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Review
“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.
