The Sculptor

A linear game until the very end choice, about a pitiable old sculptor trying to create his last masterpiece, essentially before he dies. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suicidal ideation implication.

I was a little thrown off by the sculptor’s prose making it seem like he was in the Renaissance era and then having Ricky walk in to reveal it was clearly the modern era, but my guess is it was an intentional dissonance, so I kinda liked the artistic decision there.

I did encounter some bugs and several typos, like the Texture words that I dragged being exceedingly tiny for some reason and one of the choices saying `sand still`. My biggest issue was the prose was very clunky and often ungrammatical or switching tense. Some parts approached empty-sounding purple prose and other parts were brief, perfunctory half sentences. Like, the opening lines of the game are:

> Numb. Unsure if it is joy that overtakes you or fear. It may be both, it may be neither.

When you complete the sculpture you get the empty-sounding phrase (along with others):

> Its radiance cures the blind.

No one’s personality feels more than sketched out, including the protagonist. I did feel bad for him, at least, considering his situation of being an aging fine artist in the 21st century. I also think it is a strong character choice to have the option to utterly destroy the sculpture (completing the masterpiece doesn’t mean keeping the masterpiece, after all!), but I wish it didn’t appear at the last possible moment. I also wish it was flagged more clearly what exactly I was doing with such a momentous choice before I couldn’t back out.

I don’t know if I have much to say about this one, being as it was so short. It didn’t leave that much of an impression on me…

The Sculptor is a brief narrative regarding age, art, and commercialism. You play a sculptor facing, on the one hand, a final assignment you hope will be your masterpiece, and on the other hand, money pressures from “the suits.” These are timeless themes with roots in antiquity, and this briefly told story hits all the expected notes.

One of the more successful aspects of this brief game—it’s listed as requiring fifteen minutes to play, and that was my experience—is that it strikes all those notes in such a short span. There’s only a brief page of two of language before the first suit arrives with her ultimatum. From there, the sculpting begins, and with it ruminations on age and the purity of art and the money pressures the artist is facing. The Sculptor is a reflective piece that uses interactivity to expand the ruminations, rather than having the player run around from place to place, or choosing who to talk to and where. That’s not a poor choice for a character who spends hours at a time before a cold block of marble with chisel and hammer in hand.

It’s a Texture game, and its interactivity is in the form of verbs at the bottom of the screen drag-and-dropped onto highlighted words in the narrative. This action serves to either expand the existing text or take you to another page in the story. I’ve played a couple of Texture games in the past, and I’m not particularly drawn to the user experience. It’s a personal peeve, and by no means the fault of the author. The more successful uses of this scheme is when the activation of a highlighted word expands the paragraph with more details, as though I’m filling out the story as my curiosity leads me.

Ultimately, I wasn’t enthralled with the poetry of the prose, which felt awkward in places and overwrought in others. The need to elevate every observation felt like it was keeping me away from the main character and his situation, rather than close to it. The poetry was all but shattered when the artist and a cohort began using expletives to describe his bind. I’m not against salty language, but it did knock some of the air out of the grandeur the author obviously worked hard to build up.

None of this is fatal to the game’s execution, but I was left wanting. I hoped for more concreteness when it came to the sculpting: Working with the marble, the arthritis in the artist’s hands acting up with each chip cut, the hours on a ladder covered in stone dust. The Sculptor could have been about painting or clay pottery with only a few changes to the prose. What makes a sculptor a sculptor?

The final decision the player must make was not a surprise at all—any story about art and commercialism must build to such a moment. Unfortunately, The Sculptor doesn’t stray far from expectations when it rings this note, either.

This slightly interactive story has, as far as I can tell, two meaningful choices. You do drag words onto other words to show more text and get more description, but more often than not, that doesn't change the plot. I haven't played a lot of "Texture" games. So I will try to refrain from commenting about that aspect of it and focus instead on the narrative.

