On Optimism

This piece is full of overwriting. There is angst and Sturm und Drang all over the place here. It is messy. But! These emotions are also sincere. I don't know the age of the author, but reading it, I kind of took it as a something written by a younger person, perhaps for other younger persons, and I made allowances for it.

Before you jump all over me about Having High Standards in IF and Writing In General, *I think there's a place for this.* I've read enough YA to know that some overwrought pieces really resonate with middle-to-high-schoolers...but then they grow out of it. But at younger ages, the emotions are THAT real and THAT big, and I think by automatically looking down our noses at their sense of scale, we're not showing respect for the experiences of the younger generation.

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Full disclosure: I recently went through a breakup that was difficult for me. Yeah, I'm an adult, but when the PC talked about having endless tears (which he did...er...a rather lot), I found myself nodding in understanding. This probably added a star to my rating.

In fact, ON OPTIMISM touched on some desires I'm still working through for myself. This character wants to know why the breakup happened; he was all in for it, but the girl pulled away for some reason. A similar thing happened to me; I was ready to commit, but the other party pulled away. In my situation, I will probably never find out what happened.
But, unlike me, Zach gets to explore (and even KNOW) what went wrong on her end--even if it is all "just a dream." There's a powerful element of wish fulfillment working here, and I don't think it's a bad thing.

In short, I couldn't dismiss the overall intentions and themes, despite the less-experienced writing.

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Gamewise, the concept of exploring another's heart through rooms (but while we're in the heart, shouldn't they be "chambers"?), and discovering the girl's secrets through surreal imagery captured me. It has a nice dream feel to it--you have to do strange actions for no strong purpose, except intuition. That works in some cases and adds to the dream-feel, but in later points of the game, it turns into "guess the verb"--but the HINT command is implemented, so you can at least see the story end.

My favorite room was (Spoiler - click to show)The Room of Your Loves, even though I had no idea about the floor--it wasn't mentioned in the room description. The main conceit of that room is worth exploring further, I feel.

I'm also impressed with (Spoiler - click to show)the choice to have 2 different-yet-same endings. It adds a different flavor to the story (Spoiler - click to show)(the Eastern ending seems to point to some Christian imagery). A third ending (Spoiler - click to show)(going down at the fork) seems implied, but I wasn't able to find it.

While the use of "I" for the tense is a strong point, I thought it got a little confusing later, when "you" referred to the girl, because IF convention says "you = player." I can't recall if she was given a name, but that could have been useful.

My main beef is that I don't quite know what happened. (Spoiler - click to show)I got the feeling the girl was dead at the beginning...so when she comes to get you in the endings, I had no idea if this was in-dream, a final deathbed hallucination, or some weird magical-thing where what happened in the dreamworld reflected in reality.

It'd be interesting to see what a mature writer could do with these themes, because I think the ideas behind ON OPTIMISM, while muddily executed, are worth exploration.