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Review
Edit: This review has been changed after getting some new perspective from others.
I have liked the other games by this author, and so I feel bad giving two stars (and I would raise it if asked). However, I will try to explain why I'm doing so.
This is a two-screen game with no choices. It does have fade-in text on each of those screens. It's for Neo Twiny Jam, so has less than 500 words.
It does have a nice background image and some ambient music, so I do feel it is polished. Without interactivity, all that remains for a game to be good or bad (for my tastes) is its emotional impact and its descriptiveness.
But it's hard to know what's going on. Is there a war? Is there a posse coming? What's our relationship to the woman in question? Is the ending metaphorical or literal?
Obviously a story can be ambiguous and still be fantastic, so I don't think all these things have to be spelled out. But I felt more confused than intrigued. The overall theme is one I had difficulty picking out; the ending suggests a theme of (Spoiler - click to show)alienation or lost nostalgia, but it's hard to see how the beginning fits in that case.
I guess this review is more of a plea for understanding. If someone can give me a helpful lens by which to view the game, I'll increase its rating.
Comments on this review
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I consulted the game's postmortem so I know that this one is meant to be ambiguous this way, and quite open to interpretation, but the overall theme is memory and the way it gets affected by conflict and violence. There's no one interpretation of what happened exactly, outside of what you piece together, and we're never told who "she" is, or what her relation is to "us".
I'm going to spoiler the following because it's my interpretation. (Spoiler - click to show)As a Polish person, I have been exposed to quite a lot of historical baggage that my country has to bear. I grew up with tales of oppressors coming to our cities and villages, and trying to erase anything that had to do with Poland and being Polish. So it was easy for me to imagine a mother escaping with her child from war-torn home, and it was easy for me to imagine that she'd want to return to or be buried there. And when the main character comes back, they find their once home completely unrecognizable because that was the goal: erasure of the old, and remodeling a place for the new settlers. Their memories of home are true, but it's not a place that they can now visit - it's now gone forever, lost to violence. The train tracks, I found that to be more metaphorical: they served only as means of escape for the main character, but since the war ended, nobody else had to escape.
