You Cannot Speak

You Cannot Speak isn't the only unfinished game I've tried in IFcomp. Yet, it is incredibly difficult to rate this one. You wake up in some dreamlike state, struggle to speak for a bit, and soon find yourself waking up in a room in some sci-fi setting. After doing a couple of things, you talk to some folks, and then the prologue ends abruptly.

There simply isn't enough content here for me to assess the setting and plot of this short introduction. What little that is here is interesting, but despite this game being listed under the 'half an hour' game duration, you could probably finish 2-3 playthroughs well below that time. I'm not against short games or introductory games in IFcomp, but it's just flat out impossible for me to give a score to this one.

I'm declining to leave a star rating. That said, I think this game really needed more time in the factory, even if it's just an introductory portion.

You Cannot Speak opens with an ambiguous dream sequence. You dream that Claudia- the game seems to think you know her- is trying to save someone from drowning. She is failing. She is incapable of speaking...

You wake up. She's you. You are Claudia. Time to start your day.

So, yeah. You Cannot Speak is a brief sci-fi Ink game about a protagonist named Claudia waking up for her first day at a new job. On Mars. But for some reason, she is incapable of speaking. It's as if her ability was switched off.

The player begins in a high-tech bedroom to prepare for Claudia’s first day at work. Gameplay choices center around taking in your surroundings and trying to use futuristic technologies such as a “GOERRING RESOURCE-CONSCIOUS BATHING APPARATUS,” also known as a shower.

Overall, I enjoyed the descriptive writing.

Outside the window is a totally untouched red wasteland, a ruby-tinted desert landscape with red dust and rocks as far as the eye can see. In the distance, you see a great craggy wall of red land.

The canyon is a breathtaking natural beauty, with all the timeless qualities of a MacOS desktop image.

Such vivid imagery. And then of course (Spoiler - click to show)it's revealed to be a screen. Suddenly, your high-tech room feels more like a closet. The wearable TORUS device was also cool.

Claudia has a backstory shrouded in mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)Once, she had bright dreams of a career in Earth’s Space Force. Something happened. Now, she is stuck working in the private sector at a Martian facility called Ares-622. Her official role is “Wellness Director.” We don’t get a chance to see what this entails.

You Cannot Speak seems to embrace the debate of dwelling on the past vs. focusing on the future, though the game is too short to really explore these concepts.

It's better to know
Forget about it

We can, however, prompt Claudia to do some deep thinking about herself.

As much as I love the author’s vision for You Cannot Speak, it needs refinement. I understand that it is an introduction for a larger game. Such kind of games have been submitted to IFComp in the past and have done quite well. That’s not the issue.

My main problem with this game is how abrupt and clunky the game ends. When Claudia (Spoiler - click to show)leaves her room, a scraggly man tells her in vague terms that she... I'm not even sure. Something about how her actions will affect everyone. And when a guard shows up the man starts yelling. Game ends.

As an IFComp game, this stands out like a sore thumb. The sharp edges of a promising game should have been sanded off first. Also, in one playthrough the game ran into a dead end.

It’s frustrating because there is a certain magnetism to You Cannot Speak. The title piqued my curiosity. Even the cover art- a single red square- made me think what could this be about?

Nonetheless, I wish this game well, and hopefully we will get to see more of Claudia’s story in the future.

I’ll give credit to You Cannot Speak for an interesting opening – sudden-onset aphasia, intrigue on a Martian colony, and sleep paralysis are an unlikely set of themes to throw into the blender, but you can see how they’d connect up: they all have to do with isolation, alienation, and a lack of agency. The game’s protagonist seems well-fitted to explore this mélange of concepts, too, as she’s fleeing some entanglements on Earth and clearly has cut herself off from her history: upon waking from the aforementioned hag-dream, instead of immediately jumping into your daily routine you can choose to sit for a while and reflect on your past, which involves a premonitory warning that “sometimes it’s better not to ruminate”, and you gate off a detailed description of something that went wrong for you with a simple “you don’t like think about it.”

Unfortunately none of this is paid off in any way: the game as entered into the Comp is a short demo, comprising maybe the first ten minutes of what’s clearly a larger story (part 2 is plugged in the ending). Besides the ominous opening and the vague backstory, you can take a (deeply unpleasant) shower, check out your few belongings, and then get a strange warning from someone lurking outside your quarters. It’s hard not to be a bit frustrated, because this is in no way a complete experience. There have been other part ones entered into this year’s Comp, of course, but Pure and Warrior-Poet are both notably longer and more robust in both gameplay and narrative terms; they reach climaxes at the end, even if there’s clearly more story to go before everything is resolved. You Cannot Speak has none of that, and it doesn’t even elaborate its themes sufficiently to create a hook – sure, there’s the mystery of why the protagonist can’t, well, speak, but this is just an out-of-context mystery, without any potential explanations or avenues of investigation on offer, so it winds up feeling disconnected from the actual gameplay on offer, which again is mostly just twiddling around in a minimally-furnished space cabin.

The prose, meanwhile, is fine (there’s a line about how the TV-picture you’ve got instead of an actual window shows a “canyon [of] breathtaking natural beauty, with all the timeless qualities of a MacOS desktop image”, which I think is good assuming that I’m right that it’s meant satirically) but it’s not especially flashy. So while sure, I’d keep playing based on these first ten minutes, I can’t say that’s because I found a compelling reason to continue as much as that I didn’t find anything sufficiently off-putting to drive me away. And if the plan is to release the second installment in next year’s Comp, I’m pretty sure I’d have to replay this opening in its entirety to remember what happened – to be honest, I’ve already kinda forgotten what the deal is with the protagonist’s sister, and what the guy lurking outside the door said that was creepy – which isn’t a problem I’d have with Pure or Warrior-Poet. Inasmuch as it’s a teaser, You Cannot Speak probably could have stood to be more of a tease.