The Anachronist

This is a 90K+ word novel exploring religion and philosophy (?) in 1596, near the end of the reign of Elizabeth I when the Protestant repression of Catholics was fairly intense. It's a kaleidoscopic view of the intertwined lives of six or seven characters in these turbulent times, presented as the starting character Anna Claewart dissociating from her imminent burning at the stake and trying to understand the situation that brought her here and "reduce the entropy" enough to crystallize the situation enough to escape being burnt alive (although in fact (Spoiler - click to show)it ends with her friends inciting a riot: not very orderly).

It's big on showing gruesome punishments and death. In particular we get detailed descriptions of the martyrdom being gleefully anticipated by the Jesuit priest, who gets tortured on the rack and is going to be drawn and quartered after several other delightful procedures. But he's only one of many examples.

I liked a bunch of stuff about the writing: Anna's reasoning about the weather, and about why her mind's eye sees things reversed, for instance. And Ajita's grumbling about these Frankish sects squabbling over "different opinions about a type of cracker they eat in their temples on Sundays. They do not quarrel about the best recipe for baking this item, nor about the proper etiquette for chewing it, but rather about its metaphysical status."

Ajita's Epic, on the other hand, is awful. It is diegetically supposed to be a religious mythology constructed by a cocky contemptuous atheist and rendered in free verse and it's just bad. You will think you want to read it, because the whole structure of this game is a long linear story with frequent (usually single-passage) digressions and elaborations, and these digressions are usually the best parts. But in this case, just... just spare yourself.

It also has a few unfortunate phrases like "The subsequent scenes are riveted to her literal memory" but mostly I enjoyed the writing other than Ajita's poetry. And I liked that Anna buys very strongly into all the Protestant theology and attitudes but also is like, I don't want to get married and have kids, so I'm going to dress as a man and study theology and philosophy at the university for as long as I can justify evading my "duties."

The game is punctuated by occasional options to "Return to the Stake," as a reminder of the fate that is looming over Anna. This is complemented by a strange mechanic where you try to identify anachronistic quotes or turns of phrase in the prose (which are unmarked, but you can just use Tab to cycle through interactables on the page to find them) in order to gain Knowledge or reduce Entropy. There are also certain diversions which contain trick questions which bump your entropy back up no matter what you answer (and some which contain real questions which help you out).

The idea is supposedly that if you're erudite enough, you can affect these mysterious and partially-hidden stats to the point that you can return to the stake and save Anna, but it all feels very mysterious and opaque and player-hostile. Which... is quite possibly intentional? But despite anachronism featuring in the title of the game, I never figured out what it had to do with the story the game was telling? It feels like there must be a connection but I still have no idea what it is.

And it ends with the reveal that this whole thing is (Spoiler - click to show)Ajita and Anna having written up their story to "comfort and divert" Giordano Bruno as he is in jail condemned for heresy just a few years later. "Look, we got out, maybe you could too"? I guess?

So I don't know. I found this intriguing; I liked a lot of the writing; I liked a bunch of the twists and turns; but it's also very long and the writing style is dry; in many ways it's not very interactive (maybe more like some long VNs? But fuzzier and more opaque mechanics than those tend to have, I think). I can sort of see how some of the interactivity fits with the text, and I'm glad I played it, but I'm not sure how many people I'd recommend it to.