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