Epistemophilia

Epistemophilia isn’t quite a neologism, but the title is unfamiliar enough to prompt some attention: it means love of knowledge, if I have my Greek right, but at least in English the -philia suffix denotes a love that’s gone a bit wrong, that’s misdirected or obsessive (contrast with what happens when we move it to the first part of the word, e.g. the austerely positive philosophy, love of wisdom). Although I wasn’t able to finish the game, I assume it’s meant to refer to the story’s bad guys – while it took me a while to get my feet given an oblique, highly-branching opening where the vulnerable, amnesiac protagonist explores a strange, hostile world, eventually it becomes clear that you’re poking about in the aftermath of several failed experiments where scientists and bureaucrats played god with their unwitting subjects, and reaped the whirlwind. Yet for all that the word’s associations are negative, I can certainly recognize tendencies in that direction in myself, as anyone who’s ever talked to me about the origins of the nation state or the balance between efficiency, equity, and incentives in tax policy will know. So why didn’t I find the process of uncovering Epistemophilia’s secrets especially compelling, even before running into a pair of game-ending bugs?

I think that opening is a big part of the issue. While, zoomed out, this is a reasonable, even archetypal, idea for a game, “waking up with amnesia in a strange and hostile world” is an approach that requires some delicacy. Even a blank-slate protagonist needs some degree of characterization to be appealing, and ideally some kind of drive beyond mere survival and recovering their memories. There’s some work done on the former front, as some early interactions make clear that the protagonist is older, has a rather no-nonsense attitude, and previously earned the gulp-inducing moniker of “Beast of the Dunes”. On the latter, though, things are thinner. Even after spending the better part of an hour flailing around, I didn’t have a clear sense of objectives beyond going to new places, learning new things about the world, and trying not to die.

Again, that’s a process that often works at least OK in games, but again, I found a couple of stumbling blocks in my way. First is the sheer arbitrariness of the setting – the fact that it’s all a bunch of failed experimental setups I suppose creates plausibility for even the wackier elements, but still, my early poking about uncovered an incongruous parrot, killer robots, writing in the sky, a Victorian mansion packed with surveillance equipment… things started to settle down later in the session, as the truth about what’s going on starts to be revealed, but that first fifteen minutes isn’t a great introduction because rather than prompting me to look for clues about what was going on, they trained me to just accept whatever was thrown at me because I sure couldn’t guess where this was going. Second, the prose is rather dense and often dissociated from the action. Like, here’s an attempt to go through a door:

You touch the cold metal surface of the door. You still don’t remember a thing about your past life. You realize that you don’t really care, as long as you’re human. So far, your new life was full of adventure. You don’t really know who “yourself” is but something tells you that you were nothing but yourself in this strange world. There’s no need for any regrets.

I appreciate the attempt to weave together the present action with the amnesiac state of the protagonist, but this specific reverie doesn’t tell us anything, breaks up the momentum of discovery, and is fairly wordy to boot. And that’s representative of the whole: I often felt like I was reading a whole lot of words for a disproportionately-small payoff in terms of ideas, images, and plot development.

The last weakness here is the choice structure. Most nodes give you a lot of choices, often half a dozen or so. And these usually aren’t the kind where you work through possibilities one by one, or where there’s a puzzle and you need to figure out the right approach, because often they can lead you to wildly different, mutually-incompatible branches with no real warning. Like, the first choice in the game includes options for “try to remember your name” and “woolgather”, which seem like they’d be similar “sit around and introspect” choices that wouldn’t necessarily change how you move through the main plot, but in fact they send you careening into entirely different settings. Making this structure even more challenging, a lot of these choices seem to be dead ends: I couldn’t get very far in the “remember your name” branch, but “woolgather” seemed to be the golden path to the endgame, while other options in that initial node appear to lead to quick, un-sign-posted deaths. There’s even a midgame sequence where you need to work through a set of left-or-right staircases, with no indication of the proper path that I could find, and instant death waiting if you make the wrong choice.

This is of course a litany of some of the weaker elements of Choose Your Own Adventure books – we’re pretty much in a Time Cave – which make the process of exploration feel more mechanical. Once my brain adjusted to the necessary save-scumming, I was able to make some progress, but unfortunately after hitting on a lode of computer logs that explained much of the backstory – and suggested there was still a fair bit of game left – I wound up hitting a dead-end link, and the reload function likewise stopped working. A more enticingly mysterious setting, a more compelling character, or gameplay that was less of a punishing gauntlet might have lured me back, but alas, my love of knowledge was not sufficient to push past these barriers.

I’ll repeat: by no means do I think this is an ill-conceived game. Heck, just a robust edit trimming the wordcount and number of branches by a third or so would make it much, much stronger, and adding a few clearer hooks for the world and the protagonist wouldn’t require much of a change to the structure. Given the effort that’s clearly gone into Epistemophilia, I think a post-Comp release that makes some of these improvements (and tracks down that save-game bug) could be a marked improvement, so here’s hoping for that.