Kiss of Beth

Kiss of Beth is a debut game from Charm Cochran before they ever set foot in the interactive fiction community. The player character is a roommate of Beth's who seems to be doing a vibe check on Beth's date before he's allowed in her room.

This premise seems strange: what is so scary about it, except that maybe the date is someone scary? The more you learn about the date, the more he sounds like an average guy who's neither great nor bad, but at least he seems to have a future. What is the horror of an average-looking date besides boredom and a potentially soulless future?

That's part of the mystery of Cochran's games. They often explore horror in unconventional ways: Gestures Towards Divinity is a meditation on the queer contradictions of a famous artist, Studio plays with the paranoia of living alone in a studio apartment, Your Body a Temple, or the Postmodern Prometheus allows you to redefine your body, and 1 4 the $ toys with the consumptive nature of cryptocurrency and how it devours its own consumers. The horror of Cochran's games may vary, but I notice a common thread: the range of possible actions is already determined by a predetermined story that the player may not be aware of.

It's interesting to see this "players make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" philosophy taking shape in this early game. Once I realized what I had done, I felt like there was no way out. The game says it has two endings, but neither is a "good" ending; they're both bad endings, just with different outcomes. The guilt sustained by this abusive loop of actions cannot be wished away by the player. The past, which the player cannot see, can only offer so many choices before it must inevitably betray expectations of a happy ending. The game traps the player in its unwritten history, and the perpetual cycle of abuse and addiction between the player character and Beth can only be imagined. All we have is one episode of their relationship, everything else is left to the imagination to fantasize endlessly.

I enjoy playing debut titles by creators I've played before because there's a certain kind of raw simplicity that foreshadows the later and more sophisticated titles they'll make in the near future. Kiss of Beth offers much more: with a simple premise, it's able to conjure visions of the Cochran games made and not made, of how meaningful interactivity can be when negotiated between the player and the fictional past to which they are not privy. It's an intriguing title that predicts the unpredictability of Cochran's work, and I look forward to seeing more of their work.