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Number of Ratings: 10
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1-10 of 10 - Kinetic Mouse Car, August 8, 2022
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), April 21, 2022
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 23, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Focused and nasty, November 29, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The main character in Taste of Fingers is I think the second-worst person among this year’s Comp protagonists (The Best Man’s Aiden is still a prohibitive favorite to take the crown). You’d think it’d be easy to sympathize with someone hiding out from a zombie apocalypse, regardless of their peccadilloes, but our man manages it: in a series of flashbacks, we get to know him before everything went wrong, and oof, what a piece of work he is. Beyond the overwhelming contempt that flavors all his observations, the racism is probably the most obviously awful thing about him – he’s a white person (I think some kind of banker?) on a business trip to Hong Kong when the plague hits, and he’s got no shortage of disdain for the locals, even stipulating that the prostitute he hires has to be European. But when he realizes that the disease triggering the outbreak only targets Asian folks (some kind of genetic rigmarole is invoked – PSA, race is a social construct not a biological one, though the game's themes need this dodgy bit of science to work so it gets a pass), his matter-of-fact satisfaction, unalloyed by any compassion for the vulnerable, bespeaks near-psychopathic levels of solipsism.
This is as it’s meant to be – we’re firmly in horror territory here, and one of the tropes of zombie fiction is that the stress of societal collapse brings out the worst in humanity. Taste of Fingers doesn’t wallow in too many other of the standard motifs of the subgenre, though, since the zombies aren’t actually onscreen for most of the game. It’s got an interesting structure, where present-time vignettes set in the coffee-shop fridge unit where the main character is lying low alternate with the aforementioned flashbacks. In each section, you’ve got a choice of three memories, and you get to explore two out of the three before time moves on. There’s little other branching, as far as I could tell, but the game offers a good amount of interactivity, as in each passage there are a lot of words to be clicked on. Most of these will expand out descriptions of items, or spell out the main character’s perspective or thoughts on something that’s happened – I wound up lawnmowering, but generally found the extra text added to the experience rather than being busywork.
With few choices or immediate action to keep the pace up, the prose has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task. The writing is evocative throughout, freighting almost every sentence with the key themes of decay, corruption, and contempt. It can go a bit over the top at times, flabbing up a clause with one adjective too many, but since the vibe here isn’t exactly understated, better too big than too small. The style also shifts effectively in the final sequence, which sees a change in perspective that adds a neat twist to the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Again, it’s nothing too unexpected given the territory, but it makes this small, nasty game more memorable, and provides some healthy outside perspective on the terrible protagonist.
Highlight : The protagonist’s asides when you click on highlighted words in the passages expand into the original text, which helps keep this on-rails story engaging (it helps that as I mentioned, the writing in these bits is generally strong).
Lowlight : I generally don’t mind when a main character is an unpleasant person to spend time with so long as there's a point to it, but the sequence in the strip club threatened to be a bit too much for me.
How I failed the author : I think I did OK with this one – short choice-based games I can play on my phone are really coming through for me this Comp!
- Spike, November 17, 2021
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Won me over, October 31, 2021Very short story taking place during an apocalypse. It involves a narrator trying to survive while going over memories, which the player gets to choose. I didn't really want to like this game for much of it, but I eventually got to a section that changed my mind. I won't give anything else away, not even under a spoiler tag, because I think each player should experience it for themselves. To sum up: I underestimated this piece and I got got.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An unpleasant man in an unpleasant situation, October 23, 2021I recently played through a game that used pedophilia for its shock factor, to show you just how bad the villains were. I mentioned in a review there how I dislike playing games that heavily feature pedophilia, regardless of the overlying message.
This game is similar, in that it uses something morally wrong (in this case, flagrant racism) to tell a a story. There are effective stories you can tell about racism, but this game uses unchallenged racist terms and ideas, leaving the player to make their own conclusions at the end.
I do believe the author intends this piece to have an overall anti-racist message. (spoiler for ending) (Spoiler - click to show)Your character turns out to be the true monster, and what seemed hideous monsters attacking him, saying things he couldn't understand, were soldiers of the race he hated. But that's only after we spent the rest of the game with characters saying things like (Spoiler - click to show)'all Asian women are ugly', 'mongoloids', 'sub-human'. It's like when an acquaintance repeatedly insults you but says 'just joking!', or back-handed compliments like 'I completely disagree with all your friends who say that you look like a hideous pile of cow pies'. It felt over the line, for me.
Overall, the game was polished. The only interactivity is choosing which memories to remember, and you don't have time to remember them all. I did experience an emotional reaction to the game.
When I play games, I immerse myself in the protagonist. And this is a protagonist I do not wish to identify with.
My 3 stars represents my overall rubric: polish, descriptiveness, and emotional impact.
- OverThinking, October 21, 2021
4 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
Inadequate treatment of themes of racism, October 18, 2021If you check the about screen before playing, you'll see that this game includes a disclaimer:
Disclaimer: The thoughts, actions and attitudes of the characters in this work do not reflect the views of the author himself and in many ways contradict them.
This game depicts some fairly deplorable attitudes, including racism, without rendering any clear judgments about those attitudes. Note that the author doesn't say anything about his own views.
But, why not?
(Spoiler - click to show)The game is about the main character hiding in a closet due to a pandemic apocalypse; the story is told in flashbacks, exploring the main character's memories.
Later, it becomes clear that a man-made racist disease has spread, a disease that targets different races differently, and that it turns people into zombies.
But, in the twist ending, it appears that the main character was actually a zombie, but falsely perceives everyone *else* as zombies. He sees a couple of people who he thinks are zombies, but turn out to be government officials in hazmat suits, killing zombies. (In fact, we don't even strictly know that the main character's point of view was incorrect, except that there are multiple characters who perceive the main character as the zombie and themselves as zombie killers, and the main character has a nightmare that agrees with their point of view.)
Why tell this story about racists without taking a point of view? Is the moral of this parable that racists and anti-racists are both equally right, or equally wrong? Are they at odds because they're all insane, unable to perceive each other's points of view? (Or is it just the racists who are insane in this way? Are we all insane racists?)
Zombie stories have a long history of racism, and a long history of erasing their history of racism from the public eye. "Pop culture has used the zombie, fraught as it is with history, as a form of escapism, rather than a vehicle to explore its own past or current fears."
I'm afraid that the author's answer is to shrug: I dunno, I just wanted to tell a zombie story about racism because it's fun. Come on, man, can't we tell a fun, escapist story about zombie pandemic racism now and then?
To that, I say, no. Zombie stories don't have to be fun or escapist, but when they are, it's because the zombies are simply evil, without moral complications. There's nothing fun about suspending judgment about zombie pandemic racism. If the author was aiming for fun, the added racism themes and moral dilemmas work against that goal.
And if the author wasn't aiming for fun, then what's the point? To raise the question "is racism as bad as anti-racism?" Why??
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