Your Very Last Words

I'm reviewing a fellow author's game to give a signal boost to something sparsely reviewed before comp's end. However, I'll also note it's one where reading a review may spoil the effect. TLDR: please do work through the timed text.

140mb to download for an ostensibly ten to fifteen minute game is a big ask, even with download rates what they are. At 500 Mbps, this will take almost five minutes. (I was salty about this, having downloaded on the final IFComp weekend, stonewalling thoughts of hours or days I'd put off the reviewing I wanted to do. Then I got saltier when Unity crashed out due to insufficient memory. Again, my fault. I just had to close a couple web browsers.) So I really wondered what the payback would be, especially since I read in other reviews there was considerable timed text, which made me cringe when Twine came on the scene.

I can't say I'm very familiar with the history of regime change in Mexico beyond what is received knowledge, but it's made pretty clear here that you had 10 days of turmoil, and a lot of people got killed for potentially not much progress. Perhaps that's the point, that this sort of thing seems senseless, and people can get riled up into a cause. What's also made pretty clear is, you're about to die. You may or may not have regrets. The sergeant who will shoot you will be back in ten minutes. That's enough time to look back on your whole life.

The game often repeats the choices you make in your internal dialogue, typed out on the screen as if by a typewriter. This got me rather impatient for its end – yet I knew it was my end too, perhaps. I knew the end. I would be shot. But I did not know when the sergeant would stop by. Was it based on ten actual minutes of game time? Or would sitting and waiting draw it out?

The rambling internal dialogue works. It's not disjointed, but it touches on the people you met or should have known. For nineteen years old, you've had a life. You will have at least one child you will never meet. You wonder who will know or care you're gone. And of course you are confused. Some thoughts are the confusion of a nineteen year old, and some are stuff we're still not going to figure out. By the end I felt a bit callous I was doing small exercises as the timed text came up. The character was reflecting, but they needed someone to listen to them!

The choices don't seem to make a difference. This isn't the first work to use that trick, but in this case, it reinforces that revolutions we want are out of our control. But this isn't a particularly shocking revelation. So I was pretty much ready to just say, okay, this is has its points, but it is it really worth the disk space and the download time and so forth? What new does it bring?

So I think it has something over the Twine games back in 2015 that I saw, that discussed love more than your own mortality and what have you done with your life. They felt like a need for self-expression, and if they seemed autobiographical and self-focused, perhaps done more for their author or friends like them, they served a good purpose even if they bounced off me. This did not bounce, and it reminded me of another work from the dawn of Twine, Anna Anthropy's Queers at the End of the World, which I still appreciate. It seemed to open up the possibility of quick timed choice games where you don't, well, save the world. Both times, I was surprised how interested I was in this person very much unlike me. (How different? After, I looked back with a laugh about how my parents both wanted grandkids and warned me stridently against having a kid before I got to/through college and would thus be older than the narrator, with his one kid that he knows of. Different lives, indeed.)

As for presentation? I was kind of impatient that I didn't have at least a watch or something to tell time, but of course, it was 1900, back when computer games and the theory of game design weren't exactly a thing, and violent revolutions where a country's leadership changes hands wouldn't be centered around details like that anyway. But I liked the choice to close your eyes or not. You can't look at the line drawing of the sky and a mountain and have your next thought, which ... nice. There's sobbing on a loop in the background. It would've been easy enough to mute my speakers, but at the end, I realized I did not.

This entry had a much higher "what happens next" to "get it over with" ratio than I thought it would. Perhaps it's because I haven't read many such works about Mexico that it felt new. But it worked.

So, yeah, I was just surprised how after all that, which I thought I got tired of, I still didn't want to be the first to be shot. I had more things to think, honest! If only I could put a similar priority on my actual life more regularly. Maybe it's not the experiment the author intended to run on me, but I'm glad I went through it, as I saw it. I originally played this hoping just to boost a sparsely-reviewed game, and I was pessimistic I wouldn't have much to say. I can't say it was fun, but obviously the author wasn't going for that, and unlike some works not intended to be fun, I didn't walk away saying "Geez, that was really no fun."

This is a downloadable Unity game. In it, you stand before a firing squad, about to be killed during (I believe) the Mexican Revolution due to being on the opposite side from the soldiers.

There are two components of the game. One is a text component, where you move on to the next message with a right arrow, and options appear in a menu of 3 at a time. The other is 'opening your eyes', revealing a 3d-generated world you can view from a single fixed point, looking at the firing squad, the whole world in stark white lines on black.

You are to be executed, but are given a 10 minute reprieve to consider your last words. Thoughts fly through your mind, and you can pick which ones to remember. At the end, you can choose 3 to say (although my top choice didn't work, for some reason).

The frenzied re-evaluation of an entire life was relatable, and the writing had pathos. The ending was chilling.

