Protocol

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, 3 endings

Is it me, or did it get heavy in here?

My hands are kind of frozen immobile above my keyboard as I figure out what I just read, and what on earth I have to say about it. Ok, they WERE frozen immobile, but I coaxed them into action to type that they were immobile, and now momentum is just chasing the ouroboros down this typing about typing path. I’m struggling to get my brain out of the hypnotic tarpit of Protocol and my go@!$#^mn fingers are going on about what good typists they are. Yeah, that’s the kind of work this is.

It’s fiction, not a game. Not really. There’s only a handful of choices and a limited plot. The story is set in space, aboard a damaged space station. With a large swath of the crew gone, the protagonist is wakened, injured and amnesiac, to repair the damage. Now in standard IF, this is a framework on which to hang lots of clever find the gimcrack and weird use of item puzzles. Here, the narration takes care of all that for you. And it does it under a deluge of language. It’s like there is so much impressionistic description, you are watching the plot unfold tens of feet below you, under water. Or maybe even you are tens of feet under water looking up to the plot above the surface. It is distorted and wavering and sometimes easier to just focus on the water itself, with its hypnotic rhythm and surging beauty of its own.

I can be a bit fussy about language. I balk at long compound sentences, packed with an overrun of syllables and clauses, and metaphors on metaphors. (Lord knows I don’t do any of that.) If you’re going to throw barrage after barrage of syllables at me, you better know what you’re doing. Poetry is the wobbly apex between histrionic and pretentious and if you falter even a moment you’re going to tumble down one side or the other.

I think maybe Protocol defies the odds to proudly plant its flag at the summit.

There is a tension between poetry and science, and slamming the two together is inherently fascinating. (Yes, to me. I’m writing this, everything here is according to me!) The opening prologue are science lessons, or reminders of them. They are rendered in cold, scientific language. But SO coldly and SO scientific it takes on a patios of its own. Before you even get to the story, it has started enmeshing you in its rhythms. Then the first page talks about stars, and hoo boy are you through the rabbit hole. I was seduced by the confident complexity of the metaphors, tying scientific phenomenon to human biology. And the language consumed me. Even as the plot wound through injuries, dopplegangers, cramped then expansive physical passages, you were never far from the soaring descriptions and contemplations of the void. And most of it worked. Really, really, really well.

Its not 100% perfect, according to my sensibilities. I feel like it went once or twice too often to the ‘overwrought emotional reaction to pretty specific physical activity’ well. Also, while it struck me as very competent in underpinning its poetry with realistic mechanics of space work, there were a few glitches that stood out: tethering and hand trucks were both sacrificed to drama. Looking at my notes, I captured a few passages that lost me, and a few that grabbed me, but to repeat them here does the work a disservice. It is really the cumulative use of language whose effect was so impactful. Miraculously, after every stumble, the work managed to time and again claw its way back to the summit.

To proudly stand there when the tale ends. The endings (and I looked at 3 readily available to me) were fine I guess. I chafed a bit at what felt an artificially limiting triad of choices - three variations of one idea really. But this is definitely a work where the journey is more important than the destination. And man, did that thing take me on a trippy, mesmerizing journey.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Surreal Sci-fi
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do next, if I wrote it? Publish it, then engage whatever the literary equivalent of a decompression chamber is, to twist my brain back to mundane conversational English.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.