Glimmer

by Katie Benson

2022

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Short but hopeful story. Kinda., August 11, 2023
by manonamora
Related reviews: ifcomp

Glimmer is about a person spiraling in helplessness, having a hard time to function around the bleakness of their situation. It is also about hope, and the importance of having caring people around.

The game is simplistic in both style and visual. A few lines of text, one choice, maybe some extra interactive links to add description. It is straight to the point. The world is bleak, so you turn your back to it. You face some hardship, so you avoid them. Little by little, you close yourself to everything around you. But, at your lowest point, a hand reaches out to you to pull you out of your funk (forcibly if you resist), reminding you that there are still good things out there to enjoy.

I thought the game started out strong, with tackling themes of drifting and avoidance turning into depression and isolation (though it felt at time a tad too surface-level in its representation), when faced with a bleak world and difficulties in your life. The whole losing your joie de vivre and vicious cycle of negativity.

However, I found the whole second act... dissonant almost? In your darkest moment, an unnamed friend* barges (back?) into your life, gives you a cup of tea and a biscuit, and like that, you snap out of it, awkwardly and timidly claiming you tried to get better all this time. When the first part of the game implied quite some time had passed between the first event of the spiral and current time, it feels like a whiplash to have a "recovery" happening so suddenly. This feeling was aggravated when choosing to resist the friend's pleas does little to change the outcome. As if by magic, you get better by the last page. After just a cup of tea.
*I really didn't like that you would not even acknowledge their personhood, I think that's also a reason why it felt weird.

I still haven't made my mind about the (lack of) choices and what it means for the player agency. I've come to appreciate more the kinetic approach of storytelling in IF, and considering how debilitating depression can be, making you think you do not have a choice, it is thematically in line with the story. However, the few available choices lack in consequence or are essentially disregarded by the story, which makes the little agency the player has essentially useless. It felt a bit frustrating and unsatisfying.

I did appreciate the message the game was trying to convey, but I don't think the game quite manage to get the point across.

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- Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 21, 2023

- Edo, May 18, 2023

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Points of light, January 4, 2023
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2022

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

These days it’s easy to take a look around and feel like the world is pretty bleak. Sure, it’s perhaps the case that throughout human history the world has generally looked pretty bleak, and it’s just because of the semi-recent memory of the 90s, when the Cold War was over but we were still close enough to World War II that Nazis knew they had to keep it in their pants instead of whining about cancel culture, that we in the west have an expectation that things should be basically okay. Regardless, what with an on-and-off pandemic, a land war in Europe, rising inflation, raging inequality, the global rise of an anti-democratic right, oh yeah and the marching inevitable catastrophe of climate change, it’s understandable that folks get depressed at where we’re at. And compared to where I live in the US, this is maybe especially the case right now in the post-Brexit, post let’s-crash-the-bond-market-by-being-supply-side-morons UK, where Glimmer is set.

This short choice-based game tracks a simple down-and-up arc. On the front end, you’re confronted with a well-written, linear series of shocks and shames, each of which pushes the protagonist – and the player, as their proxy – into an act of forced renunciation:

"On the bus home the next day, you pick up an abandoned newspaper. It’s filled with stories of war, poverty, and environmental destruction.

"You stop reading the news.

"Your manager calls you into a meeting. She’s been asked to make cut backs. There’s a genuine sadness in her eyes.

"You stop going to work."

It all ends with you huddled under a duvet because you’ve had to turn off the heat, disconnecting from your loved ones since they’re all just enacting different versions of the fear that’s paralyzed you, and giving up the last thing there is to give: “you stop caring.” From there, though, a friend visits, bringing tea and biscuits, and choices start to open up as you begin to consider that maybe life can be something other than a monotonic decline.

That’s all there is to it – this is a game you can blaze through in five minutes. And even when you reach the part with options, it’s still quite linear, as you end up in the same place, with almost exactly the same plot beats, regardless of what you pick. I found this did undercut the impact of the story on me, I have to admit, and I wished there was a little more detail, a little more specificity, to help the conclusion land with a bit more force (the friend isn’t given a gender, much less a name). With that said, I can’t fault the message Glimmer ultimately conveys, and overall I did find the game effective, albeit more so the first half than the second. That’s no surprise, I suppose – I suspect it’s easier to convey a slide into depression than communicate an authentic path out of it, especially these days.

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- Ann Hugo (Canada), December 30, 2022

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Tonal dissonance, December 1, 2022
by Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2022

This may just be me, but I liked the 'fall into a deep depression' part much more than the (Spoiler - click to show)'friend comes in and magically uplifts you out of your deep depression' part. Probably it's just me. But the ending seems incongruously upbeat when coupled with the very bleak beginning. I really enjoyed the beginning, though. Captures that process of withdrawing from the world.

