First Contact

If I were feeling cheeky, I would say that the biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. But look, I take the Reviewer’s Code seriously, and while it’s nice to have a laugh every now and again it would be wrong to mislead you like this: no, the biggest problem is the prose. It’s awkward and flabby, incapable of expressing an idea without larding it up with extraneous commas, asides, and Big Fantasy Nouns, and frequently employing jarring vocabulary that confuses things further. Like, good luck getting through this sentence:

"A bloody past redeemed through the decision of the last Commander-Trainer, Grinhul the Wisest, who in the 22th year before the Great Peace, choose to surrender the Hall to a Great Flight instead of a brave but sterile last stand, saving the life and future of the hundreds of trainees, and the buildings where, in the 8th year since the Great Peace, the Arcanorum was founded."

I’ve said before that generic fantasy is already a genre that I find less than engaging, and this is about the least-engaging way to deliver it. But even when First Contact isn’t plastering exposition over every available surface, the prose lets it down – it smothers the few moments of drama or characterization with its syntactically snarled style.

OK, with that out of the way we can let our hair down. The second-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core… No, wait, sorry, I’m wrong again. Actually the second-biggest problem is the content warning. “Depiction of breastfeeding” is like, a tired mom feeding her newborn, but what we’ve got here is very very different, and prospective players should know that going in.

Right, for real this time: the third-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. This is not a global judgment I apply to all works of art, mind; I did not set down Middlemarch and say to myself “that was good, but it would have been even better if there was a scene of Dorothea tenderly sucking at Mary Garth’s breast” (I’m not saying it wouldn’t be even better; it’s just that I’ve never really considered the question). But in the present context, the breastfeeding is by far the most interesting stuff in the game and seems to be the whole raison d’etre for the work – while I’m not personally in the market for sexy throuple shenanigans kicked off by a transparent “oh no, we all forgot dinner, let’s shove our boobs in each others’ mouths and drink” plot, I’m guessing that’s an underserved audience in IF and they have as much claim to get their rocks off as anyone else. I just feel bad that there’s only like two and a half scenes relevant to their interests in First Contact, and they’re reasonably tame to boot.

In fairness, this is partially a default judgment because I felt like the other elements of the game didn’t do much to justify its existence. There’s no gameplay to speak of, with choices at most letting you pick what order you’d like the ~worldbuilding~ to be shoved down your throat. The plot is likewise quite thin – the narrator, an elf with super special magic powers, goes to wizard school, meets and is immediately attracted to a demon-girl and an angel-girl through the power of authorial fiat, gets subjected to several interminable infodumps about stuff that happened 10,000 years ago, has an interminable conversation about the aforesaid infodumps once she’s able to escape, which is mercifully interrupted by a gauzily-described threeway, and then there’s a fourteen-year time jump and she graduates. Meanwhile, characterization-wise, the elf is an elf; the demon is a demon; the angel is an angel; there’s a dwarf who’s a dwarf and a dragon who’s a dragon, too. It’s the kind of lore-heavy, personality-free backstory that you see overeager 13-year-olds generate for their the DnD characters, full of incident but with no real conflict or reason to care about any of it.

The porny stuff is occasionally interesting though. The legendary event that ended the time of war and ushered in the Great Peace was a feast where all the female participants from every different race contributed their breast milk into a giant ewer, and then they all drank from it, for example – and then the dragon headmistress has everybody re-enact that in the school’s opening assembly (this is a fantasy world where everyone is always lactating, even the reptiles). One of links you can click on is titled “About Lasonthe’s Bosom”! Magical powers are apparently linked to (biologically determinate?) gender, a concept memorably introduced by the phrase “what matters is my relationship and feelings towards the natural force lying raw and untapped behind my pubes.”

Sure, the weakness of the writing means it’s hard to take the world or the characters seriously, but look, everyone’s enthusiastically consenting to everything that’s happening even if I as a reader would prefer that things slow down – it’s fine, and like I said, if you pushed it further, fixed the prose, added a clearer content warning, and didn’t make readers wade through all the gobbleydegook about the Gift of the Subtle and the Arcanorum Senate and the “around 170 Nests and houses” of Rym Iylem and the precise uniform insignias worn by the fourteen different class-years and a 10,000-year-old teddy bear (I guess Theodore Roosevelt exists in this world, but Title IX definitely doesn’t), you’d wind up with something respectable to offer soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn enthusiasts.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Full disclosure: I am a Beta tester for the game this work is a prelude to. Meaning, this is not my first introduction to these characters and this world. (It isn’t yours either if you played Creative Cooking or The The Portrait)

This cheekily-named piece is doing a lot of table-setting work, both in world building and character and relationship building. Its interactivity is minimal, primarily of the information-exploration variety, cast here (initially) as the protagonist’s wandering mind during an eventful day. It is more short story than game, its links of a page-turning variety.

