annoyed by slanted news coverage of the disaster, and gripe about having to come back into the office when there are packs of the walking dead still roving around out there, but don’t seem especially worried about getting their faces eaten off or anything. Still, there are some things that change, even if they’re small: Yancy finally takes up photography, against their mom’s advice, and reconnects with some old friends. And then just when the apocalypse feels like an anticlimax, it turns out Yancy’s world does end after all – which might actually be a good thing, though they’ll still mourn it.

The game can be disorienting for reasons that go beyond the undead plague and the nonstandard narrative emphases, too. About ten minutes in, it nonchalantly revealed that the couple I was talking to were “a colorful snow leopard” and “a literal cat-fish” (the “literal” doesn’t really help, I can still think of like three different things that could mean); while still digesting that, I went into my apartment and was greeted by my adorable pet, who’s a sort of cyclops-fox-cat kinda thing. And indeed when you take photos of the other characters, it’s clear that most of them are anthropomorphic animals of one sort or another.

There’s a clear gameplay structure that helped me maintain my bearings even as I was getting to grips with the world, though. After an introductory sequence that briskly establishes the zombie threat, reintroduces Yancy to their childhood best friend, and sees them deciding to buy a camera and take some photos while the world is still a going concern, each day runs on a pleasingly predictable rhythm. First, you choose someplace to go – visiting friends or family, heading to the café or bookstore, going for a walk in nature – which leads to a small vignette where you might encounter a member of the game’s medium-sized supporting cast, have a few conversational choices, and then take a picture. In the evening, you check in with some friends on a chat server, which is usually where the game catches you up on the state of the world; at that point, you’ve got an opportunity to DM with one of the online characters, and then head into a voice chat with the aforementioned best friend, Nekoni. Then you go to bed and the pattern repeats.

I found this approach struck a good balance between novelty and familiarity; the number of choices doesn’t feel overwhelming, but the game runs for only nine days, and you’ve generally got about half a dozen options for places to visit or friends to DM, which means that it’s hard to get too deep into any particular story or relationship strand but it’s also hard to feel like any of them have worn out their welcomes. And while the overall vibe is pretty chill – most of the people you encounter are supportive as you explore your new hobby and try to weather the zombie threat together – there are some sequences that effectively raise the stakes, and where your choices feel significant, like a scene where your best friend reacts badly to you coming out as aromantic and asexual.

Working through issues like this is where the game’s heart really lies, with the zombie stuff quickly revealing itself as a close-to-the-surface allegory for issues around queer identity and acceptance rather than an excuse for action-horror or anything like that. And in keeping with that, even when members of the friend group put their feet wrong or get wrapped up in themselves, the game keeps the focus on healing and working together; Yancy isn’t required to always forgive people, but does always keep talking and providing an opportunity for others to prove that they’ve changed after they’ve made a mistake, which makes for a nice, positive vibe while still making clear that their life isn’t always a bed of roses.

The one character who sticks out from this generally well-meaning love-fest is Yancy’s mom. She’s the one person who’s definitively human rather than a furry, and though she insists she love’s Yancy, she’s also invariably misgendering them, and spends most of her time watching the Fox News analogue and letting its misinformation erode her mental and physical health. On the flip side, while Yancy finds spending time with her actively painful, and is increasingly clear on the ways that her expectations and prejudices have created challenges for them, still feels a connection to her beyond a mere sense of familial obligation.

There are a lot of different strands here, in other words, but I feel like Yancy at the End of the World cohered for me in a way that something like String Theory didn’t. There is a clear narrative climax, for one thing, and even though it’s a bit of a swerve from what the opening seems to set up, it nonetheless is an entirely reasonable place for the story to go, and one that’s got strong thematic resonance with everything else that’s going on. And there’s a strong sense of how humanly messy relationships can get, even when you tax sex and romance out of the equation, with lived-in prose and gently funny dialogue keeping things grounded. This is a game that didn’t play out as I expected it would based on the first twenty minutes and my knowledge of genre tropes, but the surprises here were good ones.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a sprawling work that is doing a LOT. The word I keep coming back to is ‘unfocused’ though, and I think it has to do both with how much it is trying, and how those things play off each other. Here is a laundry list of elements at play here:

.zombie apocalypse
.corrosive preconceptions
.marginalized populations, and socio-political aggressions
.audio acting(!)
.safe space creation and policing
.inter-generational aggression
.family loss

All of these things ricochet around the narrative, caroming off each other, as often as not to cross purposes rather than building to something.

