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Review
Literary hypertext is like a fractal miniature of the IF scene: compared to the larger world of video games, IF is a tiny, un-commercial niche more focused on quality writing than fancy gameplay or bells and whistles, whereas in comparison to mainline IF, literary hypertext is a tiny, un-commercial niche etc. etc. While I haven’t dug into the classics of the subgenre, I’ve appreciated reading about them in places like Jimmy Maher’s blog, and where I’ve come across their few latter-day inheritors, most notably kaemi’s oeuvre, I’ve often found myself bowled over – their distinctive features are self-consciously literary prose and a dreamlike, nonlinear use of links to connect a story’s component parts, so done right, these pieces can feel like the best video games James Joyce never wrote.
So I was excited to see Cyclic Fruition Number One pop up in the festival, as from the first click it’s clear that it’s working in the literary hypertext tradition. Structurally, there are static passages telling a story with no particular character identified as a singular protagonist, with inline hyperlinks on words that obliquely point towards an action or change of location. Interestingly, these links are echoed in the page footer, where they connect to the same destination passages but boast new, abstract titles – the one link in the first passage is a character saying “I’d like to wander around first”, which is picked up at the bottom of the page as “Proposal”, for example.
As for the content, it’s also giving Modernism, as the kids say. We follow a trio of agents of some ineffable bureaucracy as they visit a midcentury-vibed railroad station, before exploring the neighborhood in pursuit of a rogue word that’s invaded our pre-existing linguistic consensus:
"He cocks his head up to listen. A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals. Each one declared under management of Reciprocus."
Per the above excerpt, the prose is controlled, complex, drily amused. I enjoyed this description of Chalgrove, the last of our abecedarian three, so forgive the long quote:
"His mind exists, even downright persists, by virtue of regular routine. It is laid out in a grid pattern, and castellated in certain critical ratios. A measure of seven splits into a two and a five. Where precision is required (and Chalgrove does enjoy precision) twenty-four is employed as the divisor.
"This cerebral containment resembles, perhaps, the rear garden of a modern family dwelling. Never quite embracing nature; the planters positioned according to policy, and the greenery only from certain Approved Suppliers.
"There is likely to be a mild disagreement very soon. Appleby always wants to go his own way, whereas Broadstairs will demand a clear objective. Chalgrove is the man to schedule this dispute for later."
As for where they’re going, well, it’s mostly in a circle. The game is fairly short, and as the title indicates, while a few of the passages do have multiple exits, they all eventually lead back to the railroad station, at which point you can keep playing to explore alternate trajectories. It’s workable enough, though I confess I found it a bit unsatisfying, possibly because I found the “true path” – which explicitly calls out the loop and links to an external blog post that explains a little more about the structure undergirding the thing – on my first go-round; unsurprisingly, later iterations felt like exercises in diminishing returns, simply piling up more incident without adding much to the picture, albeit the prose remains a draw throughout.
The about text on the festival page indicates this is a “demo piece”, though I’m not sure whether that means there may be more of this story to come, or just that it’s a shakedown for the system it’s written in, the new-to-me Spiki (my hot take: looks a lot like Twine’s Chapbook story format, seems fine). If this is a preview, then sure, I’d definitely play the next bit. As a work unto itself, though, it feels quite slight. But either way, I’m left wanting more – bring on the literary hypertext renaissance, we have nothing to lose but our attachment to causality.
