Crier

"I have a theory—perhaps it applies only to me, but I believe I’ve seen it in others, too—that the most important determiner of whether someone likes or dislikes something is based on whether its premise innately appeals to them. (Or, similarly, that they find a major character relatable.) A work’s technical quality, uniqueness, narrative consistency, and so on are secondary factors in comparison, and when a reviewer brings up these elements to explain why a work is good or bad, they are typically dancing around the core issue." - From a post I read online.

This game's premise innately appeals to me, and everything else follows from there.

In this lushly written visual novel, you're imprisoned and sentenced to wander a dungeon/"subworld" full of the wicked sovereign's prisoners, dissidents, and other things too dangerous to let loose, all warped by time and subworld-induced evolution into something unrecognizable as human. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect concept. I like alien biology, physical and mental transformations, strange worlds with an eldritch mien, and surreal evocations of altered mental states. I like weird fiction, and evidently so does the author, since they listed Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach series as an inspiration for another of their games. Vandermeer helped to cement "weird fiction" as a genre; his writing often deals with otherworlds, strange biology and transcending/losing one's own humanity, themes that show up in this story. The Southern Reach series, especially Annihilation, is a fun read.

Anyway. The IFDB description made me worry the writing would be too dense for me to enjoy, but I found that wasn't the case at all. It helps that this is a visual novel, and the characters have unique voices to set themselves apart. Some are more florid than others, but even when they're somewhat incomprehensible, the actual descriptions of what is happening are always clear.

I wasn't expecting the visual novel part at first, but the sound design and illustrations are fitting. The phrase "visual novel" dredges up images of anime girls, but the characters in this game are bizarre and inhuman and as far from anime girls as they could be. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to anime girls. But I also like out-there character designs that stray from the humanoid, and this game fits that to a T. I particularly like Phenol Red's design; I think the ex-hivedrone's design was the only one I wasn't fond of, maybe because it read as overtly sexual to me in a way that I disliked. The drone's dialogue is funny, though.

The curious thing is that despite the uncanny designs of the characters, you can have brief and compelling moments of intimacy with some of them. Most of these moments involve you being killed. These scenes are sensual without really being explicit, and don't bear much resemblance to real human acts. I find them aesthetically attractive, while someone else might find them grotesque.

For example: one of my favorite scenes is the one where you agree to (Spoiler - click to show)let the madcap labspider Cynie experiment on you: she dismembers you and conditions your disembodied brain into an obedient component of her god-machine. I thought this was lovely. Cynie's even nice enough to restrict her negative reinforcement conditioning to "the approximation of pain" instead of actual pain. How generous of her! (Your tastes may vary.)

Also, shoutouts to (Spoiler - click to show)the "Duchess of Limbs", an eldritch spider who can bind and devour you in a number of tenderly written death scenes. I liked that part too. Even though you die. You win some, you lose some.

The game is tagged "obscene" on Spring Thing. There are some sexual references, but I found the story, on the whole, to be strange and wonderful more than obscene. Who doesn't want to be lovingly dismembered? No one? Just me? --- Well, of course a lot of this nebulous "character appeal" thing can be chalked up to a player's individual idiosyncrasies, but I still personally thought the characters were cool. It helps that Cynie and the ex-hivedrone, probably my least favorite characters design-wise (though I like their dialogues and personalities), weren't characters I encountered during my first playthrough. I wonder if you could analyze the characters as subversions of common "sexy character" tropes: (Spoiler - click to show)slimegirl, spider lady, robot scientist, but with designs that are purposefully alienating and not geared towards fanservice, even as the writing itself still expresses the essential appeal of these characters. Or maybe the lack of standard character appeal is the appeal, for people like me who find those uncanny designs compelling.

The story and characters reminded me a bit of Chandler Groover, actually. Eat Me and Bring Me A Head have a similarly sensual aesthetic of mad rulers and decaying glory.

