You Cannot Speak

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.