A Moment of Hope

A short story which is well-written enough to make me feel uncomfortable for the PC and make me intensely dislike the object of his affection - as I usually say, if if makes the reader feel stuff then it must be doing something right - but really doesn't use the medium to its advantage.

Being extremely linear and on rails isn't necessarily a problem (cue Rameses, Constraints (Martin Bays), et al), the problem is when, say, you have a sequence in which you travel through a set of rooms; there is only one way forward and one way back, and you're meant to keep going forward; after the room description paragraph you're treated to "story" paragraphs; and you find yourself zipping past the locations, not even reading them, thinking (rightly) that they are mere stepping stones and an excuse for the game to dole out the PC's internal monologue.

Like I said, if the story makes the reader feel stuff, it must be doing something right. But if the game makes the reader ignore stuff, it must be doing something... hmmm... left? Well, not-as-right.

Parser IF has always been tricky, which is why choice-based IF came into existence and Twine in particular gained such traction. As much as I love parser IF, I believe this story would have been better served by Twine (being from 1999, I think - not certain - it is, instead, one of a growing number of pieces where authors were getting frustated by the parser-IF medium; the frustration which came to, in time, develop Twine. But I'm not certain about this).

One of the most galling things about the game is how it doesn't update the response to "x me", which makes a lot of sense - and builds character and story - in the first room, then stops being relevant in later scenes. I was also personally miffed at the scene in which it didn't recognise my commands, because the command I wanted to try was "undo" (I wanted to try certain minimal interaction in the previous scene, to see what happened). After the game ignored my input for 3 or 4 turns, I gave up on "undo"ing back to where I'd been.

The story is, I think, relatable. To some, painfully so. It's certainly the best part of the game, well served by the writing. At most points, interactivity does very little for the story (">READ MESSAGE / >G / >G / >G" is pretty awkward), but in the first scene it's actually used really interestingly, by having a hyperanxious, fidgeting PC waiting for time to pass - which it does excruciatingly slow (and is possibly tied to actions, forcing the player to eke out interactions in a room very sparse of objects, trying to will time to move forward at more than a snail's pace. This is, simply, a great representation of every single time anyone has had to wait, anxiously, for something and had nothing to do but wait and watch the unmoving clock hands). After that, interactivity stops complementing the story and becomes a bit of a burden.

Worth experiencing once, and, I think, no more. May be triggering. I certainly felt it was unpleasant - but only because it felt plausible and realistic. More's the pity.