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Emotional Cruise Control, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer (also known as “randomness”) I reviewed this uncomfortably close to Chase the Sun. I say uncomfortable because there are enough common superficial details it bends my brain to try and compare them, and I really don’t want to. (Spoiler - click to show)Two Runaway brides fleeing a union their communities endorse but their own heart denies. Two solo roadtrips through unpopulated stretches of road. Strong supernatural elements. Strong religious influence on the narrative. A looping ending, allowing you to explore different paths, but strongly linear outside a few key choices. A common abrupt car crash ending. Um, wedding dress still on.
That’s reductive isn’t it? It feels super reductive. Especially because notwithstanding my manipulative list above, the two are different in the ways that matter most: themes, tone and impact. I hope I got it out of my system above, US Route 160 deserves its stand-alone focus.
This is a very dark work. The mood is overwhelmingly oppressive and hopeless, even before the story starts unfolding. I am put in the mind of a writing exercise from decades ago, where the class was asked to convey someone’s mood only through scene description. 160 would have aced that assignment. Words are used like blunt weapons to convey the desperation of the protagonist. It is often effective but… ends up being a bit one-note. That note is really strong and crescendic (c’mon that’s totally a word, no need to look it up), but without variation around it, it starts losing its punch. It is not helped by some unfortunate grammar or spelling which breaks the spell. One that stood out was (paraphrase) “ultraviolence soothed her skin” Now I’m pretty sure from context, that was supposed to be Ultraviolet. If not it was jarring for different, word choice reasons. And yet elsewhere I was gifted with the phrase “corset of lies” which I unreservedly love in and out of context.
Besides the rhythm of the text itself, the main weapon in its mostly linear runtime is dramatic text pacing. 160 doubles down by using both interactivity and more traditional sentence/paragraph structure to regulate its cadence. Like the above, I think this is done so pervasively that the effect becomes muted by the end. It too would benefit from some variation in intensity and application.
The story being told is Tragic in the colloquial (not Greek Drama) sense. The protagonist’s life as told through flashback is heartbreaking. Their western journey is fraught with the rubble of those ancient battle scars. It is pleasantly surprising to me then, given the relative homogeneity of tone, that the three endings I found were so wildly different from each other and the rest of the piece. One managed to find a whole new level of tragic, one was melancholy and slightly …hopeful seems too strong but that’s all I’ve got, and one was delightfully ambiguous. But only one of them felt like a legitimate result of player choice, the others were kind of arbitrary given the choices that brought you there.
It feels …bad… to talk about “Sparks of Joy” for this piece, how about “Sparks of Appreciation?” When the tone worked it really worked, and there were some excellent turns of phrase. And that one ambiguous ending had me smiling in its audacity. But those were counterbalanced by the unremitting ambience, occasional format or word choice clunks, and some arbitrary-feeling endings.
So, to compare to Chase the Sun… godDAMNit brain!
Played: 10/18/22
Playtime: 40min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (lack of variation)
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