I can't go this far without mentioning the writing style, too. It's very in media res, with the kind of worldbuilding that offhandedly mentions things and never elaborates on them, weaving mood and atmosphere out of elaborate neologisms and alien concepts. The characters are quirky, Phenol Red and the ex-hive drone talk like terminally online Discord users, while the main character sounds like an apocalyptic Great Awakening preacher. The combination of it all is just exquisitely bizarre. The default font is mildly hard to read, though it did mean I spent more time deciphering the story's lavish sentences and turns of phrase because I couldn't be sure if something was a neologism or just me failing to parse the font.

My main issue with this game is that it's too short, and I mean this as a compliment because I would have been perfectly happy to keep exploring this world for hours. I wanted to see the world aboveground, I wanted to see the main character get their revenge on the sovereign, I wanted to see the incoming apocalypse. The style of this game is unlike anything I've encountered, and I wanted more of it. I think the shortness is a consequence of the many branching paths this story has. The first time I finished it, I thought I'd seen it all, but I played again and met two new characters (Cynie and the hivedrone) the second time. Having played four or five times, it feels like I've finally discovered the flow of events and what you require to get from point A to point B, but there's a lot of thought put into the structure of the story and the logistical flow that went over my head the first time because it works so well. This comes at the cost of having a somewhat abrupt ending, however.

I should also mention that I've had this vague game idea for a while, starring a ruined Bloodborne-esque underground kingdom struck down by a divine miracle and full of failed experiments run amok, a biological cauldron that changes you the longer you stay. The player becomes infected one way or other, and progressively loses their humanity as they search for a way back up. Progress would require dying multiple times in encounters with other denizens; you'd revive each time because the infection makes you immortal... Death and transformation and failed apotheosis. So this game was like seeing a version of my visions realized. Very satisfying.

Edit 4/24: Upping the rating to five stars because I couldn't stop thinking about Cynie. I need to get in her laboratory.

So this 4AM I was flailing out of bed to you know as it happens vomit blood, don’t look at me like that, you some kind of aristocrat who sleeps through hyperefficient daynight cycles in your Gulfstream G666 Fluidless Sheen, I bet you’ve never even seen yourself in the mirror on account of a complete lack of pours, you’re sandpaper in a tan suit, you’re a Miami highway migraine, you’re some atavist Atacama where the heavens shine so clarified no life strains beneath them tormented, and while on the whole I don’t recommend the experience, there was yet this pleasantly delirious moment where you’re dripping over a sink lightheaded maundering like “Splinters of throbbing light. Blood trickles from your nose. You’re promising too much. Causality grates against your nervous system. Put yourself in the path of entropy any longer, and you will be destroyed. This world is but a shell. Pressure shivers it from within.” Nodding to yourself gently holding the hair back by the curled wrist, yeah but everything’s a shell, it’s all a shell game, shell corporals holding shell corporals holding shell corporals holding back your hair so you know it doesn’t the blood.

Wildeyed mycologies exquisitate our subterranean jumblescape to alluring lithographs of “Toxins that erode the lungs, destroy the nerves, rot the flesh in an instant. A battlefield covered in skeletons covered in pink foam.” Worldbuilding iridises its inscrutable stains, “These aren’t all my lichen. Most are feral, or wildtype. Semiotic mimics”, which could mutate to gutterpunk jabberwocky which darksparkles the sludge too smooth, selfsame, sludge sprawling, but the prose does hazard its splatters to graffiti, it is I assure you always nice to have something to say, “They evolved to maximize attention. They emulate written speech: warnings, prayers, infographics. There are thriving colonies in the upperworld now, cultivated at shrines,” here you’re going oh god oh no is this lore but luckily we’re saved by the swerve to luminosity for the sake of it “plastered apotropaic over airship hulls. People like them.” That final plunk of throwaway candour keeps the theatrics easy, which is good until it goes all glib in teenspeak dissipations of its own moments: “sounds really peak for suffering and subjugation honestly”. Rather the purpose of making it look effortless is to emphasize all the effort. When the “grossbeautifulvile” overlap glitches too hard towards any one axis, the “fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic” glistens decay harshly to “A shit graveyard.” And in such climes the game wanders always on the edge of shitpost, which is sometimes charming, “ever at Your service! cya” and manytimes not so much, “A grub cat masturbates on a pile of scrap integument. Half-formed larvae squirm on its back, a few scattering off into the discarded chitin and sinew.”

