String Theory

This is a well-written, well-made game with some unusual aspects. While it uses the default Twine Harlowe font and color scheme, there is some customization, including the use of text effects and a dynamically-updated family tree. The latter (which is complete with little illustrations!) is a touch that’s both just nice and also proved helpful to refer to during the game ((Spoiler - click to show)especially when things get more complicated than they first appear… Also, seeing Ben added to it at the end was really sweet). The game also employs hyperlinks well, making use of false choices, cycling links, and even the simple “click to proceed” to control the pacing, ensuring that the player never faces a wall of text.

Players will also soon discover that there are special links (usually highlighted with a text effect) sprinkled throughout that lead to NPC flashbacks. I have to admit that I didn’t initially realize these weren’t the memories of Jay, the PC; this is fully on me, as on a replay I noticed that the first one makes it clear by having the POV character addressed as “Jimmy” twice, but I somehow managed to overlook that on my first playthrough. Even putting that aside, because these sections feel set off from the main story, I think a graphical cue (change of background color and/or font?) would be nice in order to differentiate them. I also wished there was an undo/back button, because sometimes I wanted to look back at the last screen of text (whether to refer back to something or because I clicked too fast and accidentally missed a flashback link).

Now, talking about a different aspect of the flashbacks, at first I thought that they were simply giving me, the player, a look into the NPCs’ pasts, giving me knowledge about them that Jay didn’t have. I liked the way they humanized even the worst characters (looking at you, Uncle Jimmy…), adding depth to portrayals that could otherwise seem stereotypical or one-note. But where it gets weird is when it becomes clear that Jay is experiencing these flashes on some level, too. This gave what had initially felt like a very grounded and realistic game a surreal vibe, injecting some sort of magic into the world that never gets addressed or explained.

I liked the exploration of the complicated family dynamics, but I think the game packed in one or two too many sensational reveals about Jay’s family history; it got a little over-the-top, and the more extreme ones weren’t really explained, which left me more confused than anything else. I also wasn’t sure what the purpose of the ambulance flashback was; I didn't feel it added much to the story. And one of the two possible endings felt more satisfying to me ((Spoiler - click to show)the Venice one, due to the emotional beat of Jay meeting Ben’s grandmother and being immediately accepted, after all he went through with his family).

But while I didn’t feel like all of the elements fully cohered, I was engaged and invested in the story and enjoyed both my playthroughs, and what I saw as the central theme resonated with me: while we can’t choose our families, and we’ll always be stuck with their trauma and mess to some extent because it’s where we came from, we CAN choose the other important people in our life, and it’s possible to find love and acceptance elsewhere even if our families can’t or won’t provide it.

“Slice of life” is a funny name for a genre, if you spend too much time thinking about it (I suspect this is true of most genre names). These kinds of games tend to have relatively low stakes; there might be romances kindled or breakups endured, sure, but there likely won’t be melodrama, nothing dramatically out of the ordinary or unexpected. At the same time, they typically have an arc to them: at least some characters finish the story in a different place than where they started, with some event or incident having made some kind of impression. So the “slice” part of the genre label is apt: the selection of what to include, where to begin and where to conclude, is usually artfully curated to present something tidy and appetizing, a lovely triangle of carrot cake with the iced-on carrot just so at the center of the arc.

String Theory defies expectations by not doing that; this is less a slice and more a core sample of life, a series of incidents that sometimes feel like they’ve been thrown together by blind forces rather than authorial design. The opening made me expect that the game would be confined to a single climactic Thanksgiving dinner, but in fact there are a few nested flashbacks, some of which have only glancing relevance to what I take to be the main plot. There’s also a series of short epilogues that leave the narrative lurching past its logical end-point, and the game’s attitude towards tying together its various plot and thematic strands is desultory at best: I finished the game nonplussed, unsure how everything I’d just read was meant to come together.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy some of my time with String Theory, though. The protagonist, Jay, doesn’t have a strong personality but he’s appealing enough – a mostly-closeted Caltech student visiting his Kentucky relatives for Thanksgiving, he undergoes the slings and arrows of a right-wing uncle, a closed-off father, and the time difference and familial obligations separating him from his boyfriend. He’s dealing with self-image issues, too (he’s trying to be vegan so he can lose a little weight), and worried about too-hard classes and too-expensive tuition.

