Cannery Vale

In this choice-based game, you're an author who holes themself up in a vacant hotel to create the needed mental space for finishing a novel. The world of the gothic-styled hotel is little more than your room and bed, some empty hallways and lobby, and an overly familiar desk clerk. The eerie silences and inevitable writer's block would be sufficient fodder for a Stephen King-inspired IF. It's mere backdrop for Cannery Vale.

When you sleep, you enter a free-form dream-world of macabre, sexual, and often violent imagery. The two worlds feed each other. Your progress on the novel is keyed off visions and experiences in the dream-state. In turn, your choices in the hotel are reflected in your recurring dream.

I confess, I was taken aback by the depth and nuance of this title. The game starts by asking how explicit you want it to be. This and the opening prose led me to expect a raunchy adult-oriented game. Soon I realized it aspires to much more, and is willing to pull out the stops to achieve some very striking effects.

Right when I thought I'd plumbed the edges of Vale's dream-world, and thinking it was merely a matter of piecing the remaining puzzles together, I'd discover more dimensions of exploration, each image more macabre or orgiastic than the previous, peppered with moving moments of humanity. Dreams often involve mazes of unending rooms, stitched together by weird and bizarre connective tissue. Vale provides just that.

The metafiction might suggest this is yet another IF narrative experiment, but the in-game novel really isn't the endpoint here. Although I mentioned Stephen King earlier (because stories about writers who trap themselves in creepy settings is his oeuvre), the stark psychosexual landscape is more reminiscent of Barton Fink, a movie about a writer in a hotel watching his reality collapse.

There were some logistical problems to overcome. In one case, you make choices via a series of checkboxes, and I couldn't tell if my choices were sticking. Another time, it looked like my progress on the novel was lost; I couldn't tell if this was a bug or intentional. An inventory is maintained, but I had trouble figuring out how to use the items in it. There is in-game assistance, which got me on my way.

There's so much to like here, I hesitate to mention my criticisms. The most significant is that the player character is more fleshed-out than in most bog-standard IF, but wandering through the dream-state, as vivid as it was, felt aimless at times. The motivation of finishing the novel doesn't have enough oomph, and so I was left to my own curiosity to keep playing.