First Contact

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