Crier

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 30min 7 iterations, two escapes

Why don’t we see more Ren’Py in Spring Thing and IFCOMP? As a platform, I haven’t seen enough of it to get my head around how I feel about it yet. It feels tailor-made to echo point-and-click adventures, somehow through a Powerpoint lens? To me, and for this game in particular, I feel echoes of Myst and The Longest Journey: background environments that are artistic showcases, crossfading travel in lieu of the latter’s side-scroll movement paradigm.

This implementation is more dialogue-tree than point-and-click, but its graphical prominence and limited animation still conjure those ancestors. Playing a wizard/prophet, you are condemned to an underworld for conspiracy against the king. The underworld itself is the showcase here, a fever-dream of body horror, fantasy-/techno- patois, and memorably alien characters. It is a heady, compelling mix, defying the player to keep up with its building strangeness, and rewarding the effort with compounding unease. It confidently seems to understand its most powerful asset quite clearly. You are treated to several encounters of compounding disquiet (or outright horror), populated by intriguingly unique characters. You either die or escape. The work does not devolve into repetition, nor diminishing returns on its weirdness. The whole experience will depend on how appealing, or maybe ‘fascinating’ is a better word, you find the setting.

For me, it really worked. It was the artwork that really sold it to me (not to say the characters, soundtrack and narrative voices were inconsequential!). The backgrounds are dark and evocative, but decidedly intended as background. Their palette and gloom contrast to characters that positively pop off the screen, both in color choice, design, and sheer ickiness. Notably, the protagonist themself does NOT - they practically seep into the background highlighting in a subtle way the player’s unconcern with their own image in the face of their shocking neighbors. I mean, that’s how we live most of our lives, right? Focused on the beings and events outside our mobile-camera bodies? “Influencer Culture” excepted. This has the effect of deemphasizing the protagonist’s narrative utility until the dramatically appropriate time.

The most confrontive choice is the narration/dialogue font. It is a harsh design, jagged and borderline illegible. Adjusting your mind to its shapes and patterns is a mini-game that echoes the protagonist’s floundering for purchase in their alien surroundings. That it is so quickly digested mirrors our protag’s almost superhuman resilience in accepting this new normal. Turns out, the protag (Spoiler - click to show)is ALSO composed of weird, alien stuff! This is a nifty choice that kind of shifts the narrative from one of vanilla player/protag adjusting to seeming unknowability, only to crest over time to alienation from the protag themself!

That schism is an interesting narrative choice. It provides a minor ‘shock twist’ of sorts that completely reinforces the mood of the piece. It also abruptly decouples the player from narrative immersion. Untethered from the protagonist, it becomes a more voyeuristic experience than an immersive one. This is perfectly fine! What you’re given to look at is pretty compelling! It does put a LOT of weight on the environment though. Here, the brevity of the work plays in its favor. Over a long narrative, having committed to essentially one dimension of engagement, the challenge would be to consistently deliver escalating weirdness that does not smack of repetitiveness or deescalation. The impulse to center the protagonist’s weirdness as a climactic twist of sort was strong - it carries precisely the novelty needed to end on a high note.

Now, I’ve used the base word ‘alien’ what, like 6 times now? This reflects a creative choice that is super specific, and plays to competing impulses in our brains. On the one hand, humans have a desire for novelty, even repellant novelty. On the other, we relish the comfort of things We Already Know. Deliberately defying the latter provides a charge of endorphins, but could as easily engage our ‘flight’ response. Certainly the longer we are subjected to novelty the more uncomfortable we might become, and the stronger our desire for comfort might crest. The comfort need not be in the environs, it could simply be in the human relatability of the characters around us, and the emotions they evoke. Despite consistently denying such anchoring, this work struck a tasty balance for me - escalating its weirdness, then climaxing before the latter impulse could overtake me.

Also, my choice to include the Nostromo in my ST26 categories now looks positively… PROPHETIC.

Spaceship: Nostromo
Vibe: Splatterpunk
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I’d be tempted to humanize the protag and not drive a wedge between them and the player. Which feels like it might actually damage the considered effect of the work? So maybe don’t give me the wheel here.