meminerimus

can’t fully decode the wordplay that gives rise to meminerimus’s title, but I think “minimum” or “minimus” has to be somewhere in the blender, because this parser game seems an exercise in creating the smallest possible unit of story: the critical-path transcript barely cracks 500 words. So as a result it’s hard to discuss the game without getting into the ending, and since there is a plot here to be spoiled, fair warning that the rest of this review does so.

To pad out the text a bit so readers deciding to nope out after that warning aren’t immediately confronted by unwanted story details in the following line, before they have a change to hit the back button, let me do some throat-clearing and note that the brevity of the text doesn’t indicate that the game is a low-effort production by any means; there are a bunch of testers listed, and there’s a nicely-styled online version of the game that features intuitive hyperlinks for potential actions.

So the restraint here certainly feels intentional, which makes for an interesting contrast with the density of the premise. See, what’s going on here is that the player-character is a digital simulacrum, reconstituted and placed into a virtual shrine featuring the effects of a real-world person who, we learn through examining each of the four items in turn – and examining is all you can do, this is a limited-parser game – has died of suicide. The person who commissioned the replica is the dead person’s parent, who, through misguided attempts to change them “for their own good”, wound up hounding them into their desperate act of self-harm. That parent acts as the game’s narrator, providing commentary as you look at a gift the dead child received from a boyfriend, an award they won at school, and so on, providing a small anecdote for each before eventually triggering the endgame text which spells out the above summary.

This is a fine story, albeit a sadly familiar one, so what I found notable were the ways the game deviated from my expectations. The main divergence is that while the parent is clearly a terrible person who did terrible things, the game’s presentation is nonetheless at least a bit ambivalent. At a micro level, this is done by having one of the four items represent what appears to a wholly positive memory, a board game the two of them enjoyed playing together, which serves to indicate that the relationship wasn’t completely one-dimensionally negative. But zooming out, the reason the parent’s gone to the trouble of creating this “virtual resurrection” is that they’re baffled by what they did wrong – they’re aware that the things they did exacted a toll upon their child, and from the questions they ask in the finale (“Why did you have to do that to yourself? Why did you have to go so soon? Where I did I go wrong? Am I to blame for this?”) it’s clear at least part of them understands their guilt. But for all that the game makes the parent’s passive-aggression, low expectations, and abusive behavior pellucidly clear, this incomprehension seems to be sincere.

This is an intriguing dynamic! An AI looking at the detritus of the person it’s aping, looked at by the person who knows that they caused their death but due to some flaw in their humanity unable to grasp exactly how or why – it’s an existential hall of mirrors that caused me some vertigo when I thought it through. But it’s also one would probably be more impactful if the game had spent more time elaborating upon it. The AI, for one thing, has no subjectivity beyond providing a vector for the player to make the arbitrary choice of which object to examine, and with the dead child provided no real character traits beyond a few generalities adverted to by the obviously-biased narrator, their suicide lacks some impact.

Sure, there would be challenges to expanding this piece of micro-fiction too much: more robust gameplay systems would probably be required, which can be tricky in a character-first game like this, and it might be hard to sustain the narrator’s lack of understanding across a more worked-out plot without things feeling absurd. Still, I think it would have been worth the attempt; meminerimus raises some interesting questions, but doesn’t do much to elaborate upon them. That’s not a bad position for what appears to be a debut work of IF to leave the player, though, as that means I’m game to see what the author does next.