As a short story, it is burdened by the demands of lore dump. Ultimately, I think, overburdened. If it were me, I think I might have split this into two separate works: world background in one and interpersonal drama in the other. Each of these components has an arc to describe with dramatic crescendos and my sense is allowing each to breathe on its own would be a more satisfying experience than muddling them together. Not the least of which because the super, super non-vanilla fantasy world envisioned here is so… singular. It takes a LOT of oxygen. Too there are narrative decisions that in isolation might be more digestible, but when compounded on each other strain even the most willful attempts to play along.

The setup is a young elf’s (sidebar - ok, I know, when elves come up, I historically froth maniacally against their anti-dwarf racism and overall superciliousness. If nothing else, this world’s elves have so far admirably challenged my OWN biases)… where was I? Right, protagonist is a young elf entering magic school. As a world building conceit this allows a few things: 1) to detail how magic works; 2) to provide some social history of the world via a ‘welcome address’; and 3) to provide a flavor of its pan-species population. Their introduction is the same as ours, a welcome address.

I can hear you whining away out there. “Oh man, an in-story lecture? The info-dumpiest of info-dumps!” Well yes, but the narrative choice to focus the lecture on physical artifacts and first-person flashback accounts mitigates a lot of that. It provides immediacy and stakes to what could be cold history recitation. Rather than droningly relating “Alamazix begat Byrrrhana begat Chatham begat…” we are treated to two dramatic anecdotes that summarize the formative conflict of the world… 10,000 years ago.

Ok, Utopian world building (cause that’s what this is), has a serious challenge for non-Utopian audiences. We know how miserable societies can be, and we have seen any number of promised Utopias impaled on the twin spikes of time and human nature. In about 5000 years of recorded history. In that time innumerable societies have risen and fallen, and never for being TOO GOOD. We need to be convinced that such a thing is possible AT ALL, nevermind over an extended period of time, by implicitly refuting the lessons of our own history. Now compound that challenge by reflecting on how something 10,000 years old could even be relevant today, let alone defining. Strangeness (and boy do we have that in spades here!) is the best tool available. Yes, long-lived mortals shrink the march of time, that’s one help. Living memory is a powerful (though as the 2024 US election shows, somehow not powerful enough) sustaining force. If we had just a little extra push… maybe (Spoiler - click to show)Magic Breast Milk??? It’s so crazy it JUST… MIGHT… WORK!

As wild as this world’s lore is, of which my spoilered three word summary only scratches the surface, it nevertheless helps bridge that cynical gap. Its shock value to modern sensibilities is an asset here, rocking us from our smug cynicism with a cold slap of 'WTF?'. It is even more powerful once you get past the shock value and digest it metaphorically. (heh, digest.) A ritual recreation at about the halfway point nearly manages that impossible task, and notwithstanding quite a few melodramatic quibbles is the strongest crescendo of the piece. This should have been the narrative climax of a standalone work.

It wasn’t. That first climax leaves us off balance in this very metaphysical, very sexual, very utopian world. The work has successfully used shock value and dramatic crescendo to get us over the hump. Rather than let us settle into place, consolidate our gains and regain our equilibrium, it instead piles on additional leaps and shocks, each more rushed, less earned and so less dramatic than the one before. The core thruple’s meet cute, (Spoiler - click to show)Special Magical Destiny and (Spoiler - click to show)Hidden Eternal Bond are really just too much, for one sitting at least. These pretty big revelations get nowhere near the buildup as that first one, and are presented at an escalating pace that we have no chance to get comfortable with.

All this would be helped, I think, by separating into two stories. Establish the background in the first, including the capstone ritual. In the second, focus on student life and allow the thruple’s romance to blossom and bloom. THEN introduce revelations. Stand on a cured, hardened bedrock of established lore for that second story, rather than molding all the clay at once. For me, the formulation we are given improbably generated Sparks with its bonkers world building and legit first climax. The continual piling on of rushed Revelations after that just pushed me back from Engagement.

Now, the above reviews the piece purely as a standalone work of IF/short story. Dramatically I think it overburdens itself against that goal. But what if, as seems exceedingly likely, that is not the goal at all? What if the goal is purely and simply to lay the groundwork for the work that follows, to allow IT to focus more narrowly on its narrative aims? Provide that bedrock to build off of? Maybe it is accomplishing exactly what it needs to do in service of the author’s vision for the next work.

Played: 9/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable translation artifacts
Would Play Again?: No, except maybe for scientific research

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless