Epistemophilia

Entropy is a measure of a system. It gives a sense of how unpredictable one state is from another. A fair coin has maximum entropy because previous flips do not give you any information about future ones. Turned around, a system with lots of entropy requires a lot of information to describe its state. The more information needed, the more randomness or entropy the system exhibits. This is a little contrary to our intuitive notion that if we get more information about a system, the more rigid and predictable it becomes. This is because we assume a system has a fixed amount of entropy and by learning a little about a state, we can cut down the possibilities of missing information.

Epistemophilia roughly translates to an obsessive desire for knowledge. This is a spot-on title. You start in the classic IF form of being an amnesiac with a strict sense of a wake-up protocol. Usually when I regain consciousness, I start unconsciously doing things before I start knowing things. The one consistent thing about the player character in Epistemophilia is they strictly think before they do. They do have a general sense of wanting to learn about their situation, but for the most part they just pause, do a thing and hope answers fall out.

They don't particularly.

For every step in the game you are given a half-dozen choices of actions to undertake. You choose these following a description of maddening vagueness yet verbosity. Any sense of reality is entirely liquid. At times this is supposed to suggest a virtual reality veil in front of your eyes, obscuring the true situation, although various incongruent markers and signage stab through the scene like exaggerated spears thrust forward in a 3D movie. The protagonist themselves is liquid - one of the first options you can choose is to "woolgather", but adjacent in the choice tree are offhand references to power plants and calzones. The narrative voice shifts in and out of your head, sometimes as your thoughts, sometimes in dialogue as a voice external to you.

I ran through several plays of the game. Many times I'd die seemingly at random to something vague and unpredictable. Other times I'd pinball between scenes confoundingly impossible to visualise, and get to some new scene where again I'd be given either too many choices or not enough and I'd select them at random.

My entire play experience was trying to get any sense of the game. Overall there are hints of being maybe on a space station run by aliens or robots (with signage in English), and some of it is virtual and some of it is not. Whatever felt definite was not useful or actionable. This drove my desire for knowledge to even greater intensity, but I kept being left cold.

Often in these things I try to tell if I can trust the author to lead my dumb ass to eventual salvation. The writing has a sophistication to it, but I encountered numerous spelling or grammatical mistakes. But then they were gorgeous mistakes like "dishearthened" so I wondered if there was a subtle something else going on. But then again, punctuation was occasionally mangled.

The whole game was trying to grab onto sand. I got a sense of movement, but no structure. It was a vast array of coin flips where I thought I was gaining knowledge, but I was just gaining entropy. Replays didn't clarify. Scenes didn't illuminate. It was weaponised "Yes and".

I didn't dislike it, but I don't think I enjoyed it.