When it does maintain composition, this magic of having something to say while expending most of our energy revelling largely in the raw pleasure of saying still must be balanced against the other tendency, for it all of course to mean if you squint. We get the hatchmarked sidesketch of the spiritual thrum: “The subworld is a repository for disavowed projects. The toys that some upper power threw down in disgust. Or the things that crawled from the corpses of those toys. If you seek influence, learn their ecologies.” This, counterposed against an overworld ordered by Commerce Torture, we make all the requisite rounds, “Most of them work the soil to produce food. Or in mines to produce matter for manufacture. Their bodies are destroyed by the toil, captives of obligation. Above them, a handful reaping the produce. A chain stretching absolute up to the sovran” assembles us right and ready for the Porpentine revolutionary lashout, final slimergences wheresoever “A different evolution obtains” in the overlooked margins, since “Scientiffs know not our screwing-algorithms”, demiurge unchained here we go, but then some random uh oh cuts you out to a cutaway ending, congrats you’re leftover limbs to be surgered, congrats uh well it turns out there were too many limbs actually, congrats you can’t feel your limbs on account of lichen, congrats you uh just kind of chose a boring option so let’s end the game anyway, go back to the beginning if you want the true ending, but then the fulcrum I found isn’t so much a climax as a thesis statement: “Sovran Absolack: But of course you do. It was the face of history as an unbreakable fortress.” The pleasure of this austere surprise is dampened a bit by “Absolack”, but you know maybe the real vengeance was all the friends we made along the way, “haven’t done much killing lately though… don’t really miss it or anything. just chilling in the catacombs here”.

And that’s fine! Vibing’s how you get the vibes, what are you a JRPG protag here to Masamune God, relax, the whole point of being exiled is to leave your troubles behind. “You wait. Small sounds take place in the dark. Is that a real glint of light? Or the prisoner’s cinema, a visual trick of your pareidoliac mind?” Stop fretting that you can’t get a grasp on anything and give yourself over to the paresthesia’s pleasures.

Sometimes you can tell a lot from a font, and the one visual novel Crier uses for its protagonist’s dialogue is a clear statement of purpose: an all-caps, heavily bolded gothic excrudescence, its chunky letters more concerned with straining to escape the narrow strip of screen real estate into which they’re claustrophobically crammed than anything as pedestrian as legibility. What typeface could more aptly give voice to a mad prophet so monomaniacally bent on predicting grotesquely baroque curses upon the reigning sovran that being thrown into the endless oubliette under the palace barely slows down their doom-saying?

This is a game that revels in the aesthetics of its transgressions, turning every available dial up to 11: the character and background art is a well-executed attempt to do Geiger with fewer genitals and way more goo, while the more restrained prose, meanwhile, delivers precisely-limned descriptions of horrors, its clinical tone dwelling on the diverse ways to experience organic rot:

"Feeling your way along the wall, you encounter a textured patch on the stone: it smells fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic."

The dungeon has more to offer than just decomposing bodily fluids, though – the ecosystem down here is grasping its way towards a higher purpose, like an artificial but biologically-mediated neural net. In the chatty words of the sidekick who eventually accretes on to you, who’s an oddly adorable sort of giant dendrite:

"lots of things survive down here… biotech stuff, variously sapient/sentient, outfolding like ancient dungeon tunnels into villi, 2 extract info from the miasma"

The aforementioned Phenol Red is a mensch, but there’s royalty down here too, queens and duchesses of decay, whose domains you’re forced to navigate in your quest to escape back to the surface so you can tell those jerks that no seriously, y’all are turbo-doomed. Most of the game’s choices revolve around set-piece encounters with these figures, as you must give them something of what they want in order to progress, but giving too much can cost you more than you can bear.