It's a short game, so if you think you'd like it, I'd encourage you to play it yourself.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Form, Meet Function, November 26, 2022
by JJ McC
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Of course I’m not the first to observe that interactivity doesn’t have to mean story branching. Interactivity in linear stories can accomplish at least two things: 1) it can invest the player in the protagonist more deeply than raw text and 2) it can carefully manage the pacing of the text to enhance emotional effect. I am saying this to the population that least needs this explained.

Glimmer is very much a short, linear study of depression and to varying degrees attempts both of the above. Because the subject matter lends itself to spiraling introspection and lethargy, there was a particularly nice fit with form here. The player can dive into tangential mental rabbit holes. Scene changes are paced slowly, with small blocks of text where the act of interacting slows down the proceedings. The formula is subtly shifted as the narration proceeds, the interactive pace as much as the words conveying the protagonist's mindset. All of this displays a nicely deliberate marriage of form and function.

As far as protagonist investment, Glimmer didn’t quite get me there. Early game events were fairly dispassionate, showing the protagonist with flattened response to increasingly important events in their life. I understand the intention here, that the protagonist is increasingly withdrawn such that events do not register like they should. It seems that because we are introduced to this mental state before we have built empathy, there is an unnecessary hurdle to our investment. For me, I didn’t get over it until way later and was playing catchup to the narrative all the way to the end. Meaning when the protagonist had a subsequent shift I was also behind.

Stephen King (or was it Alan Moore?) famously said something to the effect of “Horror is seeing your neighbor dismembered through your bedroom window. Terror is when the killer notices you.” There’s gotta be an empathy/sympathy analog to that idea that seems relevant here. While I admire the precise pacing effect of the work, the killer did not see me, leaving me at a remove.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 15 min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022

- OverThinking, November 16, 2022

- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), November 15, 2022

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022

- Vivienne Dunstan (Dundee, Scotland), November 11, 2022

- Kinetic Mouse Car, November 4, 2022

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A brief spot of hope in a life that spiralled, October 28, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

Katie Benson has made many games of varying length that are always well-polished, descriptive, and generally have simple, story-focused gameplay with a positive message (such as the Crumbs series), although sometimes things can get wild (like Off the Rails).

This game is a bit short but has a nice message. Each screen generally has two choices, one that expands the text and one that moves on.

The idea is that your life is spiraling out of control. Things are getting darker and sadder and you find yourself more and more isolated. But there is a glimmer, like the game name says.

I definitely appreciate seeing games from this author in competitions and hope to see more, always a positive spot.

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- jvg, October 24, 2022

- ArloElm, October 15, 2022

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Very short and lacking in choices, October 14, 2022
by RadioactiveCrow (Irving, TX)

This story, hard to call it a game since as far as I could tell the game had no real choices, is about a person (you, the PC) going through a very rough patch in life. Thankfully, you have a good friend who isn't willing to give up on you.

The first half of the story was unrelentingly bleak and I was worried that was going to be it, but the friend character is introduced to save the day (and the story). I can see how this could be a good portrayal of what creeping sadness turned into full blown depression might look like. In the end there just wasn't enough substance there for it to really grab me.

Between the lack of choices and at least one mistake I found in the text I had to give it two stars.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Brief game with a simple but powerful message, October 4, 2022
by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina)

This is an earnest, vulnerable game with a powerful message. The game proceeds as the player progresses through a series of quietly despairing and distressing episodes -- passing by boarded up shops, realizing that a coworker is living at the office, being beset with bills. The player struggles to keep up a positive outlook on life until (Spoiler - click to show)a friend visits them and helps them to enter back into the world.

This is a kernel of what could be a very affecting game, though I had a few issues that kept me from fully engaging. Primary among these, even for a relatively short game, the structure got to feeling repetitive: most pages have a few sentences of text with a linked word that expands the text with some observation and then a link at the end of the passage that moves to the next passage. This effect works for the first few passages, creating a sense of inundation with the distressing events encountered, but the structure doesn't change much as the narrative turns. Even a slight change in the structure would signal a shift in the player's perspective.

While there are some interesting bits of writing throughout the game -- for instance, the observation that floors of the player's apartment are so weathered that 'a sparrow landing on the floors would likely make them creak' -- a lot of the language is generic and ungrounded. I never get a sense of any of the characters' personality, voice, or perspective beyond the broadest strokes.

I very much enjoyed the game and appreciate the message greatly, but was left wanting more.

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