The story is very, very short. I think it takes maybe 10 minutes to do a full play-through and another 2 or 3 to replay it to get the only other ending and try some of the other non-meaningful branches.

You may or may not get some adult language depending on some of those branches, but either way that doesn't change your ending choices. This kind of felt like those scenes in movies with something gratuitous that add nothing to the story and feel like they were just to get an R rating.

As a very-short form work of IF, it's not really bad. I have played shorter ones that I enjoyed better (9:05 comes to mind). Generally with a really short IF it is more enjoyable for me personally if there's a few other branches to explore to try to get different results.

Some of the descriptions are a little, uh.. pretentious-sounding? But if you consider from the perspective of the protagonist, maybe that fits into the character, so I will chalk it up as the descriptions fitting the characterization of the characters.

One issue that I do have with the narrative is that it seems to impose the protagonists' view of art upon the player. Maybe that's just me, it just felt a bit heavy-handed in its preaching about Art and not so very nuanced about it. I get what the author is saying. Or at least, what they are saying about the protagonist. I disagree with it, but hey, to each their own. I did enjoy playing this game, it's worth 5 or 10 minutes.

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Part 4 of the “Playing with Matches” IFCOMP23 Texture review sub-series. Recap: as an IF tool, Texture must be tightly managed due to its 1) potentially powerful drag and drop UI and 2) deeply challenging presentation choices. The latter in particular can cripple a work if the Chaos Twins (Text Hunting and Font Dancing) are allowed free reign.

It is with near religious ecstasy that I report Sculptor has tamed that infernal duo! By my count only a single page was subject to resized font, and that only a single step. Text Hunting was banished altogether. How was this miracle performed? Through exacting text formatting and page size discipline. New text was metered tightly, sometimes replacing, sometimes adding and bar one always with an eye to the fully displayed page. What an ungodly relief this was. It is actually distressing to me how much joy I derived from this basic craftsmanship. Too, the text formatting was clean enough, the options delineated effortlessly to make new text intuitive and not distracting. Occasionally the text would get laid out on the page in modest flourishes that further kept things clear when modified. Barring anything else I am about to say, this is the standard for future Texture authors to consider.

I wish I could report that the narrative and gameplay provided as much joy. Let’s start with narrative. It is a short work about a sculptor at the end of his life, having sacrificed everything to create his magnum opus, then making a decision about it. If your first impression on reading that is ‘art about art, its going to be artsy isn’t it?’, then you and I are on the same page. And we’re both right. It is a work flowing with elevated, poetic language, capturing the passion and sacrifice of an Artist (and only that), as well as more than a little self-pity. All in the kind of overwrought language that leaves me cold:

“And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.”
“Regardless of all, yet another comes to deny your craft.”

It’s the kind of work that uses the phrase ‘gird your loins’ unironically, straight faced, and portentous. Maybe it’s just me, but that phrase seems best employed in full acknowledgement of its stiff pretention. I don’t want to belabor the point, suffice to say I am not the audience for this kind of prose.

So let’s move on to gameplay, or more accurately interactivity. Here too, I felt the work undid itself a bit. For one, while the work tamed the Texture Big Two (which let’s not lose sight of that tremendous achievement), it did nothing to leverage the power of its drag and drop interface. Options were connected without surprise, the connection bubbles offered no nuanced comment on the connections being made. It was largely mechanical, punctuated with baffling choices. At one point you are asked to connect “Sand” to “Still”. I’m not sure a typo’d ‘Stand Still’ made any more sense there and am just at a loss. Elsewhere, two connection choices provided different linkages when one was “Examine” and the other “Gaze Upon.” None of this is fatal, mind, just missed opportunity.

A more damaging gameplay artifact is that the game was undecided how much player-protag autonomy it wanted to allow. Now despite some strong traditions, IF doesn’t REQUIRE protagonist autonomy. Books are famously entertaining, requiring only the occasional player page turn. IF could use interactivity to enhance the reading experience while still presenting a linear narrative. Many works do. You could argue that Texture is specifically engineered to enable that kind of work.

