Your Very Last Words

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.