My creation

Reviewing a chunk of games all at once through the course of the Comp can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, there can be synchronicities that help you look at a game through an unexpected angle. On the down side, though, sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling like past-you is stepping on your toes. Case in point: the best jumping-off point for My creation is Frankenstein, since the game excerpts it at length and is clearly in dialogue with Shelley’s classic. But having already reviewed Frankenfingers, and done a little tap-dance about the not-so-good doctor in my INPUT PROCESS review, it feels awkward to go back for a threepeat.

So let’s go with what’s arguably the second-best jumping-off point: parenthood, specifically those first few days when you’re back from the hospital with your first kid and you are sleep-deprived and your life has changed and you don’t know how anything works. It’s a terrifying, disorienting experience, and so in some respects it’s a perfect fit for a somewhat wonkily-implemented parser game: the sense that moving around is harder than it should be, you’re either seeing double or things that should be there are nowhere to be found…

My creation does communicate the claustrophobic vertigo of those moments quite well via its writing, too. The game starts with your days-old baby screaming and crying while your headache gets worse; you don’t know what to do to quiet the kid down, and as the blurb indicates, you don’t have another parent or any other family member providing any help. Small wonder that even moving from one side of the bed to the other involves “dragg[ing] yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers,” and that there’s a clumsy tactility to your physical interactions with the baby:

The unevenness of the floor and the speed of your movements shake the basket, and the child within it, more than either of you expected. The moan has become a cry. You shift your hand on the floor and grab the baby’s wrapper with the other. In one swift movement, the child is on the bed. With wide, tearful eyes, the child watches you groan and sigh, your face scrunched up in pain.

Thankfully, this isn’t an extended experience – My creation is a short game – but it’s an authentically horrifying experience, knowing you’re responsible for another life but not sure how to do that while also needing to take care of yourself, too. There’s only a single challenge to overcome, but it’s a doozy: get the kid to stop crying, with nary a formula bottle or white-noise machine in sight. As mentioned, the game really could have used more testing, because there are rough patches everywhere: moving from one corner of the bed to another absurdly uses compass directions (and UP and OUT and EXIT won’t let you stand up), you can get told that there’s a basket and a baby where you are but trying to interact with them reveals that they’re actually somewhere else, and Inform’s default responses are jarring when they intrude, both because of their voice – Graham Nelson’s studied disinterest has rarely felt less apposite – and their content, with SLEEP throwing up a totally-not-true “you aren’t feeling especially drowsy” and FEED BABY horrifyingly generating a “(to yourself)” implicit action (thankfully, it fails). The gameplay wouldn’t work in a choice-based interface, since the desperation of typing anything you can think of into the parser, with most of it not working, is 100% the way to marry form and substance when depicting the existential despair at not being able to quiet a crying infant. But the same effect could have been achieved without quite so much clunkiness – heck, the game doesn’t actually end, it just throws a “(the end)” after the wall of text following the correct move.

All right, I think we can circle back to Frankenstein now. The protagonist has a copy of the book right by their bed, and examining it displays an extended passage near the middle of the novel, as the reanimated-and-abandoned monster reflects on his miserable condition by comparing himself, and what he’s been able to intuit about his nature, to the lives lived by a seemingly-happy peasant family. This also prompts him to ponder his origins: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to answer them.”

Dr. Frankenstein is undoubtedly one of the worst parents in all of literature, so it’s understandable that an anxious, frightened father worried about how bad a job they might wind up doing would think of Frankenstein, though there’s a more direct reason why the protagonist would find the monster’s situation resonant too (despite copious clues about where the game is headed with this, it treats this as a reveal, so I’m not going to spoil it). Babies can feel so fragile, and the psychology of child-rearing is presented as requiring such specialized knowledge and attention, is it any wonder that a parent who doesn’t have their whole life already figured out would be terrified that they’ll make a child as broken as they are? Even for those of us who faced parenthood with plenty of supports My creation’s protagonist lacks can find these fears relatable, I think, which is why I appreciate where the game ends: you can stop the kid crying, and hopefully start to get a handle on your anxieties by articulating them, but they don’t go away, and the baby doesn’t stay quiet forever. Taking care of someone else is something you do hour after hour, day after day, never knowing where you’ll both wind up at the end of it – hopefully not locked in an Arctic death-hunt, at least! – but dragging yourself out of bed, searching for creativity even at your wits’ end, nonetheless.