The Acquisition

The Acquisition has enough specific date markers and references to contemporary events to make clear it’s not a period piece, but this blackly-satiric skewering of the vapidity of lite consumerism feels straight out of the 80s, and not just because its choices are labeled with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-aping “turn to page XX.” The decade of my birth was rife with movies and books reproving the yuppies for the crass, materialistic ideology they’d embraced as the idealism of the liberation movements of the Sixties curdled, and Paul, the Acquisition’s protagonist, would fit right into the rogue’s gallery. He’s a wannabe Master of the Universe (the Wall Street kind, not the He-Man kind – as someone who was a kid when both of these things were big, let me assure you that it was confusing back then too) who dreams of being an alpha-male cowboy, and attempts to bridge the gap between aspiration and reality by purchasing actually-not-all-that-expensive-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things artwork, while quietly quailing from his wife’s disapproval of his spendthrift ways.

He’s an unappealing, pathetic character, in other words, a sign and symptom of the decadence of the moneyed elite, and at least in the opening set of passages, the player is invited not to sympathize with him but to judge him. The prose is brisk and dry, well-suited for this clinical dissection:

No need to hesitate. It’s your money. Just buy the drawing. Just click pay. Don’t look at the VAT. You buy the drawing and you wedge the information in over grilled cheese sandwiches and a robust kale salad for dinner. In your delivery, you are firm, curt, and assertive.

“I bought the drawing and I’m going to put it in my office. There’s no way to return it. We’ll have to adjust.” You place your hands on the table and scoot back in your chair, as if you are finalizing a transaction. [Your wife] nods once and you hear her sigh in the kitchen, deeply.

So this stuff is well-realized, but I can’t say I found it especially compelling: the game flatly states its simple themes early on, and while it’s hard to disagree that consumerism is no substitute for values, and lies and steamrolling are bad for relationships, the writing here intentionally foregoes the kind of specificity and plasticity that can enliven these platitudes. Indeed, unlike many of the celebrate poison-pen novels of the 80s, The Acquisition doesn’t feel especially closely attuned to the foibles of the lifestyle it’s satirizing – the general vibe of wealth and the fact that Paul’s on an art-dealer’s list for individual outreach sits uneasily with the idea that $3,300 is a sufficiently big expense that can’t be managed with a bit of credit-card juggling, for example (he doesn’t have kids! What else could he be spending his money on!) The art-world references do provide some much-needed context, but there aren’t that many of them, keeping the overall feel rather high-level, glossy, and disconnected from human experience, even the human experience of soulless materialists.

The story structure also strengthens this sense that there’s less of substance here than one might prefer. Of the half-dozen or so major branches available from the opening few passages of the game, all but one terminate quickly, bringing the narrative to an abbreviated conclusion within two or three additional clicks. Those endings aren’t bad, exactly – they’re thematically appropriate, and boast some of the most viciously funny writing in the game, like the one where you suffer a fatal heart attack immediately after buying yet more art, this time an even more expensive customized painting tailored just to your preferences:

You do not experience the experience of knowing your final act was to saddle your most beloved with an irritating tertiary bill and an illiquid, smarmy asset.

There is that one branch that keeps the story going for longer, however, and here the Acquisition gets a little more ragged, which winds up helping it. The plot starts taking non-obvious twists and turns, and if they sometimes feel more like zany non-sequiturs than anything deeply connected to what’s come before, well, as noted the premise runs out of gas pretty quick so switching gears is probably the right call. I was unconvinced by the swerve into therapy, and the attempt to characterize Paul’s acquisitiveness as a form of OCD – beyond the details not quite ringing true, I’m not sure this is the kind of story where you really want the main character to be redeemable. But another way of saying that is that the last part of the story is notably more humanistic than the first, and if you had to pick one, well, I’d choose the messy, more compassionate one over the self-assured and detached one any day, much as Gordon Gekko might disapprove.