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Review
Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 15min
My second played work from the Goncharov Jam, and hoo boy quite different. This is a tragic love story, where interactivity is used to provide different insights and flashbacks into the central relationship, between a (Spoiler - click to show)gangster and a killer seemingly hired to kill him. An early charge I got from this work was this super loaded phrase in the Content Warning: - Brief cannibalism. LolWUT???
The cover art was actually the FIRST charge I got from this work. It is evocative, compelling, and very much of a piece with the 70’s movie conceit of the jam. So much is packed into that illustration, its dramatic layout, its swirling brush strokes, the dynamic lettering, the details in those swirls, I could stare at it for minutes. I could mount it next to my Vertigo poster as a full partner.
Another aspect of the work that landed precisely for me was its use of inline links. There are three types of them: 1) third person flashbacks; 2) first person internal monologue/observations; 3) advance the story. Each of these has its own interactive paradigm and color cues, very effectively segregating three intertwined narrative threads. If I had a quibble, it is with the default color scheme, which seems at odds both with the purported inspiration and the narrative itself. If it was intended as ironic frisson, it didn’t quite land that way for me. Small quibble, but there it is.
The story itself is a relationship study of two flawed men. The prose used here is quite magnetic, employed in both first and third person to simultaneously flesh out the deep attraction (Spoiler - click to show)and the tragic destiny of their relationship. The language flows from character-focused descriptions of physical and emotional attraction to horrific acts of violence, and does so in a shockingly consistent voice - the juxtaposition enhanced by the language thread that unites them.
It was a compelling read, no doubt, but like another recently reviewed work it engaged the ‘romancing the villain’ trope. It’s a work of fiction, I get that, but real or not there is some level of atrocity where I just stop caring about perpetrator heartache. I don’t want to make too much of it. It’s my own hangup. If you find that trope compelling, it is hard to see how this work would disappoint.