The piece opens with an underplayed ‘zombie apocalypse’ sweeping the planet. Our core cast of characters then proceed to basically treat it like background noise to their lives of creative pursuits and online community. The thorough and complete disconnect from the world around them, and lack of consequences in that world!, put me in the mind of the cast of Seinfeld. Deeply self-absorbed people, impervious to the outside world in the cocoon of their own drama. Notwithstanding the walking dead, one character wanders aimlessly outside, looking for photo ops. Another lets his daughter play in the neighborhood! An early scene in a supermarket establishes the perceived threat, but makes no impression on any of the main cast beyond ‘did you see the news?’.

The world itself seems to be adjacent to our own, except that surprisingly dog-/cat-/and snail- people exist. But so do dogs that are only pets! I guess in this world that’s just the way it is, but MAN does that open so many wormy cans that go unexamined. Nothing is done narratively with this by the way, it just is.

The online community itself, an enclave of high school friends and acquaintances who all found artistic outlets and non-mainstream sexual identity journeys, reinforces this disconnect at every turn. As society is presumably in turmoil, they are preoccupied with reconnecting, establishing their journeys, and policing a not-quite-empathic-enough member. Yes, his transgression is clumsy. But it is hard to believe as a longtime member of this community that this is either a) his first transgression or b) that he hasn’t absorbed norms by being corrected before now. Instead it generates great drama, ECLIPSING THE ACTUAL APOCALYPSE. This presages an exchange between the protagonist and the MOST generous, MOST sympathetic NPC where the PC reveals their sexual identity, then reacts really intensely to the confused response.

Before I wander further onto that VERY thin ice, let me sidebar about gameplay/interactivity. The choices are really two varieties: exploration and protagonist character building. Depending on how generous/enthusiastic/wounded/angry you choose to play, you are building a character in your head. As far as I can tell, there is no impact to plot in these choices, though that is definitely not a criticism. Similarly, your explorations are either geographical, or whom you choose to IM. For the most part, you get one explore, one IM, a group interaction (where you shade responses) and a similar 1-1 facetime for ~10 days of gameplay spread out over months of narrative time. The exploration is interesting, and provides some latitude to privilege some interactions over others. The heavy lifting though is in pure character build.

Ok ice, here I come. The chance this ends with a cold dunking is very high. After some collaborative protag character building, we reveal that they are aroace (not a spoiler, in the blurb!). Our most sympathetic NPC responds, conveying their emotional loss at that revelation. Is that a great response? No obviously, they did take the fraught revelation and make it about them. The resonance with the previous episode casts the most sympathetic character in the same role as the oblivious deplorable. On the one hand, this demonstrates that no one is immune to empathy blind spots which is certainly an insightful message. On the other, it seems to enshrine indiscriminate righteous anger as a the corrective tool of choice. Isn't that just an exhausting social prescription? Is there no other way to engage this? I am ill equipped to critique this as a character beat, but as a resonant narrative choice it really grated on me.

I can hear the ice cracking under my feet. The Awful Right has this narrative that ‘wokeness’ is nothing more than a ‘cancel-happy gotcha machine.’ Because these are the only incidents we see, and because the perpetrators are SO different, this work inadvertently plays into this toxic narrative.

That apparent dissonance was compounded by another plot development. At one point you have opportunity to meet a character who tells you, in no uncertain terms, they want no interactions, please go away. If you ignore them and revisit anyway, you are thanked for getting them ‘out of their shell.’ (Lol, that’s funny for reasons). You see the issue? You are explicitly asked to respect a character’s choices, violate their wishes, then are thanked for it??? How is this not a GREATER transgression than what was so dramatically escalated above? Yet is REWARDED?? On the one hand, I think this is a very subtle and effective nod at the complexity of these issues where people sometimes get trapped in their own mind. On the other, that very complexity requires MORE grace, not less, and makes the above stark condemnation even worse!

Hey, we’re barely halfway through this. WHOO! This water is cold.

