Demonstration

Belying its title, Demonstration isn’t a game overly concerned about selling you on anything. This short parser game is made up of four even smaller vignettes, set up with just a few sentences focused more on vibe than context. Two of them appear to be on short timers, playing themselves off the stage almost before the player’s had a chance to catch their breath, while the others require you take a single thematically-weighty action to progress. The former of these is heavily prompted, while the latter isn’t; it took me like three minutes to figure out, after I’d exhausted all the obvious stuff to try and started in on some more random options, which isn’t that long but was a high percentage of the 7 or so minutes the game takes to play.

The subject matter of the vignettes is intentionally opaque. You’re a spy, on or failing a mission: X ME returns “that’s classified”. You’re on an airplane, you’re in an elevator, you’re drowning (?), you’re in an office. You have a female coworker and a male partner, or maybe they’re the same, or maybe in some vignettes you’re the coworker and in others you’re the partner. You think about travel, you consider what space there is for human relationships in these circumstances:

Under safer circumstances, interpersonal interactions are pointless. if no one is injured there is no reason for first aid, and without first aid or other productive efforts there is no need for contact.

Demonstration’s themes are straightforward even if the storytelling is cryptic; I felt like it was more espionage-as-metaphor-for-romance than romance-as-metaphor-for-espionage, but honestly it could easily be intended to go the other way, and that ambiguity is fine, even a positive. And I like the presentation, a sort of atomic-gastronomy of the parser form; my instincts are to want the vignettes, especially those on a timer, to be more built out, but I’m pretty sure those instincts are wrong.

So I have some admiration for the game, but I feel it at somewhat of a remove. It’s less that it’s intentionally alienating and obscure as that it strikes me as a bit too clinical. The characters barely exist, the idea of another human being shorn of almost all human traits. The spy stuff is so dreamlike that it doesn’t provide much beyond the abstract idea of concealment; per the above excerpt, the prose is clean and abstract, devoid of emotion or even subjective detail. I would have preferred something slightly less hermetic – give me a proper noun or two to help my imagination breath life into this scenario, tell me we’re in East Berlin or our spy agency is defending capitalism, take advantage of the whole rich world that exists outside the four corners of this tiny game to make me feel something! The vibes, as I said, are good, but man does not live on vibes alone.