PURE

Pure is a fairly short parser game in which the player goes through a gauntlet of challenges in a dungeon in pursuit of an unclear goal. There’s some suggestion that whatever it is will grant you some sort of increased legitimacy; there’s also an indication that the PC doesn’t really want to do it but is being forced to by a couple of brutish guards. But what you are pursuing is not really explored beyond this.

The author’s note is quite explicit that this is a metaphor for the trans experience (or a trans experience, at any rate). The dark, disturbing imagery naturally invites comparisons to Porpentine, but what came to mind most for me was A Trial, a surreal satire of the process of getting a legal name change. While Pure’s tone is very different, it similarly seems to be concerned with the hoops one has to jump through to legitimize one’s identity in the eyes of mainstream society.

That being the case, it is interesting to me that the trials as you proceed deeper into the dungeon are primarily about willingness to hurt others, not about hurting yourself or bending yourself into a particular expected shape. You’re compromising yourself morally, of course, but it’s not your own hand you’re cutting off. I don’t really know what to make of that, metaphorically. Does it imply that to legitimize oneself, one must turn around and sacrifice other vulnerable people? But what should we make, then, of the fact that some of the people you’re forced to harm are those who forced you into this situation in the first place? I can’t quite get a cohesive reading out of it, but it is interesting to consider.

Another interesting figure in the game is the Heir, the PC’s love interest, who is sort of the carrot to the guards’ stick. Rather than threatening the PC in some way if they don’t go through the ritual(?) that they’re participating in, the Heir coaxes them, lovingly encouraging them to commit terrible acts because the reward will be so good for them and the Heir is so proud. Given how the guards end up, it seems like perhaps the Heir is the real driver of the whole thing, like perhaps the promise of love and respect (and power? Since the Heir seems to be some kind of prince/ss/x?) is ultimately stronger than the threat of force. (It does feel a bit odd thematically for it to be possible for the Heir to be nonbinary, as the metaphorical representative of cisgender hegemony, but that could just be me.) The Heir was an intriguing and unsettling presence, and doesn’t necessarily need to be fleshed out very much more since their primary role is as a symbol rather than a character, but I did wish it were possible to interact with them a little more.

Before the player gets to any of this meaty stuff, though, there’s a basic medium-dry-goods puzzle and a set of riddles to solve. It may be meant to sort of frog-boil the player into the more disturbing aspects of the game—you think this is a normal text adventure, and then stuff gets weird!—but for me the shift was so abrupt and total that it just sort of felt like two different games pasted together. I liked the latter half much more than the former half; the actions the player must take to continue are better integrated into the narrative and the distressing descriptions are very striking. But of course, this being "part 1", just as you're starting to sink your teeth into this part of the game, it's over.

I did notice a number of polish issues with the game, including typos, missing paragraph breaks, missing spaces, stray extra punctuation marks, and places where the Heir is referred to by a particular pronoun regardless of the gender chosen for them. This was a little distracting, but it's still an interesting work with a lot to chew on.