But, interestingly, it probably won’t. For all that Crier’s presentation is relentlessly grim, its actual mechanics are pretty low-key. From a bit of experimentation, most choices only change a bit of the following line of dialogue, so are far lower-stakes than they appear, and while there are ways of getting to a premature bad ending, it takes intentionality to swerve into them: pretty much every character will give you direct instructions about how to handle the next one in line, and the game usually provides plenty of warning if you’re on the wrong track. As a result, I experienced a not-unpleasant clash of vibes as I played: the text was telling me I was a degraded churl wallowing in filth for all eternity, while the gameplay structure was telling me I was on a jolly dungeon crawl adventure that just happened to boast some naughtily outré décor.

I wouldn’t say that’s wholly a bad thing. Crier really does have some compelling writing, dense with allusion and gesturing towards ideas that are more fun to contemplate than have spelled out. There’s an engaging section where you’re trying to use your prophetic talents to decode the messages coming down a sort of fungal sigint network, and the choices are enticing – my favorite was interpreting one splotch of lichen as “a dragon encircling a sun while eating its own tail and buttocks[, d]rawn in fluorescent blue kohl.” There’s a later bit of worldbuilding that reflects on the methods of the above-ground tyrant: “The sovran’s men take to the sea for new markets. They bring lenses, automata, small marvels. Whalebone dice. Thaumaturgy husks. Severed thumbs. Those who will not trade will be cut down.” I dug all this stuff, and I doubt fighting the game tooth and claw to progress would have made me enjoy this imagery more.

As a result, though, I’m not sure Crier goes as far towards celebrating the fecund and horrifying vitality of the abjected as it seems; player-empowerment sits awkwardly alongside these themes. IF boasts plenty of examples of games with similar subject matter that either through gameplay mechanics (like say, howling dogs) or downbeat narrative progression (hat tip here to Accelerate) feel like more unified aesthetic objects. It’s probably not wholly positive that I quite enjoyed my time with Crier; for all that it’s a very well-put together piece of misery tourism, I can’t help wishing it imposed more of a toll.

Originally written on the intfiction forums. Minor edits were made.

I was optimistic when I learned that this visual novel was by the Saltwrack author. They made quite an impression through their survival game filled with just enough information of lived-in worlds to leave you with a vivid picture, but with ample open room and ambiguity. My interest grew when I read the description on itch.io speaking of the assassination of rulers, underground societies with unorthodox, twisted beings and beliefs, and “antierotic obscenity.” They sure delivered.

Upon opening the game, I was immediately greeted with a background image resembling an entrance to a mossy cave, a gothic font (I eventually had to switch to a more readable DejaVu Sans from the accessibility menu on repeated playthroughs), and music that I can only describe as “sparse chime-y drone BGM” with occasional concerning-sounding human(?) vocalizations. I kept the game open for quite a while just because the title music is nice to listen to.

Crier is weird and gross (praising) and perilous for yourself and others. It contains just enough information on the world that made me yearn for more drip-fed cave lichen lore and a motley collection of Creatures. It is absolutely not for everyone - the presentation and a lot of the characters’ speaking habits and appearances (looking at you, (Spoiler - click to show)proxydrone, but you rock that stinger dick) can be off-putting. Still, you don’t necessarily have to be a Person Who Enjoys or Is Interested in Being Enveloped in Cave Mildew While Attempting to Become a Cyborg to have a productive time discovering the nuggets of insight from this deliberately unpleasant presentation.

Descend into grime and meet homuncuslime queens, chitin drones, and blorbo from our chemicals! Tap into life-threatening violations to make deposing all-powerful leaders a reality! Listen to minimalistic ambient sounds! Sometimes there’s a Menacing Piano of Anxiety when you run into a real creep (and I mean it, one character’s description made me do a double-take over a certain word)! Appreciate the drippy lichen cavern aesthetic from a distance! Experience many gruesome game overs (the visuals fade to black thankfully)! Embrace and interpret imperfect communication in order to destroy the unjust world order!