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My city of runes, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There have been a lot of cities in this year’s Comp, I’ve noticed – the arboreal paradise of Elvish for Goodbye, the gentrifying Toronto of Grown-Up Detective Agency, the dying arcology of Archivist and the Revolution, the city-of-Damocles of Hanging by Threads – but I reckon Conduin, the desert metropolis that’s both setting and star of Prism, is the one to beat. The game’s got characters and a plot and significant choices, all which work perfectly well, but it’s this fantastical city at the center of the work, with the story continually circling around the questions of what it is, where it came from, and what it could be.
So what’s the deal with Conduin? While it’s blooming in the middle of the wasteland, with canals sluicing life-giving water in the midst of the sands, it’s no paradise: the city is a stratified place, with the poor chased out even of empty apartments, and growing your own food is a crime because self-sufficiency would insulate you from the lightning-based economy that structures society. Crystal-structured buildings are drawn up from the depths of the dunes by geologicians, the domes of the academy glow on the horizon with the promise of a better life, and couriers cling to a marginal existence, ferrying precious cargo and messages across the rooftops, dodging corrupt constables and cultist-gangsters alike.
This is a hell of a setting, and that’s just what’s established in the opening, before any of its secrets begin to be peeled back. The protagonist, of course, is one of those couriers, with the game starting as they’re hired onto a job that could change everything for them (most people in the city go by “they”; gender is seen as a foreign affectation only a few opt into, choosing pronouns regardless of their body’s biology). What starts as a simple delivery from one scholar to another will see you decide to take a stand against the injustices in Conduin, discover the mysteries behind its rise from arid destitution – or just keep your head down and get paid.
The setup really is masterful, and in some ways I feel like it’s wasted on IF – for all that the author does a good job limning the city and it’s precincts, really this calls out for the AAA treatment. I can easily see Prism as a hybrid of Mirror’s Edge and Dishonored (there’s even some whalepunk elements to this one…), unspooling the same plot over a series of action-packed missions that send you sprinting over, above, and through the city, getting into kinetic fights with the constables, and unlocking supernatural powers if you decide to join the Streetborn cult.
That’s not to say it doesn’t work well in its current form, though. Exploring the city is still very engaging, and unlike many Ink games I’ve played, it’s quite interactive; you can choose to focus on your mission, seek out your childhood friend who has joined the aforementioned group of cultists, or get drawn into a street brawl with a silver-armored superhero. Sure, many of these involve action or sneaking scenes of one description or other – thus the wish for the more conventionally video game version – but the prose is tight and exciting when it needs to be.
While all the pieces are in place for a memorable experience, I think the structure slightly lets Prism down. The game’s overall a sort of dumbbell-shape: there’s the aforementioned delivery mission and related side-activities, and after that wraps up you can either decide to take your earnings and get on with your life, or dig deeper into the secrets that you’ve started to catch glimpses of. If you opt for the latter choice, there’s a time jump, a whole bunch of new characters are introduced, and then you’re conveyed into another action-packed sequence that wraps up the game as a whole. The plot holds together, but it feels unbalanced – after finishing the delivery I spent a long time thinking that I was experiencing an extended, kind of anticlimactic denouement before realizing the narrative hadn’t actually wrapped up. The two pieces didn’t mesh together smoothly in my playthrough, either: I got hints at what Conduin’s engine of prosperity actually was in the course of the delivery, but in the remainder of the game, the protagonist seemed ignorant of those hints even in moments where it seemed like they really should have. Whether these were bugs or narrative oversights, they reinforced the feeling that Prism is two separate experiences stapled together in the middle.
Still, I enjoyed both experiences. Sure, the narrative is a little lumpy, and the fact that I’m gushing about the worldbuilding over all else I think is an indication that the plot and characters are, when you strip away the rococo detail-work, fairly straight-ahead. But it’s not like I needed more of an excuse to play tourist in Conduin, which might wind up being counted as one of the great IF cities.