How Dare You

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Not taking no for an answer, July 7, 2024

How Dare You? has a cringeworthy premise: you show up at the home of our partner, Heron, who communicates very clearly that it’s over and you should leave. Yet…

…No, you can’t. You’ve got to convince em to change eir mind. You just have to show em how much ey means to you. How much you care.

You refuse to leave. The game requires you to try to win Heron over. It won’t let you leave prior to making some sufficiently dramatic gesture (and it’s a parser game, so you don’t know the options).

From the opening, we get strong hints that Heron had good reason to call it quits, and this is borne out by the options available to us, our internal dialogue about the situation, and Heron’s reactions.

If this were a romcom, you could probably turn things around: an egregious disregard for boundaries at the final act climax is always a winning move. But this was written for the Love/Violence Jam and the Anti-Romance Jam 2024.

The cringeyness of the premise and ugliness of the situation is redeemed in that it does end badly. The story doesn’t sugar-coat toxic behavior and pretend it’s sweet: it recognizes the toxicity, which is refreshing.

It’s an extremely quick bite-sized story and worth a few play-throughs.

A brutal breakup, July 8, 2024

This one is rough, emotionally. Your partner (Heron) is breaking up with you (Tiel), and you are NOT taking it well. Your goal is to change eir mind. There are several implemented strategies to try, ranging from the desperate to the manipulative to the despicable.

The world feels deeply implemented. Of particular note is that taking inventory gets the response You are carrying nothing but a broken heart. You can then examine the heart. That’s the kind of detail work I love in a parser. “Undo” also has a poignant response in place of its usual function. There are a few disambiguation moments that could be smoother—both your and Heron’s hands are implemented, and doing something to “hands” doesn’t default to Heron’s, unlike most other actions.

One thing that didn’t quite work for me was that trying one of the “game ending actions” precluded trying any of the others. The picture I’d built of Tiel in my mind was of someone who wasn’t about to take ‘no,’ and that he takes one particular ‘no’ over another doesn’t quite hit for me. On my first play I tried to kiss Heron, and then after ey rejected me finally I tried crying—a reasonable response in my mind’s version of Tiel’s mind. But I was told I couldn’t do that and must simply leave. I know the suggestion does risk a bit of combinatorial explosion and a less tight form, but unique responses for those kinds of pathetic or petty reactions after the goal is already lost would go a long way for me.

It’s a very short game, and worth playing multiple times to explore all of the options. It knows what it wants to do and does it well. The author’s notes say it’s based on a game from last year’s Anti-Romance Jam—I may have to check that one out next.

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