So that zombie apocalypse? Turns out it’s fine, actually. Yeah, there are now zombies in the world, but no worries. They seemingly don’t eat people anymore? And now zombies are a repressed population, drawing ire of reactionary right dickheads? Sounds about right. Our core cast is suddenly MUCH more engaged in this (not the least of which via a neat twist where one’s brother is left zombified). There is a lot of social business that gets observed and then resolved, but our core cast is not really involved except as spectators, one of whom has big stakes in the matter. As a story arc it was interesting but backgrounded enough that it failed to engage. There are also SO many unanswered questions that really muddy the waters. Do zombies eat people? Seems like they did at some point. Can they ‘turn’ others against their will? Seems like they did at some point. These questions corrode the situation enough that there’s a lot more grey than the narrative acknowledges and instead kind of hand waives away, leaving the player at a loss.

There is also the matter of the protag’s mom. An aggressive ‘no, you are my SON’ shrew of a woman, swallowing the Awful Right party line so hard (Spoiler - click to show)it literally kills her. She is portrayed as irredeemable and unpleasant and I pretty immediately avoided her like the plague. When she develops health issues, the game suddenly got real. She was no less irredeemable, arguably more so by denying the evidence of her eyes. But, as protag, my choices suddenly became much more constrained. Leaving her to her own devices, which might have been my first choice, was not an option. Above, I decried authorial choice steering that made the protag react in ways I did not believe in. The crucial difference here is, the limited choice in this scenario was not only COMPLETELY BELIEVABLE, it was a powerful use of interactivity to drive home the awful complexity of these toxic relationships. Lack of true choice was a powerful narrative tool that made me understand and empathize with the protag MORE, not less. I found this entire sequence difficult, complex, infuriating and powerfully realized. It was the showcase sequence of the work, I think.

So, where does this leave me? A patchwork of dramatic preoccupations that narratively, with one very notable exception, missed more than hit. I kept coming back to the question ‘why zombie apocalypse? It is mishandled so often, why is that even in the narrative at all?’ Then it occurred to me. What if I treat the world of this work as PURE metaphor, not story at all? Holy crap do things open up then. Animal beings become a broad range of perplexing humanity our only duty is to accept as is. Online communities become echo chambers that can be equal parts supporting and blindering.

The zombies become a masterstroke of genius. The concept of ‘zombie’ is pretty universal at this point, beyond mechanical details. As a consumer of pop culture, we bring all those preconceptions to the table. As I reflect, it occurs to me the NARRATIVE does not confirm zombies’ threat, it is us (and their world) that ASSUMES it. So later, any inclinations we have to question zombie personhood comes from a place of preconception and prejudice. What a powerful, amazing choice! It puts the reader squarely in the difficult place of having to combat their own prejudices! While I rebel at the narrative storyline of the zombies, the METAPHOR is an incredible, subversive choice. It also retroactively forgives some character choices that do not presume flesh eating.

As a story, the work was too all over the map for me, with too many jarring, baffling, and unconvincing choices. (And one searingly effective plot point.) As a metaphorical construct to challenge the player, it positively sings. It also opens up what I feel is its crowing allusion: that the zombie apocalypse is NOT about zombies themselves! It is about surrendering to the shittiest side of our nature. THAT is the real apocalypse. Unlike most zombie fiction, we’re not just the worst part of the apocalypse, WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE ITSELF.

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1.5hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging beats in parent storyline and metaphor, offset by bouncy beats elsewhere, average to Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless outside audio
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

I would be negligent if I didn't address the audio acting, but I really think I can’t top that final line. So think of this as an appendix.
On balance, I think the audio detracts more than enhances. Like timed text, it has the effect of making the player (who has already read the page) wait for the game to catch up, with the attendant impatience that can generate. There are definitely some great performances, highlighted by the insufficiently empathic friend Nekoni, but the lack of ambient background sound (when warranted) further detracts from the overall effect. Newsroom, crowd, workplace, etc settings make it glaringly obvious when background noise is missing. It is also distracting when the text notes a beeping sound absent from the soundtrack! Lastly, the mix seemed a bit off. In particular the volume difference between Laz and Nekoni went from barely audible to quite loud, and was jarring.

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless