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Review
As someone whose day job deals with digital archiving/curation work, I was instantly intrigued by this game. The protagonist, Maria, works as an exhibition tech at a digital culture museum in the near future, and grapples with burgeoning romantic feelings for a curator, Sean, at the museum while they work together on an upcoming exhibition. Both aspects of the story are very well done, as scenes that feature detailed descriptions of Maria's work meticulously restoring aspects of historic games switch off with at times awkward and at times sweet interactions with Sean.
I found the mix of these narrative threads to be balanced well, achieving a realistic representation of someone who's engrossed in their work, who has a fulfilling (if complicated) family life, but runs up against romantic feelings for their coworker. More so than a description of the affair, the game centers around Maria confronting these feelings and struggling with what they mean and what to do about them.
Maria's internal monologue as she goes through these thought processes is well written if a bit detached. Maria reflects on her identity as a Mormon, which adds an interesting dimension to her character, but doesn't seem to overly determine anything about how she approaches her feelings for Sean. On my first play through, I was expecting something spicier, more akin to a romance game, but I actually found this headier self-assessment of what these feelings mean to Maria to be just as intriguing. There are enough books and games out there that deal with carnal passion -- let's actually enjoy sitting and thinking through even our remotest attractions!
The other major thread of the game, Maria's work as an exhibition tech at a digital museum, was equally engrossing to me and equally thought out and well written. I enjoyed the descriptions of Maria thinking through the decisions she was making and the highlighting of some of the intricate details that can be really important to recreations and restorations of historic works of software -- the way digital grass moves, for instance. I appreciated the introduction of some longer texts, some of Sean's writings, for instance, that deal with the theory of archiving digital culture in the near future.
The discussion of some other aspects of society and culture in the near future was the only part about the game that didn't work as well for me. I felt like Helps was trying to inject some social commentary about our current trajectory in regards to algorithmically-driven systems and corporate social media platforms, but this sort of fell flat for me. There are some efforts in the game to discuss some of the implications of these things, but it seems like the media landscape of the present time in the game isn't all that different from ours today. So I was left wondering what Helps' point was in making this commentary. I'm not sure if this is a complement or a criticism, but it felt like the game could have been set 5~ years from now rather than the 70+ years from now that was the intention.
This commentary on our media landscape is a really minor aspect of the game though, and doesn't really impact the otherwise stellar treatments of Maria's digital curation work and Maria's tentative affair. All in all, this is a lovely slice-of-life story tinged with just a bit of melancholy.