He’s plausibly beleaguered, in other words, and the game is good at deploying bits of interactivity to wryly underline his predicament. When someone asks how college is going, your dialogue options include “I’m going to fail Ph 229,” “I’m in so much debt”, and “am I wasting my life?”, but clicking on any them just redirects to a terse “fine”, for example. And the while the writing doesn’t ever reach for spectacle, there are some good comic set-pieces, like this struggle with your aunt’s well-intentioned attempt at a vegan pie:

"You reach over with a butter knife and poke it. Your first attempt fails to pierce the skin. With some effort, you plunge the knife through the crunchy white tufts into a wobbly lake of yellow, and fight your way down to an alluvial graham cracker deposit from the middle Devonian."

The prose also establishes a nice wintry mood, leaving me missing the cold-weather Thanksgivings I used to have when I was still visiting the northeast on my breaks. But that brings me to some of the weaker elements of String Theory, because despite going to Caltech myself, there weren’t any details of Jay’s experience at the school that felt especially lived-in or resonated particularly strongly, beyond the title of one topology textbook being repeated a few times. Similarly, the plot and characters are very archetypal: dealing with a racist uncle, furtively texting a friend from the bathroom, entering a food coma, bonding with a supportive aunt, and watching football are all prominent on the big board of Thanksgiving tropes. Heck, from context I think this sequence is supposed to be set in Kentucky, but it could be Iowa or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania just as easily – as with the setting as with everything else, the player isn’t given much to attach this story and the people in it to a particular, specific context (admittedly, I did enjoy that one of the things the uncle rants about is California’s push for reparations for slavery – I’m peripherally involved in that campaign!)

The plot is also somewhat perplexing. There’s a fair bit of incident, but at least in my game, the closest there was to a Jay-focused climax was the moment when the uncle awkwardly tried to reach out and tell me that my dead mom loved me very much. It’s not a moment that landed especially heavily – it’s short, stereotypical, and it’s established that Jay’s mom died when he was a baby so his emotional engagement with her memory isn’t exactly clearly, all the more so since he doesn’t really respond directly to the overture. Then there’s another climax where a flashback allows you to relive the car crash that killed your mother, from the perspective of some EMTs, but of course you already generally know the outcome and the gameplay here is odd, with a light time-loop structure resetting things if you make the wrong choices in a couple of coin-flip situations. And then the game keeps going for a couple more scenes after that, before ultimately ending with a visit to your boyfriend’s warm, effusive grandmother who provides a non-uncliched contrast with Jay’s emotionally constipated family.

It just doesn’t feel to me like it adds up to much: why is the game about this Thanksgiving instead of the one before or the one after, say? What makes this particular collection of events – particularly the not-always-intuitively-integrated flashbacks – a single narrative? Admittedly, there are plot points I missed, based on a late-game conversation with some crossed-out options that I think corresponded to options I didn’t take earlier in the story, but this isn’t really the kind of game that invites replay through engaging mechanics or dramatic plot branching (the last screen indicates that instead of the ending I got, where Jay spends winter break house-sitting with his boyfriend in Venice Beach, there’s another one where they go on vacation to Mexico, which seems comparably fine?)

The game’s title, and the mechanic by which progress slowly fills out a graphic of a family tree, seems to indicate that it’s engaging with ideas around connection, but that’s a very broad idea, more a vibe than a theme – I felt like the game needed more of a defined central spine to anchor its disparate pieces. As a result, while I liked some of the ingredients, in the end for me String Theory didn’t serve up a nicely-cut piece of cake; more a haphazardly-chosen lump of frosted dessert that could have used more defined layers and a cleaner presentation.

This game was interesting; I'm not sure if it's actually complete or not, as the story ended a little abruptly for me. It did give me an ending screen, and I downloaded it and checked and found a few side stories I missed, but overall, it felt like a plot arc was building up to something but just kind of stopped right before the apex.

This game is about a tense Thanksgiving with family that doesn't really get you and a variety of unusual occurrences. Plot threads include a bigoted uncle, hiding your sexuality, learning family secrets, and (Spoiler - click to show)experiencing weird visions.

Also, everyone treats you like you're vegan but it seems like you're not really heavily vegan? That part wasn't clarified, but most of the plot points aren't. This seems more like a character-focused mood piece. You can talk to your uncle a bit, and you can decide how much to interact with your boyfriend on the phone, but (Spoiler - click to show)the visions you see don't really seem to have a resolution that I could find.

