recombinatorial

recombinatorial is a short experience that leads the player character on an involuntary journey through a place of ruin and dislocation. You can select certain words and phrases along the way, or not. The story notes how people who arrive in this place purge their past and replace the old with new, which the interactivity mirrors with its fragmentation and regurgitation of words.

Mostly I got impressions. The urge to go north, more familiar from the popular media I grew up with as some kind of admirable drive to explore, is repurposed into something more like the mindless compulsion of an animal being puppeted by an invading fungus. I also sensed echoes of the siren calling travelers to the shores, with all the wrecked boats and bleached bones.

There is something else at the end of this journey, a meadow beyond the rough sea. Whether it’s real or imagined, I couldn’t tell. The distinction between yourself who must go north and those who stay behind in the narrows is something else I’m still not sure about. There’s a lot to ponder.

But it felt like the impressionism was the point here, and using more words to elucidate the details would be counterproductive. The concept fits well into the 500-word limit of the Neo-Twiny Jam, and the terse writing reads like smooth yet uncomfortable poetry. Reusing snippets at the end is an interesting way to stretch the boundaries, though it ended up being one final question mark for me since I couldn’t tell how or whether the end sequence connected to what I’d clicked earlier.

But the overall piece was intriguing and transportive. It felt quite cohesive as a game poem, even if I didn’t fully understand how everything connected.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 5m

One of IF’s venerable capabilities is the use of interactive presentation to meter the pace of the work, in the most successful cases using that pacing to make a statement. Sequential art (just say it, comic books) truck in this too, using visual cues, frame design, lines and shadow to usher the eye across the page to specific pacing effect. Every now and then, someone comes along and creates a new visual vernacular that is so effective its novelty never seems to expire, and it becomes just part of the visual language. Will Eisner famously innovated continually through his career, expanding the vocabulary for everyone.

In IF, this vernacular is in page size, link usage, graphical layout of words, fonts and colors. And yes, timed text. (Perhaps heretically, I maintain effective examples of such exist! Just because a knife is dangerously sharp doesn’t mean it can’t be wielded to effect!) These tools are so familiar and pervasive, it is easy to think perhaps all of them have been discovered. Easy as it might have been for illustrators to think Little Nemo and Krazy Kat had exhausted the visual palette.

This work kind of did the unthinkable for me. It invented a new pacing convention that worked like gangbusters. This work is peppered with links, rendered in dark brown on a black background. The effect is to have them register to the eye, but be all-but- illegible. Clicking the link has the effect of turning them white, integrating them into the surrounding text. The effect is to slow the eyes down, demand an excavation of the reader, and subsequently put some weight on the discovered text beyond their plain meaning. It is an analogous effect to underlining passages or ALL CAPS-ing them, but with the added element of active reader participation and discovery.

How cool is that??? SO COOL. An interactive paradigm I have never seen before? It feels innovative and I kind of hope there isn’t any prior art. Yes, to put it on the scale of Will Eisner’s accomplishments is clearly hyperbole. But I wasn’t alive then, was I? As exciting as this was for readers of his day, I inevitably want to consider the impact on contemporary ARTISTS. That kind of watershed revelation, of unsuspected new frontiers in expression? Can you fault me for wanting to be in the vanguard of a taste of that? What a letdown if it exists elsewhere. Never tell me.

I say this because the thrill of this unfamiliar technique is my most dominant impression of this work. The narrative is loosely of a young mariner observing a cruel massacre on a beach as they are morbidly compelled to a singular path. Befitting its experimental UI elements, the work is abstract, poetic and impressionistic. This particular author has a history of battering aside my deeply ingrained resistance to poetry. For some reason, here this effort was less successful. I can’t quite suss out if I was so enamored of the innovative UI that I couldn’t spare the effort to push out of my comfort zone, or if the nature of the narrative and protagonist’s mindset just didn’t land for me. There are still banger phrases to enjoy like “flashlight under covers, red capillary net, light behind your eyes” but the impact of the narrative ultimately eluded me.

Which brings us back to the UI where the impact did NOT elude me. On the ‘final’ page of the work, after rounds of joyous experimentation, suddenly some links DID have function. Narrative function! The surprise of this somehow pushed the bounds just that much further! Clearly, I found recombinatorial worth my time as a showcase for an unfamiliar interactive paradigm. Narratively, I reserve gushing for subsequent implementations. Hey, Eisner had his critically lauded successors too.

One of the things I like about my approach to reviewing IF is that it’s a prompt to think about games, to try to develop a take about what it’s doing or the craft by which it’s been put together. It’s fun to think about stuff rather than letting it passively wash over you, which is way too easy to let happen given all the distractions of modern life, and ideally it means I have some insight or analysis to share when I write things up – a couple of the reviews that I’m most proud of are basically just an attempt to construct a reading for a difficult game that some players might have bounced off.

The downside, though, is that sometimes a game just leaves me befuddled, which leaves me even more flummoxed about how to talk about it. Such is the case with recombinatorial, which has been percolating in the back of my head for the couple of days since I played it, as I wait, increasingly in vain, for something to click. Part of this is probably situational, as I’m a bit sick and my son’s preschool has been closed for a week, meaning I’m fuzzier and more distracted than usual. But part of it is that this is an elusive work, a downbeat prose poem about obsession, confusion, and disintegration with gorily compelling scenery. It also has a color scheme that’s surely intentionally off-putting and hard to parse, with links showing up dark brown on a black background.

Those links are very interesting, actually, and one of the key things I haven’t been able to figure out: they go white when you click them but don’t seem to lead to branches or other changes within the story, from the limited set of text comparisons I did, though from some comments on the game’s page perhaps the poem whose disintegration is the climax of the work varies based on which you clicked and which you ignored? I suppose I could experiment with that, but honestly, while it’s an effective ending I’m not sure I remember any of the specifics, it’s thick with portent, an impasto rendering of the dissolution of identity, but it was the vibes more than the particular words that stood out.

Not to say that the words in earlier parts didn’t stand out, though. As I said, there are some engaging images along the way, most involving blood and viscera:

"They string up the criminals all Jesus-like here, dangling from long poles sunk in black sands. Soot, holy ashes on flayed martyr-skin."

…

"Gore-frothed waves break on men and women marching to drag the butchery inland. They were not from here. Tore themselves apart, raised lances like lightning. Struck and became anew, fin and fang and beak and too-many-too-dark eyes. Images folding on images folding on images in the coiled gut-pattern spilt on the docks, kinked and curled message in their square-and-triangle script."

“Images folding on images folding on images” is a frequent refrain throughout, I think speaking to a sort of kaleidoscopic negation of meaning? And the equation of spilled intestines with language is clear enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure what to make of the other repeated phrase, “go north”. That’s the one link that visible does something, moving you to the next passage and retroactively reconfiguring the previous one (e.g. “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must. Go north.” Becomes “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must go north.") On a literal level, this is because the protagonist is traveling to the ends of the earth on their death-pilgrimage (the game specifically cites the way insects suffering from a fungal infection will travel large distances to climates more favorable to the fungus), but beyond that I’m drawing a blank – maybe that’s all there is?

So yeah, more question marks than usual for one of my reviews (did someone swap me for Victor Gijsbers?) It’s hopefully not too flippant to characterize the author’s typical formula as immaculately threatening vibes combined with queer melodrama, and I found without the latter part of the equation the vibes remain very compelling, but there’s a little less to hang onto, and proceedings are a little too enigmatic, for my personal taste.