machina caerulea

This is a short game that relies on parsing out text briefly in two ways: timed text (which is relatively quick) and 'click to add more text to the paragraph', which is helpfully indicated by a symbol in the corner.

As part of the Neo-Twiny Jam, the game is short. As part of the Bluebeard jam, it is full of mystery and violence. And as part of the Anti-Romance Jam, it is heartwrenching.

I felt like this game was trying out something really unusual. The way that text spread and proliferated as I clicked on different things and the way the text automatically appeared felt like it was glitchy and strange, but intentionally so as part of your experience as a (Spoiler - click to show)robot.

I couldn't find anything much to do beyond looking and doing what I was asked not to do. In a way, that strengthens the story and explains why (Spoiler - click to show)all the earlier experiments failed; it is part of their existence to rebel, there is no other way to progress. At least, that was my interpretation.

This is an incredibly stylish entry into several jams and I found it through the Neo-Twiny jam, specifically. I have a passing familiarity with the narrative surrounding Bluebeard--namely, wife murder--and was not hindered by my lack of experience with the tale.

Each short sentence of this game is delivered with the intensity of a knife jab--the act of clicking to advance the story analogous to the thrusting of the blade. The prose is stark and almost violent in its bleakness. The protagonist's disorientation is mirrored by the player stumbling through the story and--on a meta level--afraid of the limited choice available knowing there's no satisfaction to be found behind that door...

Plus it's visually quite engaging--it's a Twine game that puts on a tux to take you out for dinner.

In the early aughts, a documentary called The Aristocrats got a bit of buzz by digging into an inside-baseball joke structure widely used by comedians doing a set in front of other comics, but much more rarely presented to the general public (this was the middle-ish days of the web, so inside baseball as a concept still had a couple more years to go). I won’t go into detail on what, exactly, the joke is, since the whole point is that it’s extraordinarily filthy and changes every time, but the important part is that it’s a sort of shaggy-dog story with a set beginning, end, and punchline, which isn’t actually very funny. But there’s an extraordinary amount of craft that can go into filling in the middle part; because so much of the joke is already determined, it’s a stress-test of the comic’s pacing, delivery, and other technical skills.

There are some jam concepts that can be similarly restrictive, and Machina Caerulea clocks two of them – as a Neo Twiny jam entry, it’s got to operate under the absurdly stringent ceiling of 500 words, and since it was also in the Bluebeard jam, you pretty much know how the plot is going to go from the jump (the game was actually quadruple-listed, also qualifying for the Love/Violence and Anti-Romance jams, but those are much more spacious concepts in comparison). But while it doesn’t boast much in the way of surprises, it winds up as a really well-done example of intelligent implementation of a narrow brief.

Given the limited word-count, it’s smart that the setup is so archetypal: you wake up, amnesiac, in a sci-fi laboratory, get a couple choices to get your bearings, before the Bluebeard figure wakes you up, drops some exposition, and gives you the don’t-go-through-that-door warning. It’s not something that needs to be belabored, and the prose style leans into parsimony as a result:

"Arms interlocked. Cold floor. Faint smile. Sad eyes.

“Breathe in deeply.”

It’s effective in its own right, while leaving space for an exploration sequence with reasonably robust detail, and a climactic choice leading to three different endings – each of these pieces are short and focused, as they have to be, but they deliver just enough texture to work. The game also has some nice visual bells and whistles – a blue-shaded interface, cool-looking buttons, text that sometimes fills in from the middle of the screen instead of just the bottom – that sell the alienated sci-fi vibe without running down the scarce word-count.

It’s true, the endings do go pretty quick, and on the Bluebeard disturb-o-meter Machina Caerulea rates pretty low (admittedly, that scale goes quite high) – when I decided to desperately struggle to kill the husband character, it was more because it felt like the thing to do than because what he’d done seemed all that beyond the pale. But as with the Aristocrats joke, the punchline isn’t the point: as a demonstration of how to do a lot with a little, and fill out a familiar premise with verve and concision, this is an impressive piece of work.