The Sculptor

This is a Texture game, one of several in IFComp. It’s a game system where you drag actions onto nouns, with different actions having different nouns. Hovering over the nouns can add more info, as well. It’s a character study of the main character, a sculptor who has given up everything to buy one final marble block and carve a sculpture.

The man is deeply invested in this. He focuses on his work despite the loss of things like family, friends, and good health. The writing is highly dramatic, with unusual positioning across the screen and extensive use of metaphor. Here’s a sample sentence: ‘Her words were cascaded venom, and you, their subject.’

It also changes between tenses from time to time, in a way that’s hard to know if it’s intentional or not. I found at least one important typo. In general, the text is ambitious but I was confused from time to time.

What works best for me here is the effort put into descriptiveness. I can feel the author’s enthusiasm for the story and that gives me enthusiasm for the story. But for me, it was hard to sustain that emotion; the whole story was at the peak of intensity, but I think it could have benefitted from having more contrast between high-intensity and low-intensity. But that’s a personal choice.

There is some intermittent strong profanity in the story that, for me, doesn’t fit the abstract and metaphorical text very much, but it may be intended as an earthy contrast to the heights of the rest of the game.