The Acquisition

The Acquisition is the story of a man named Paul who wants to acquire an expensive work by a famous artist, leading to friction with his wife. It's a choice-based game that mimics a gamebook; there's nothing wrong with that sort of simple branching structure, but the options being labeled "turn to page X" is a little jarring. I'm not sure what that's doing for the piece, what it says besides "the author's last encounter with text-based interactive fiction was reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child and they haven't really thought about how else an interactive narrative could look."

Or maybe it's to enhance a general sense of '80s nostalgia, because despite being nominally set in the present day, The Acquisition does feel very '80s to me. I wasn't personally around in the '80s, but I've seen enough of the movies to recognize a preoccupation with consumerism that takes a certain form—men (always men) in high-powered corporate jobs wearing slick suits and jockeying for position amongst themselves via purchases of luxury goods. This is the world Paul seems to inhabit, and there's something a little quaint about it; I feel like in the last forty years, the whole capitalist nightmare has gotten so much worse and weirder and more complicated in ways The Acquisition doesn't reflect.

But there is a noticeable difference between The Acquisition and its '80s predecessors. Those older works were generally concerned with consumerism as a societal ill. Even something like American Psycho that positions its central character as particularly and uniquely unwell is ultimately doing so as a critique of the system that allows him to thrive. (Of course, there are many criticisms that can be made of the use of mental illness as a sort of rhetorical tool in this way, but this isn't a review of American Psycho, so let's move on for now.)

So I guess there is something uniquely 2020s about The Acquisition after all, in that it is concerned with consumerism as Paul's personal problem, befitting an era in which large-scale problems are frequently framed as needing to be solved by individual choice or improvement. Paul's need to acquire the latest, greatest luxury item is driven not by the values of the world he lives in, but by an inexplicable internal process that he needs to manage with medication and therapy. And to be clear, I love meds and therapy, and I hate when the popular social media talking point about capitalism turning societal ills into something you just need to do some personal improvement about starts to shade into "mental illness isn't real, it was made up by Big Pharma to distract you from overthrowing capitalism." But The Acquisition isn't a nuanced and realistic portrait of a man living with a hard-to-manage mental illness, either, it's just sort of "this guy is an '80s movie cliche because he has a mental illness that makes you into an '80s movie cliche." Which at least makes a change from the more common stereotypical portrayals of OCD (as one branch reveals his illness to be), but I have to say it did not ring especially true for me.

So if The Acquisition isn't saying anything about society, and it's not saying anything about the experience of living with mental illness, what are we left with? OCD as metaphor, possibly—"consumerism is like a disease and it will ruin your life". Which, in addition to being a commentary that's weakened by the dated portrayal of the subject matter, is something I would find a bit tasteless in its use of a real illness as, well, a rhetorical tool.

Or maybe I'm approaching it all wrong—maybe despite being sort of satire-shaped, The Acquisition is not really interested in saying anything so much as offering a series of escalating absurdities. Maybe it's actually a close cousin of High School Reunion. Looked at through that lens, it's more successful in some ways, with the (Spoiler - click to show)apocalypse ending being a particular high point of absurdity, but then the decision to bring in mental illness and treat it somewhat seriously is even more incongruous and uncomfortable.

So I'm not quite sure what The Acquisition was trying to be, and I don't think it quite succeeded at any of the things it could have been. But I also think maybe I'm being a bit harsh on it because the portrayal of OCD didn't sit well with me, so there may be other players who are better equipped to enjoy going along for the ride and seeing how out-of-hand things can get.