Crier

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.