This game does use timed text at the start and a timer for the middle portion. Unfortunately, I mostly chose to get into IF because of the ease of pausing and doing other things. My childcare duties called me away from the computer multiple times, so I came back to see the execution had started without knowing if I could have seen more interesting text in the middle and no rewind. What I did see was worthwhile, though. This game led me to look up more about the revolution on Wikipedia.

Is there anything more talismanic than last words? There are fictional characters – and real people too! – defined completely by the all-time great way they went out: who knows anything about Nathan Hale, or that guy from Tale of Two Cities, other than their eminently quotable exits? And “badass” is only one viable strategy, like, imagine how much time humanity has collectively spent trying to figure out what the heck Socrates meant about that chicken. In fact you can get a lot of mileage out of enigma – “Rosebud” is the engine that powers Citizen Kane, after all. They even have a special power in the law: dying declarations are exempted from the rules against hearsay evidence because of their gravitas. So kudos to Your Very Last Words for zeroing in on a perfect scenario for interactive fiction; we’re all head-over-heels for words already, so how can we resist the chance to author a sentence written in lightning whose thunder will reverberate down the ages?

Of course, in reality last words usually don’t live up to their billing. People who are close to death are often confused by pain and medication, and there can sometimes be disagreement about what a person’s last words actually were. Plus, most of us aren’t Socrates, or being written by Charles Dickens – for all that it can be morbidly fun to fantasize about the words of wisdom we’ll bequeath to our loved ones as we leave them for the last time, don’t we also nurse a secret fear that they’ll lean forward, pens at the ready to note down our valedictory phrase, only to shoot each other guilty looks once we’ve departed, disappointed at how banal our dying thoughts proved to be? And if that’s the case, kudos I suppose too to Your Very Last Words for being a bit muddled in its implementation and less than piercing in its prose.

Judged just on its mechanics, this is a very odd duck, and an underexplained one, if a duck can be underexplained. The way it works is that you’re facing a firing squad, and the sergeant derisively gives you a few minutes to think of something to say before he orders the bullets to fly. Your character says a sentence or two, reminiscing about the revolution that brought them to this awful end, their grieving family, or the fate of their country, and then the player gets to choose one of three phrases with which to complete the thought – though you’re given the unexplained option to choose and remember, or choose without remembering, for whichever one you pick. It turns out that phrases you remember are recorded in a running list tucked under a dialogue bubble in the upper left corner, but these aren’t your actual last words – instead, at the moment before you’re killed, you can choose three of the phrases in your list and slot them together, Mad Libs style, to complete your self-written epitaph. Oh, and at any time you can press E to open your eyes, at which point the game’s black backdrop irises out to reveal a black-and-white 3D rendering of the firing squad and the fellow prisoners being executed alongside you, which you can explore via mouselook.

It’s confusing and awkward, all the more so because some controls are mapped to the keyboard (opening the eyes, advancing to the next bit of dialogue) and some to the mouse (looking around, picking a dialogue option, opening up the list of phrases you’ve recorded). Beyond the interface, I also found the particulars of the protagonist’s predicament hard to come to grips with. This isn’t an abstracted, Platonic ideal of an execution – instead you’ve been caught up in the violence of Mexico’s Ten Tragic Days, when rival generals who’d launched a coup against the incumbent president unleashed terror against supporters of the regime. This is a historical period that I must admit I know vanishingly little about, and while the game provides some proper nouns, it doesn’t give much more so unless you’ve got a solid grounding in Mexican history you’d better hit Wikipedia if you want some context. And this isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity – it was hard for me to have a handle on which dialogue options I wanted to pick when the protagonist was lamenting the loss of freedom and the fate of his country, without knowing whether he was likely a right-wing or left-wing paramilitary! Meanwhile, the personal side of the monologue often felt melodramatic, which I suppose is as much due to the structure as anything else – when the screen only displays a dozen words at a time, the main way to make brevity have an impact is to get histrionic. And likewise, there’s not really enough detail for a personality to emerge; in a longer work, there could be poignancy in the way the protagonist mourns for the loss of his lover and unborn child, only to reflect on the many, many other lovers and many, many other illegitimate children he’s sired, but as it is I found it injected a presumably-unwanted comic note.

The nail in the coffin is that I found it really hard to string my list of isolated phrases together into a coherent, much less powerful, set of last words. Because they’re not drawn from consecutive sentences, it was challenging to create syntactical connections between the three phrases, much less substantive or thematic ones. Plus, trying to bridge the personal and the political felt too challenging since there’s so little real estate to work with – but choosing one over the other felt like giving short shrift to the game’s full set of themes.

I admire what Your Very Last Words is trying to do – I like idiosyncratic games, personal games, and historical games very much, and it certainly checks all three boxes. But as with the fetishization of last words, it tries to pack too much into too few phrases, and as a result it buckles under its own weight. After all, last words carry the most weight when we can see how they’re a capstone for a full life: without that broader background, they might as well be written in water.