SALTWATER

[Written August 2024 with minor edits November 2024.]

A strange game. I'd call it a mostly linear hypertext novel, short by novel standards but long by IF standards. Very ambitious, covering a wide range of perspectives and characters, and jumping between them with aplomb. You can make choices, but they don't seem to have much staying power, partly due to how the story's told.

The game has three acts, and each act retells one series of events. So you get more or less the same series of events, three times. I say "series of events" because it's several intertwining plotlines, involving several different characters who all do different things and eventually converge in a church during a possible apocalypse. I say "more or less" because there are variations in what happens, and whose perspectives we get, but the characters involved always stay the same.

Beyond that, I had a hard time discerning the specifics of the overall situation. There are certain lines, like stuff August says, that makes me think a literal time loop might be involved. Maybe these events are recurring over and over in an endless cycle, with only certain characters aware of it. If so, the ending seems to indicate a release of some kind from the eternal recurrence, with (Spoiler - click to show)the torrential, world-ending rain becoming a blizzard, and the characters sheltering in the church that got destroyed in the other two loops.

I liked the events and scenarios presented. The one about the cult of kids who live in an abandoned factory and listen to the voices of pigs was particularly striking to me. There's some compelling imagery in this story, both in specific lines like the ones I point out below, and the general aesthetics of certain scenes. Like when Nana points out the rain of blood to the bartender, and he momentarily looks up and sees it. I did, however, wish there was more meat to the worldbuilding. What is causing this apocalypse/cycle business? What kind of stuff is happening in the world where a bunch of children can just abandon their families and join a cult for rotting pig bodies that actually speak to them? The story takes place on Earth, or some version of it, but didn't really feel like it was rooted in any Earth I know.

The main barrier for me, though, was the surrealism and rapid perspective switching. It's done well in some cases and badly in others. There are occasions where it's used in ways I enjoyed, e.g. the transitions between perspectives in the first part are smooth and pretty clever. But once you get to the third part, there are so many perspectives flying out at you that I had only the vaguest idea of what was happening. Because of that, it was hard for me to really connect to any of the characters or the story overall.

I think this story would benefit a lot from more editing. A beta reader, at least. There are more than a few typos and grammatical errors. More editing might also improve the overall difficulty of understanding certain scenes. My least favorite parts were the prologues to each act and the ending. In the prologues, I could never really tell who was talking or why. It just felt like vaguely philosophical dialogue that didn't have anything to do with the story. In Act 3 and the ending, the tendency towards ambiguous perspective switching and surrealism was at its worst. Sure, there were a few moments in the ending where I did get what was going on, and could follow the perspective as it jumped from character to character, and those moments was amazing. But there were also sections where I ended up skimming because I couldn't figure it out.

That said, the writing has some really cool parts. Samples:

(I couldn't copy-paste these directly, so I typed them out by hand. Sorry for any errors.)

"Time being pulled apart, frayed, sewn together again backwards under the luminescent blinking of the ceiling lights."

"August's body floated downstream to some other part of town, or maybe to some other town entirely. Maybe towards a beach in a dry place where it never rained. Where sand drifted between cliffs along the horizon. Where everything was always warm."

"Trees that extend far up into the clouds, left to grow for centuries, their shadows so long they cross state lines on a sunny day."

Also, the full-color backgrounds were all drawn by the author and look amazing. (Fine, one specific background, the fiery one in the ending of Act 2, clashed with the text and made it hard to read. Maybe a partially-transparent black box beneath the text would help with that? But besides that, they're great and it's impressive that they were hand-made.) The backgrounds are combined with sound effects for each passage, and really contribute to immersion. Stuff like this feels highly cinematic, bringing IF a few steps closer to a full-color film, and I'm all here for it.

Playtime: ~80 minutes

Now that the post-Twine revolution is well and truly settled, it feels natural to survey the different choice-based subgenres – branching CYOA-style narratives, RPG-lite quality-based narratives, puzzle-y parserlike hybrids – and think yes, of course this is how it had to be. But if you went back to 2000 to tell a reasonably-cosmopolitan member of the parser-focused amateur IF community that in 25 years choice-based games would be a big part of the scene, I’d bet that they’d think you primarily meant hypertext fiction. While many folks back then thought CYOA and gamebook approaches were overly simplistic, literary hypertext had serious ambitions and academic cred that matched the arty aspirations of the IF scene, so it might not have seemed like that big a gap to bridge. Of course that’s not the path events wound up taking, and I’m not sure of any contemporary authors mainline-IF working in that tradition other than Kaemi Velatet. But I still sometimes wonder what our Comps and Festivals would look like if the hypertext model was a major influence on our games: we might see narrative choices decentered in favor of allusive linkages, characters deemphasized in favor of linguistic play, and thematic coherence seen as a greater virtue than a satisfying plot. We might have better tools, in short, to create, present, and engage with games like SALTWATER.

