Am I My Brother's Keeper?

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This is an uneasy marriage between a paranormal adventure and a sibling relationship drama. Let me start by answering the question posed in the title. “No, you are your SISTER’S keeper.”

Now I am on record as admiring the Texture interface. I think an author can do a lot with the drag and drop mechanism, particularly what options you make available, associated with what text, and through creative use of the “balloon text” when you do connect the two. I don’t think this work leveraged the power of that interface to its narrative fullest. On many early screens you are presented with two options. Turns out they are not exclusive, you actually need to connect both to advance. Worse, each choice reveals a subsequent paragraph, but they are not position independent. If you choose to reveal the ‘second’ paragraph before the ‘first’ the text doesn’t really flow right. Or if it does, the insertion of the final paragraph dispels that equilibrium. Now creative text choices could use that to advantage, to lead the reader on a different mental path depending on order. Here, I couldn’t detect that. It just felt like a single page that required two pulls to see. It didn’t connect prompt and choice in an interesting way and didn’t leverage that delay for dramatic pause.

I’m not sure why, but I also hit some issues that I think belong to Texture and not the author. It's weird to me how much Texture work I consumed before this registered. I don’t know enough about Texture to know if other authors were able to mitigate these artifacts better or if Texture’s luck just ran out here. For one, the VERY distracting “font resize” issue reared here. (Is it just me? I complain about it a lot, like a LOT a lot, and I’m starting to question whether this is a fundamental flaw of Texture itself.) Texture appears to do an HTML-like dynamic formatting for line wrap, paragraphing, etc. Which suggests that like HTML, an author would need to do some extreme intervention to tightly control their screen. In HTML, when text overruns the available window space, it scrolls. In Texture it seems to shrink the text until it fits. Man is that an intrusive choice.

There was another presentation glitch that I noticed for the first time here. The “text balloons” that hover over the prompt word do not recognize edge-of-window. If your prompt is on one side or the other of your window, and you have more than a word or two of bubble-text, it disappears under the window’s edge making it useless. Since Texture appears to auto-wrap, its not clear how the author could mitigate this, and yet this is the first work I saw this artifact so consistently. Bad luck?

Leaving aside the distracting formatting, the narrative was a little too bare bones for me. It’s a missing sibling search, that culminates in a Big Bad dream-dimension battle for freedom. It has always been true that horror is a genre practically screaming for metaphor. The supernatural stakes are completely at the author’s whim, and creative authors have crafted innumerable monsters as sophisticated metaphor for real-life horrors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer famously did so for years until the true monster was revealed! I wrote that line as comedy, but it actually makes me a little sad.

Here, the Big Bad doesn’t strike me as having any metaphorical resonance, it's just a (really cool!) monster. Its realm, whose description is also a high point, similarly doesn’t seem to serve a metaphorical purpose. The central sibling relationship seems to be crying out for such a treatment, but no. So it ends up being a pretty straight-forward, unnuanced pulpy adventure.

I don’t think it succeeds as that either though. It's not moving fast enough to paper over its plot contrivances, which is crucial for pulp. If it’s not a white knuckle thrill ride, the audience will have time to question, “Wait, he rode all the way to Germany CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF A SUBMARINE???” Zip them past that, author, that’s totally not important! I get no joy from listing “plot holes” so I’m going to spoiler these just so we don’t have to read them. If the author is curious what didn’t work for me, here are a few plot choices that jarred loudest: (Spoiler - click to show)finding not one but 2 crucial clues, in minutes, that a presumedly much longer police search failed to turn up. Keeping the police out of the loop before the supernatural angle was obvious. Reading about the savior MacGuffin, that the sister suddenly has, but does not realize how to use. Why else would she have it?

I think though, that all of those I could have forgiven with a taut sibling drama, and I feel let down here too. The missing sister was presented as flighty, disappearing for long stretches without reason, the implication being she can’t take care of herself. More traditional use of spoiler-mask: (Spoiler - click to show)At the climax, the sister is begging, pleading to be trusted to effect her own rescue, or at least effect a heroic sacrifice. The game does not even give you an option to honor her wishes, and so the protagonist siezes the agency, denies the sister, and saves the day. The real answer to the question in the title “Am I My [Sibling]'s Keeper?” is apparently “Yes. Yes you are and always will be.” This is like the least satisfying answer to that question.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
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