So I'm not sure how I feel about this story. The writing was good; I was invested in the characters and the overall feel. I just felt something missing in the end. But at least it's good that I wanted more of the game and not less!

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Neitzsche famously said “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I prefer the terser “grapple not with monsters, lest monster ye become,” but hey Neitzsche was an idea guy. Less well known was Neitchze’s playful rewording, “truck cautiously with cliches, lest cliche’ ye become.” No, he totally said that, I think in a bar maybe? Discussing a play or something? I absolutely didn’t just make that up.

The way to tell if something is cliche’ is if it becomes such a trope of standup comedy that it gets a recurring SNL character. The ‘problematic uncle at Thanksgiving,’ ‘Drunk Uncle’ if you will, is one such. Couple that with a closeted (at least family-closeted) protagonist, and it’s fair to say my expectations for this work were unfairly lowered. Hey, sometimes I am a prisoner of my biases, I’m the victim here!

Cliches become cliches because they are rooted in real, resonant experience. Every cliche’ starts life as ‘oh, hey, I recognize that dynamic!’ They do not need to justify their existence, but do need to breach the trap of their familiarity. The plot and setting beats were firmly rooted in that familiarity, that’s not where the work achieved escape velocity for me. I found the characters mostly stock-ish, with some minor variations. (Though I did appreciate the titular Physics Curriculum as code for ‘things in college student’s life that relatives will never understand.’ That was a cool resonance.) Where the work came alive, I think, was its use of multi-perspective flashback and insightful employment of interactivity.

While the ‘present day’ activities were maybe not so compellingly painted, I was intrigued by the flashback structure. Background is presented as flashback, where we inhabit a DIFFERENT character than our present day protagonist. These flashbacks may not introduce dramatic recontextualizations, but they DO introduce new viewpoints and formative events that enhance our understanding of the (mild) present day drama. I found these enhanced the proceedings at every turn, providing empathy and rounding for the NPCs that in ‘present’ day might seem one dimensional.

My favorite part of the piece, however, was how it leveraged the unique asset of its medium to enhance the entire thing. I speak, of course, of interactivity. An early example that snapped me to attention was an innocent question pregnant with landmines.

“And how’s your school going, Jay?”
[with the options presented as:]
I’m going to fail Ph 229.
I’m in so much debt.
Am I wasting my life?

Selecting ANY of those responses replaces them all with a single option:

(Spoiler - click to show)Fine

That is just a perfect employment of interactivity to first represent the troubled mindset of our protagonist, then turn to a social self-edit that is all too familiar. Kudos, author. There were two other employments of interactivity that were more subtle, and even more affecting. One was an opportunity to open up in a real way with an NPC. To that point in the narrative, the NPC had been presented as clumsy but well meaning. The choice was actually quite agonizing! Do I risk entrusting this NPC with personal vulnerability, unsure they would welcome it, and even if they do, that they might mishandle it anyway? It wasn’t the choice that was so well done, it was the buildup that made that choice so agonizing.

My favorite though might be the unheralded, but conspicuous in their absence, choices to interact with the protagonist’s father. We see enough of his character to suspect he is not of similar cloth to Drunk Uncle, and certainly struggling with his own demons. Yet the entire work, we are not once given the option to interact with him in a meaningful way (more poignant, given our flashback experience with him!). This LACK of interactivity speaks worlds to the protag-father relationship and actually tarnishes the protag’s character in a very realistic and dramatically satisfying way. He is so caught up in his own drama, he can’t even conceive of reaching out to his dad, either for comfort or to connect with HIS problems. It simultaneously diminishes the protagonist, subverts the driving drama of the piece while also adding complexity to the overall narrative.

It is also a point only appreciated once the work is complete. The flashbacks and interactivity were definite Sparks of Joy here. In the moment, the main plot was just too rote to fully Engage me. This is definitely a work that improves on reflection.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Very enjoyable! The way it tells the different family members' stories and how it lays out the structure of the family tree are really interesting! It really managed to make the characters actually feel human and bring you vivid and relatable images easily found in the real world! I have to admit that some of the writing was perhaps a touch too nebulous for it to really flow like it could of and I was left perplexed about what the situation actually was at a few instances, but nothing too severe, honestly.