Into The Lion's Mouth

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

An awesome thing about well-crafted video games is that they can conjure up seamless new worlds for the player to explore. An awesome thing about poorly-crafted video games is that by inadvertently breaking the illusion of mimesis, they can conjure up hallucinatory terrain that dislocates and disorients the player in a way that wind up perversely enjoyable. So it goes with Into the Lion’s Mouth, which combines a strange loop born (I assume!) of a weird bug with some odd writing choices to convey a discordant, postmodern experience where the player’s more Theseus adrift in a maze than Heracles bearding a lion.

The opening is deceptively simple: this choice-based game starts in medias res, as the protagonist suffers a vehicle break-down in the middle of the Serengeti and is immediately menaced by lions. The player is primed for a tale of survival as you need to make the right choices to escape hostile animals and unforgiving wilderness to make it back alive, but the reality is more discombobulating. For one thing, if you try to deal with the lion, your only options are to yell at it and draw attention to yourself (bad idea, duh) or to… try to hypnotize it, which the game illustrates with an inline YouTube video of a young girl “hypnotizing” various small animals like a frog and an iguana. Shockingly, this also doesn’t work, sending you back to the opening menu where you can select the remaining, incongruous option: “Lucky I prepped with the lion taming simulator.”

Clicking on that takes you to what seems to be an unrelated vignette, where you (is this the same you? In this story you apparently work as a park ranger, whereas the main-timeline you seems to be unfamiliar with the Serengeti) encounter an abandoned lion cub and nurse it back to health. There’s another odd fourth-wall breaking bit here, where you get sent to an unrelated website that lays out a DIY recipe for approximating lion’s milk that you then need to pick out of a set of choices in order to successfully feed the cub. But other than that things progress as you’d imagine: you bond with him, you help him learn to hunt, you reach the moment when you realize he belongs in the wild, and you tearfully leave him there and drive away…

At which point you’re sent back to the game’s opening yet again, I guess to hope that hypnosis will work better this time out (it doesn’t).

I have questions. For one thing, in what sense was this vignette a “simulator”? It’s framed as something that actually happened. But are we to assume it was just a Twine game that the protagonist of this other, less-successful Twine game played prior to going on safari (the lion-cub bit is far and away the best part of the game, seeming to indicate that some bit of research went into it, plus as mentioned it has a narrative arc rather than allowing time to become a flat endless circle)? If that’s the case, and you’re the kind of person who is so psychotically prone to overpreparation that before a trip to a wildlife preserve you research exactly what you should do if you happen to come across a lost lion cub and need to raise it into adulthood, shouldn’t you also know how to jump-start or a car? Or at least know not to engage with potentially dangerous animals instead of shouting “yoo-hoo, over here!” or trying, I repeat, to hypnotize them?

I had plenty of time to contemplate the answers to these queries as I confirmed that yes, everything remains the same in this second iteration, including the possibility of jumping back into the simulator again and rebooting things yet a third time. Into the Lion’s Mouth is a misnomer of a title: play this one, and you’re crawling into an endless matryoshka doll with infinite narratives nested inside each other, never resolving; I’m half tempted to play it until I’ve set free so many rehabilitated lions that they’re no longer endangered. Surely this can’t have been what the author intended, but from a quick nose at the Twine code, I can’t see a more definitive ending. And honestly I’m glad for that, since absent this bug or whatever it is the game would be a forgettable snack that doesn’t do much with a unique premise. Instead, I get this picture of the future: a man, hypnotizing a lion – forever.