Eight Last Signs in the Desert

Reader, I’m going to have to say something right now that might be hard for you to hear. Are you ready? Do you want to sit down? Do you have your preferred beverage to hand (but not too close, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of spillage)? Okay.

I have some flaws.

I know, you’re going to say, that’s not news, of course you sometimes pad your reviews with hilarious and insightful but maybe only tangentially relevant personal anecdotes, and perhaps sometimes your writing can be too analytically rigorous and insightful. Which, yes, guilty, but actually no, I mean real flaws. I’m terrible at languages, tend to flail when small talk is required, and (worst of all) am too middlebrow to actually enjoy abstract art. I can maunder on about color and composition if I’m trying to impress someone (I’m always trying to impress someone), and there’s definitely some post-Impressionalist transitional stuff, where you can see where the artist jumped off from representation and hangs poised in the air in defiance of gravity, using shapes and textures that aren’t representational but nonetheless have the faintest of tethers to something real, that I find compelling. But beyond that I’m at sea.

All of which is to say that I don’t think I’m the right person to give Eight Last Signs in the Desert its due, even if I weren’t playing it just about a third of the way into this enormous Comp, when my brain is starting to get benumbed at the scale of the task before it and groans in protest at the idea of having to do work. There’s nary a character in sight, much less a motivation easily translatable to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, in this impressively-produced choice-based game: the protagonist addresses a septet of monuments in a sandy wasteland, each of which lets you craft a tone-poem through careful selection of cycling links. There is a progression, as each monument vanishes as you complete it, and for every pair you finish, you get a bonus bit of text that appears customized to the combination of those two. Do that three times, then wrap it up with the final monad and then the surprise eighth monument (no points for guessing what that is), and that’s the game.

It’s a solid enough structure, and the themes at issue – dissolution, the slippery nature of reality, the aridity of the detritus of contemporary civilization – are trenchant enough: what are we living through but the decay of modernism into the abstract? And the prose, er, poetry, is really good, with thought-through meter and memorable images by the score. Heck, speaking of art, the backdrop to all this is lovely, Seurat-style landscapes that provide an unsettling, lyrical home for the seven brooding metaphor-totems.

But good lord is it abstract. Here’s a late-game peregrination:

"You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame."

This is good, but it’s a lot, metaphors tripping over each other in a torrent, and it’s not an exception – this is an extended excerpt of what I landed on for my first monument:

"Enter the palace. Wander its halls until you find the window. Layer its transparencies in a grandiose matrix.

"Seal your choice. Cross it and float outside. Reach for the moon above, but it’s too late in the palace gardens.

"Seal your choice. Sit in it. Dream an uncertain story of the sea."

The lapidary nature of the imagery wound up feeling exhausting to me; until the very end nothing feels like it reaches a climax, each stanza just gives way to the next, sometimes with only the most tangential linkages. Similarly, I experienced the choices as simultaneously polyvalent and weightless in their lack of implication:

"Seal your choice. Rise again and take one step back. Reach for the [discarded/once public/exclusive/devoted] strand and pull."

“Discarded” and “devoted” are wildly disparate concepts, to say nothing of “once public”, so trying to parse out these possibilities imposes a cognitive burden, but then I found it even more challenging to keep those choices in mind once the text moved on, as the subsequent lines might not even mention a strand, much less an excusive one. A more labile brain than mine might have been able to surf the vibes, weaving this riot of language into something that coheres, but I freely admit mine wasn’t up to the challenge: to the extent my quick summary above winds up being accurate, I did end up with a sense of what the game is getting at, and as an aesthetic experience I found a lot to admire in Eight Last Things in the Desert.

But personally in my IF I need a bit more of, well, a personality, and a more disciplined metaphor-palette plus ideally some drama beyond the wearied acceptance of discorporation. So file this one under games I admired more than liked, though I’m pretty sure that to the kind of player who lives for Surrealist art exhibitions and jams to Symbolist poetry will find this among their favorites of the Comp: the fault is not in Eight Last Signs in the Desert, but in myself.