Dear Anna

I see that there are a number of audio-focused games in this year’s Comp, so I suspect I’ll be issuing this disclaimer several more times before this thread is through: since my time playing IF is typically snatched between taking care of my kid, doing bedtime, work-breaks, chores, and so on, I usually have my computer muted while doing so – being able to sit for long stretches and quietly contemplate voice acting or a soundscape just isn’t how things work for me these days. Dear Anna bills itself as an “audio-first narrative” boasting the cool gimmick that it’s playable entirely via headphones, with various ear-taps allowing you to select between the two choices that are occasionally offered up, but these focal aspects of its design were entirely lost on me – thoughtfully, the author’s made sure the game is playable without sound, via transcripts and a more traditional click-to-continue interface. I played through and am reviewing this version, but let me emphatically flag that that’s not the experience as intended and as hopefully most players will experience it.

Right, that’s out of the way, so let’s talk about Manic Pixie Dream Girls. It’s a trope that’s non-undeservedly come in for a kicking since it was first identified in the mid-aughts – one certainly rolls one’s eyes at the gender politics of a quirky, invariably beautiful woman who sweeps into a sad-sack man’s life in order to utterly transform it, while apparently lacking much in the way of interiority of her own. Yet I sometimes feel like it sometimes the label can be applied too broadly, or it gets more of a kicking than it’s due: it really is the case that there are people who can meaningfully shift our understanding of ourselves or how we’re living our lives, and often we actually have no idea what’s going through their heads as they do so.

This is the precarious terrain Dear Anna stakes out: it takes the form of a project the lead character, Sam, pulls together in the wake of the death of his partner, the eponymous Anna. His own narration and reminiscences form the glue, but there are excerpts from her audio diary, interviews with former roommates, and other ephemera. But whether my art or by accident, this is a memorial to the impact she had on others, not to who she was as a person: almost everyone she came into contact with directly states that she helped them realize something about themselves, or crystallize a decision they’d been wrestling with, but comparatively little of Anna’s actual character comes through, even in the parts where she’s speaking on her own behalf.

As to the other characters, this is plausible enough – people like to talk about themselves, film at eleven, and the game’s dialogue is definitely written for the ear and not the eye, with lots of meandering and long, somewhat saggy sentences. But there’s also a frustrating lack of detail. Like, one of several turning points Sam cites is a time in college when he reconnected with Anna, who he’d known since he was young but drifted out of touch with after graduation. She messages him out of the blue, while he’s feeling aimless and adrift, and he decides to fly from Florida to New York to visit her:

So of course I booked a flight. I emailed her back, expressing my feelings — because I wasn’t doing too hot then, either. The world was opening up before me in ways I hadn’t considered, and it felt more and more like there was a canyon opening up inside of me. Or something.

That flight was when I started reading for real. So in a sense, I guess Anna made me a reader. Another one of her gifts.

Given that Sam eventually makes a career as a writer, this is legitimately a big deal! But we’re given very little to go on: what was the book? Why did he pick it up? How did it make him feel? Did he talk about it with Anna? Had he never previously had a chance to have a couple hours of enforced downtime to make him appreciate reading?

It’s the same with the other characters, who are good at describing changes in their lives but vague on what exactly Anna had to do with it besides being there (I still don’t think I really follow the ex-roommate who credits Anna with the inspiration to quit her job and follow her dream of opening a Russian restaurant, because they went clubbing together and made out one night – the roommate just says “she helped me realize what I’d been missing”).

If the parts where others are speaking are overly bottom-lined and conversational, the Anna segments do make for a change of pace. These bits feel writerly, and in a way that I think captures the self-seriousness of someone early in their life who wants to live the life of letters but is still doing the work needed to develop their chops. Here’s an email she writes to Sam while she’s working at a publishing house:

The work is intense. So is hanging out with these people. They seem to expend no effort and yet get things done. They’re publishing things and hosting readings and writing chapbooks; there is an industriousness here that I find compelling. But the parties, man. Everyone out of their minds on cocaine and whiskey.

Later, she says – not writes, says – that someone’s face “betrayed no human emotion”, and in another conversation she says she’s considering taking up religion because she found God “in a disused shed”, and woo boy, putting “disused” there sure takes me back to some of the more pretentious moments of my mid-20s.

But the Anna sections also feel writerly in that she’s very clearly inhabiting a pre-ordained plot arc that’s more about narrative convenience than deep fidelity to character. She starts getting sucked into the parties, abusing substances, and dropping out of the world, to predictably bad effect. Then she gets clean, finally hooks up with Sam and lives with him for a year, and mends fences with her parents, before the inevitable relapse leads to her death by overdose. We’re not given enough granularity to feel a person beneath the melodrama, so Anna ultimately doesn’t come to life here, either, though there is an understandable poignancy to witnessing her sad end and seeing how it impacts those around her.

The strength of the climax is undercut by some frankly confusing structural decisions, though – I’m not sure whether they’re an indication of the game still being a work in progress (a disclaimer it issues in a few passages when it says some audio is being rerecorded), or are working as intended, but after the story comes to its natural conclusion, you’re given the option to either proceed to the credits, or keep things moving ahead. If you choose the latter, you get a short vignette of Anna’s last days from her dealer, who was with her when she died, and then the same question repeats. This time, you get what seems to be an abbreviated Sliding-Doors style alternate take on the plot, where instead of overdosing Anna comes down with cancer immediately after a life-changing first night with Sam, and then there’s one more, also short, but this time from the point of view of a new character named Elliot. It’s an odds-and-sods miscellany that doesn’t add much to what came before – perhaps the idea is to flesh these pieces out and then interpolate them into the main section of the story, which I think could work, but in their present placement they’re just baffling.

As for the gameplay elements, given the constraints of the format they’re fairly light. There’s one backstory-establishing choice early on but other than that and the ending-related ones mentioned above, they’re largely just “would you like a one-passage digression Y/N.” That’s probably the right call given how the player is intended to experience the game, but it does mean that there’s not much in the way of interactivity to engage the player.

The elephant in the room is that it’s obvious what’s meant to engage the player – it’s the audio, and the performances! Indeed, going back to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, when the trope works I think it’s rarely because of anything the script is doing, but because an actor is able to imbue the archetype with a sense of subjectivity, while projecting the charisma that the other characters are meant to be feeling. So let me just end this review by saying all that could well be in evidence here, sweeping aside most of my critiques (save for the structural ones) aside – I’m looking forward to checking out other reviews to see what those able to come to Dear Anna on its own terms thought.