Sculptor can’t quite make up its mind. It offers the player opportunity to mold the protagonist with choices how to react to events. This gives the player latitude to tailor the character somewhat, to build a character in their head. But not always. At one point it requires (Spoiler - click to show)pleading with a lender in a way that clashes with other character choices the player (me) might have made. These are off notes that come to a head at the climax decision. The work has VERY specific ideas about the final choices and their import. But given the prior decisions available to a player, it is possible that these choices, and their narrative characterization, feel false. I know it is possible because it was my experience. The game WANTED me to feel a way (boy did it), but had let me build a protagonist in my head that just DIDN'T feel that way. As a result the climax fell flat and unconvincing. This is an IF work I think would benefit from LESS player choice, and more focus on using interactivity to shepherd the reader to the final destination.

Between the prose and cross-purpose interactivity I could not connect. It was a Mechanical, Mostly Seamless experience for me. But I don’t want to lose sight of the Texture Taming accomplishment. That is real and significant.

Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

This is a Texture piece, where you’re an aged sculptor, near the end of life, wanting to craft one last superb sculpture.

The story is quite linear, but gives the player options of how to proceed along the way. For example they may choose to reflect on the past, or focus more on their art, or a mix of the two. There are some nice interactions with other characters, though again I felt as though these were a little too predetermined.

Ultimately the story boils down to one key choice. I played twice, to see both ending options. I preferred the first one that I got.

So a promising piece, but I felt a little too forced down certain routes. I did like the feeling of creation, of being an artist at work. I did feel as though as I was taking part in that process. Albeit with a generous serving of melancholy along the way too.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

The randomizer, ever playful, gave me two short Texture games in a row. Like Lonehouse, this one’s also a deeply interior portrait of a person in the throes of powerful feelings, and also boasts a fair bit of awkward writing. It does have a clarity of purpose, though, and some arresting images, as it tells a story of one old man’s obsession with completing his sculptural masterpiece, while it manages to use the sometimes-awkward drag-verbs-onto-nouns Texture interface fairly intuitively; for all that it does have real merits, though, it seems to endorse a rather narrow understanding of the role of art, which limited the effectiveness of its climax.

While The Sculptor doesn’t offer a lot of biographical details about the main character, it does give you enough to understand his situation. His aspirations towards artistry have been frustrated for decades, first by an unsupportive father and then his lack of money. After a lifetime of menial labor, though, he’s finally been able to save up enough money to purchase a block of marble, so that he can have one last chance to create a magnum opus. Complicating matters, he’s also deep in medical debt due to a hernia surgery – the collections agency representative, though, seems intrigued by your work, and might accept your masterpiece to discharge the debt, and their display of such a remarkable piece might even help make your name famous…

This is a straightforward plot, but it’s enough to support the game’s short runtime. And there are a few places where the game offers some optional social engagement with your old boss, or lets you contemplate what you’re trying to achieve, which enriches the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Mechanically, you’re usually given one or two more passive or reflective verbs, and one that’s more active, so it was typically clear which options would deepen the current scene and which would move on to the next bit of the story. On the flip side, the prose is often wonky, but does mix in some moments of real power. Here’s a bit where you consider the sacrifices you made for art that shows off both these aspects of the writing:

"The days you scavenged your intact pockets, counting what to spend so you could put the rest away. The nights you slept in hunger’s bed, the winters of wet socks and tattered shoes you wore with pride, and the dear family you loved — children and wife you chose not to have lest they too would choose to put the rest away."

There are also a few images that just land, with no caveats needed, like this description of the marble block you’ve paid for with your life’s wages:

"That is your whole life, you explain. Where every little coin you saved went. You struggle to admit that every chip you break from it is a year thrown away."

