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.