Recapping the premise and the way it’s elaborated here might start to get at what I mean. The game plays out over three acts that are more like cycles, with each one moving an ensemble of half a dozen or so main characters (and maybe a dozen more supporting ones) through a sequence of set-pieces and flashbacks that see as much variation and elaboration as straight repetition, before ending in a climactic scene that brings everyone together in a collapsing church just as the world might be ending. The emotions are pitched fever-high, and the roles each character plays progresses over time: there are always people being lost, and people looking for them, but the identity of who plays any particular role is always in flux. There are different subgenres at work, largely divvied up between the different viewpoints the game provides: one character is drawn back to a past they’d tried to flee by the death of their parents, and is haunted by one of the people they left behind; another is running a sort of Lord of the Flies apocalypse-cult, squatting in the ruins of an old slaughterhouse to listen to the prophetic whispers of long-dead pigs. Much of this is compelling, but none of it is especially naturalistic, and besides a shared juxtaposition of externally-mediated catastrophe against salvation through connection, the strands aren’t woven together especially tightly.

Indeed, I have to confess that it took me a while to get into SALTWATER. The entire first act – an hour or so of playtime – consists of jumping from one perspective to the next, running through five or six entirely different sets of characters and situations with little time for the often-disorienting plot elements to breathe, much less engender investment in the characters or their world. And the relatively traditionalist choice-based approach to interactivity highlighted my lack of understanding and investment. There are quite a lot of novels I’ve loved while still experiencing pervasive moment-to-moment confusion about what exactly is happening or which character is talking (Ulysses is the obvious touchstone here, so let’s give the shout-out to Gaddis’s The Recognitions just for variety’s sake) – but that confusion lands different when you’re expected to put yourself in someone (whose?) shoes and make choices for them. There’s an early sequence, for example, where I had to decide whether a bartender (who I knew basically nothing about) was going to lie to Molly, a customer he’d just met (who both I and he knew nothing about), about an old woman who’d just collapsed upon entering the bar (who both he and she knew nothing about, though I at least had a small inkling about her deal since she’d featured in one of the earlier vignettes) – trying to figure out what the bartender might do, and why, and why I’d be expected to have any clue about any of that, took me right out of the game.

SALTWATER is also sometimes a bit slapdash about its worldbuilding and characterization. Rye, the aforementioned prodigal child, is introduced receiving a phone call from their sister, who asks them to come to their parents’ funeral to help support her. But then the next time we see them, the funeral’s over, and the last we hear of the sister is when an old friend asks Rye how she’s holding up, and Rye waves the question away with a dismissive “she’ll be fine.” Meanwhile, the societal decay implied by a bunch of children taking up long-term residence in the meatpacking plant is nowhere on display in the other sequences, and I got hung up on the revelation that the aforementioned bar is miles and miles from where people live (it sure doesn’t seem like it’s in a business district either, so who decided to set it up there?) And there’s an overreliance on talismanic images and activities – many of these are individually powerful, but between rising floodwaters, a collapsing church, a flickering lighter, bodies being put into and dug up from graves, people being lost in the snow and warmed back to the land of the living, plus the oracular pigs and maybe-ghost, there’s too much being crammed into the frame to fully cohere.

Yet I did find that I enjoyed the game substantially more when I got to the second act, and SALTWATER shifted from introducing a disorienting panoply of people to fleshing out their motivations, personalities, and the context for their decisions. And on a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is often quite evocative and engaging (the way Ink is customized here meant that copy and paste wasn’t working for me, so you’ll have to trust me on this). By the time the third act came around and it became clear that events were moving into their final configurations, I found myself moved by the plights of some of the characters, hoping for them to find some peace.

All of which is to say there’s a better version of SALTWATER that ruthlessly simplifies it, cutting unneeded viewpoint characters (the bartender and Molly wound up being completely irrelevant so far as I could tell), building more extensive linkages between those that remain, and rigorously providing context so that the player feels empowered to make choices on their behalf. But I think I’d like that less than the other better version of SALTWATER that leans into its messiness, doesn’t impose expectations of agency on the player, jumbles up the characters without worrying so much about where one ends and another starts, shifts the prose to be even more poetic, and presents its various narrative strands not as rigorously-alternating plaits in a braid but as nodes in an ever-expanding, densely-interconnected web: a beautiful sally in a hypertext revolution that never was.