Academic Pursuits (As Opposed To Regular Pursuits)

I did not get far into the game, but I suspected it was all going to be along certain lines. Reading the reviews, I don't think I was mistaken.

It is an interesting thing to have a game where the actual mechanics are simple, and mundane, but the overall point is actually the story that you reveal as you go through the motions. There is then a balancing act: although the mechanics are not the point, they are what the player will actually be doing, so it needs to be minimally engaging, possibly fun up to a point (doing boring things can also work, but it's very risky; the player may simply decide to go play something else).

In this one, it failed to capture me. Part of it was that I was trying to figure out good places for the things I was unpacking, but at the same time I was also going, "why bother? This is an unpacking-and-dumping mechanic. What difference does it make where I put stuff?" But I still wanted to make it relatively sensible. Some things made sense for me to be in storage. Others made sense for me to be prominently displayed. But even as I was giving it some thought, I was always thinking, and the game never really contradicted me on this, "what is the point of giving it any thought at all?" If I had kept playing I might have just gotten into the routine of unpacking, examining, thinking about, and dumping wherever. I suspected the game might throw a "space optimisation" puzzle at me, and I don't know whether it does or not, but I was dreading it in such a bland setting.

Ultimately what made me decide enough was enough was,

a) finding an item that seemed so worthless I could not think of any reason to keep it: (Spoiler - click to show)a faded receipt used as a bookmark; no longer inside the book, so no longer even serving its fuction. Unpacking into a new office and you come across that? Geez, just throw it away! But that's not an option, we have to Find A Place For It. Even if it's storage. That's a pretty ridiculous item to put in long-term storage, though. That is the mechanics getting very on-the-nose.

b) trying to move boxes out of the way to get to the MISC box second (it was the one that made more sense for having a knife for cutting the tape, all boxes considered, after dealing with "stationery" first) didn't work; and it didn't work in a way that made it clear the game wanted me to go through the boxes in a certain order, which is all fine and dandy for the game but makes no sense as it's trivial to, if I really want to access a certain box first, just move things around. If I try to do anything to a box, I get a message like "All you need to do with the book box is get it open and get it unpacked." I was not expecting it to be on rails like this. Again: mechanics transparently getting in my way Just Because.

c) seeing that the desk was "creaking under the weight" of a calendar and a pencil. Really? Seeing that, I couldn't really muster any kind of motivation to try and make it sensible anymore. And once again, yes, this was Mechanics Transparently Showing Up And Reminding Me That Objects Were Really Nothing But A Size And Weight Property.

I was certainly unpeeling a story, and I don't dislike stories that get revealed this way. In this game, I think it missed the mark. The mechanics were, to me, far too intrusive. It wasn't worth drudging through it, and especially it wasn't worth reducing, in my mind, the objects to their size/weight to find places they fit. I mean, if the game is about giving those objects a history and making them part of a revealed story, asking me then to forget that a pencil and a calendar is certainly not enough to make any desk creak under their weight is far too mimesis-breaking.