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Review
Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review
Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 4 endstates reached, 10/15 branches taken
Bait and Switch is a well-known pejorative at this point. Promises made, only to dissolve into nothing and be substituted with something far less attractive, commonly in service of a scam of some kind: monetary, emotional, whatever. Seems like a wild way to open a review of a work whose blurb is “A short story with hyperlink branching.” That’s like marketing Stephen King’s The Stand as “A thick book of pages, each with a lot of words.”
“Reviewer, how can this be bait and switch? That looks like a pretty naked hook to me!” Absent literally ANYTHING to hang on to, all we have left is every single IF game we have ever played. IF is a wonderfully broad canvas. Might we be in for a work of Gothic/Body/Cosmic Horror? Some hard-science or pulpy sci-fi? Light fantasy, puzzlefest, romance, slice of life, some REALLY MOTIVATED vampire erotica? Even in the face of that impossible expanse, you can be forgiven not finding room for “Multimedia Philosophy Lesson.”
This is not a lick on CFN1, in any way. The work arguably went out of its way NOT to set expectations, so much so our pattern recognition brains inevitably reach inside, attempting to frame what is to come. By avoiding any expectations of its own, the work puckishly lets our imagination flail around, knowing we will be flummoxed once it is fully revealed. It is a bold subversion of expectations on all fronts, so much so that it carves out for itself a truly novel IF experience, in some way echoing full on Augmented Reality Games.
The piece opens with some absurdist characters exploring a town, possibly investigating some ill-defined supernaturally-philosophical threat. The kind of thing Grant Morrison might conjure in his sleep. You are given choices on how to engage the town, but right away, things are a little off. As with any number of choice-select works, choices are embedded in the text, loosely associated with one of three characters. But there are also links beneath the transcript, meta-commands of some kind. They carry distinctive but contextually empty meanings. In most scenes this presents a bewildering number of options, some concrete, more just baffling. I want to say “all” in the next sentence, but since my data is anecdotal I must in good conscience downgrade myself to “most.” “Most” modern browsers (that I have used) highlight the http address of links you hover over. It took a moment’s exploration to determine that the inline links repeated the ‘meta’ links. This created a new mystery! How are these obtuse words aliasing to concrete actions in the text of the game? Why are THOSE two things driving to the same destination? That frisson alone, of trying to decode the game’s architecture, was a pretty uncommon experience in IF, and the novelty of it really hooked me.
Nothing in its very short runtime suggested any answers. Each screen presents MORE of these action/arbitrary word aliasing as a meandering story of no true climax plays out, inhabited by characters more avatar than alive. Except eventually, you find one link that does NOT alias to the labels at the bottom. Instead it takes you to an essay! Well, this is new! The essay makes it clear that what you have experienced is an implementation of a taxonomy of election-to-action. A State Machine model of human behavior in the finest tradition of Constructionalist Philosophers. You even get a bubble diagram!
Suddenly, the opaque decision making, the flat but elevated language of the work, the common links all make sense! You were not inhabiting a protagonist (or three) on a fictional mission, you were experiencing the model through example! Guided by rhetorical tools, personified. Example-before-theory is kind of a backward way to teach, but a powerful one! It gives us fresh, concrete experiences to crystallize around the abstract theory, immediately clarifying it. I found this to be simultaneously a very effective way to convey abstract theory, and somehow a completely new IF paradigm where multiple media converged to make my education a detective game! How did I get to an education Switch, from IMPLIED Bait???
It will not surprise any longtime readers to hear that now, I HAD to explore the game multiple times, armed with new understanding and using the state machine as a game ‘map.’ I explored its narrative structure as if it were a rudimentary colossal cave. Math checks out! Every branch of the construct was sure enough mapped to narrative action, a complete implementation of its thesis.
So. Your enjoyment of this will depend on how open you are to starting on Danny the Street, and finishing on Sesame Street. Given how liberally I sprinkle real-world grains of my life into these reviews, I must have previously mentioned my Philosophy Minor in college, years ago. For me, this work was a joyous surprise, engaging neurons I hadn’t fired in decades. From its intriguingly opaque narrative and befuddling construction, it encouraged my mind into an exploratory state, EXACTLY the mentality needed once its true purpose was revealed. This was an anti-narrative puzzle whose solution was every bit as satisfying as the most obtuse parser construct.
The focus of this review has left one observation adrift: the language of it. Once its purpose is understood, the language turns out to be much more engaging than necessary. The below is an example passage that just tickled me green. I’m sure that’s the expression?
“Whatever can exist, does exist”
“Then why haven’t we seen it before?”
A pretty pithy reference to this work!
Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I doubt I would have focused on THIS construct. While rigorous and intellectually interesting, I’m not sure I was convinced of the UTILITY of the model. Understanding a conceptualization is inherently rewarding, but I’m not sure THIS conceptualization has enough predictive utility to live beyond this work for me. Had I authored it, I probably would have centered a model more immediate to my own interests. Which is kind of a ‘who cares’? The point of the work felt like a PROCESS more than a message. Certainly, that’s what I responded to!
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