I did find the game tottered a bit at the finish line, though. After you complete the masterpiece, the collections agency people return, and you’re confronted with a climactic choice, which are literally labeled as either “Sullied and Impure” – you let them have the sculpture, clearing your debt and bringing you worldly fame – or “Refined and Preserved”, where you take a hammer and smash the sculpture to bits before their disbelieving eyes. This is not an especially nuanced look at how artists are cross-pressured between commerce and integrity!

This could work, I suppose, as an allegory of various artistic dilemmas, but the rest of the game has too many specific details – like the whole hernia surgery/medical debt plotline that sets up the choice – for it to easily function as a pure philosophical statement. At the same time, it isn’t sufficiently grounded to really engage with the questions of artistic production under capitalism; like, if he has the medical debt because he was uninsured pre-Obamacare, that lands differently than if he lives in a state that’s stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid for obscure reasons of political fealty. Similarly, the game seems to posit collections agencies as well-funded, classy operations akin to Fortune 500 corporations or law firms, able to shell out big bucks for art and promote it in such a way as to ensure your reputation.

This matters because throughout human history, artistic production has been embedded in webs of economic exchange and patronage – especially capital-intensive forms like marble sculpture – so the simple art-for-art’s-sake philosophy the game endorses seems about as substantive as someone yelling “no sellouts” at a Jawbreaker show. Like, creating a great work of art is rewarding in and of itself, sure, but quarrying rock is not an especially fun job, and the people who cut it into regular blocks often die of silicosis. The myth of the lone, tortured artist creating at the margins of society is largely an invention of the Romantic era, but it’s telling that the people actually doing the creating back then were primarily white male aristocrats or members of the haute-bourgeoisie. The Sculptor seems to interrogate that myth by seeing how it applies to someone with dramatically less economic privilege – but it can’t quite bring itself to reject this inherited narrative.

The best moment in The Sculptor is the description of the final statue. This is a hard moment for any artist. When you're writing about a fictional masterwork, you need to describe a masterwork in terms that make it believable for the reader -- but of course, without having to actually make that masterwork yourself. Here's what Yakoub gives us: an old nude man, wrestling down a falcon that attempts to peck his heart, raising a scythe with which to kill the falcon; meanwhile, the old man is being strangled by his own beard, and water flows around his feet, washing the shame away.

What I love about this is how it audaciously combines several motifs from European art into a single vision. The man is, clearly, Old Man Time, or Death, with his scythe. But he's also Saint Michael fighting the dragon, as well as Prometheus, his innards being pecked at by a bird. And being strangled by his own beard, well, this cannot help but remind one of Laocoön being strangled by the snakes. As for the water, I heard these lines of Elliot in my mind:

A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.

On the marble's waves ran the memories of your lost days.
And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.

On the marble's waves danced the memories of lost days, shimmering and distorted as one, two, three tears squeezed past your wrinkled lids.

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.

The Sculptor is a pretty short interactive story about the artistic dilemma of creating for the sake of creating and essentially selling out, through the lens of an older man yearning to create his Magnum Opus before it is too late. Through a fairly poetic prose, the man reflect on his gifts, the process to get to the finished state, and that dilemma.

With a focus on touch-related imagery, the entry does a fairly good job at describing the tedious, and often painful, but fulfilling process of creating art. Its poetic prose engages to see creative endeavour as more than the final product, but all the acts, the efforts, the sweat, the tears that made it happen. I was particularly touched by the yearning of the old man to accomplish one last piece, fulfilling his dream, before meeting the inevitable.

Though it is a major point of the story, I did not find the dilemma quite satisfying. The question itself of creating for the sake of creating or to be able to survive has been debated almost ad nauseam, without much of a new or fresh angle to it. It also felt like the Sculptor’s position was clear: not preserving the art from being sullied through transaction would tear his soul.

Another thing that felt strange was placing the time period of the piece. The cover art and starting prose suggest a Baroque or maybe Romantic period, while the dialogue from other characters would place it in a more modern time. It would not be too surprising to learn that the sculptor’s sensibilities were tuned to older periods, being maybe even detached from reality due to his age or current state. An angle like this could have helped bridge the gap, I think.