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Previous | << 1 2 >> | Next | Show All - Niels G. W. Serup (Copenhagen, Denmark), January 19, 2024
- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), December 29, 2023
- Zape, December 15, 2023
- Tabitha / alyshkalia, December 15, 2023
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Magnificent tense dystopia, December 2, 2023“The Archivist watched. The Archivist listened.”
And no matter what happens as the game progresses, this is how you always feel.
Every choice, every decision, weighing the responsibility to keep the protagonist surviving, a
tension never dispelled, a distrust of every outcome. Maybe there’s no one to trust. Even those who seem like they’re on your side?
It’s an eerie world the Archivist inhabits. A tiny functional apartment. An uncertain atmosphere with the threat of disease and the need to wear safety gear to go out beyond the apartment. Nothing seems natural, all is (bio) engineered or constructed.
The Archivist can’t remember why it is like it is, but slowly some idea of the history of this place and their place in history comes into view by decoding fragments of data stored in bacteria.
Your daily work is to decode and file documents to earn money for food and medicine and rent. Costs that constantly increase through the game. Even though it’s the future, it feels like life today.
Slowly you figure out the network of friendships and romantic connections, and the shape of the society in which you live. Not too fast though. You get tired and need to eat and sleep.
And you never quite get to know much about the mysterious archive and why it’s there. It’s another threat in your day, especially if you record the decoded information in the wrong way.
So against this bleak backdrop of daily life, it’s surprising to find that the story feels actually optimistic. Sure there are different paths to take, a range of endings, challenges, surprises and disappointments. Yet it never gives up on the hope that connections between people are necessary and sustaining.
In the breakdown analysis of the game, Autumn states “the numerical design of the mechanics makes the game fundamentally unwinnable. There is no ending where everything is just peachy.”
I disagree. At the level of pure numbers, perhaps you can’t win. Yet at the end of nearly every storyline there is a continuing future that offers possibilities to wonder what might happen next.
And also to wonder what else is hidden in the archives…
- Laney Berry, September 29, 2023
- Edo, September 28, 2023
- airylef, September 24, 2023
- nilac, September 12, 2023
- elysee, September 3, 2023
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Some glimmer of hope in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future..., August 7, 2023This is a Post-Comp Version review. Also maybe biased because I really like Autumn's work.
In a far future, after centuries of conflict, the Earth's population has been reduced to small communities stuck inside arcologies (city domes). In one of them, lives Em, an Archivist (sorta), trying to survive the best she can (sorta), and maybe (re)form relationships to better her situation. Throughout the game, you must ensure Em is on top of her duties and health.
As with her other Dendy games, A&R works in layers. On the surface, it is a resource management game, where your savings, energy level (hidden), mental and physical health (hidden) must be minded when organising one's day or spending.
While you have agency in this, how far you can go with the different actions will depend on whether you've unlocked certain storylets, or Em's current health at the time. Since she has chronic issues, you won't be allowed to churn through hundreds of files for your job, or even do anything at times.
Underneath, two other mechanics come to play: the relationship/storylet aspect with Em's old acquaintances, and the archiving loop, Em's job. Both will affect Em's survival (savings/health) and the ending of the game.
The first is relatively similar to Autumn's previous Dendry games, in which a side-story will be parsed throughout the game, requiring the player to meet specific characters multiple times to uncover the story at large. In this game, clearing more than one path in a playthrough is quite doable.
The latter is a mechanic I had not really seen before in an IF game, but one I enjoyed greatly. Your job entails decrypting and archiving files, each with a specific code (hint hint), requiring to be either placed in a specific slot or discarded (or you can keep it for yourself). Combing through the documents were quite fun.
The first time I played the game, I thought I could survive all on my own, leaving past relationships where they were, focusing only on my job and keeping myself afloat. I remember it being incredibly stressful (I almost cried when Em was on the brink of eviction). Everything felt hopeless, and the almost-clinical-at-times prose, as well as the UI, accentuated that feeling.
This time around, I followed Autumn's advice and shamelessly begged my acquaintances for money. I didn't want to recreate that very anxious feeling I had the last time - and wanted to see what else I had missed. Indeed, it was much less stressful to go through. I didn't really have to worry about money (thanks A-), I didn't have to exhaust myself with work, and I could explore more different facets of Em's life (her past relationships, herself, how she had to navigate the world). The world is still wretched, but there is more hope. You almost believe that surviving through it is... doable.
The storylets manages to offer a bit of levity in this wretched world, in which Em can find a community helping others, rekindle her relationship with a (re)closeted trans person, rekindle her relationship with her ex who you had a child with. In (re)making connections, you can learn more about your past and how you (don't) fit in this world. You can go on a date, cook with someone, spend time with your child... have a "normal" life.
I quite enjoyed how grounded and raw these storylets felt. They, at times, seemed like a commentary on our present, with the tribalism of social media, the lack of trust in the news, the grueling life under capitalism, and the treatment of transfolks. Strip away the sci-fi/post-apocalyptic future, and they could could be right at home with our current time.
I still hated the news part... its description changing the 'a form of self harm' was on point considering the comments...
Even if you don't interact with anyone, you can still learn about the world and your place in it through the notes (essentially a Codex page) or DNA files you decode. From old recovered chats between yourself and other characters, science articles, old journal entries, and documents regarding the Arcology's founder - Liana -, you can build together a bleak image about the world, the state of the environment and human condition, filled with disenchantment and conflict.
Depending on what you do with your day, you may find some Easter Eggs, like the TV Series you can watch or the Games you can play, little winks to Autumn's other games. Some characters of the game, made obvious by their names, share a resemblance to ones from the Pageantverse.
With the implementation of the Autosave, I was able to reach a lot more endings than the first time around, especially less bleak ones, without having to replay the game. Those endings are highly dependent on the actions you took during the game, some being sweet (especially with K-), some being maybe critical (imo A-'s, Alone), and one specifically blew my mind (Ending 1 - didn't find before).
Ending 1 is by far the most interesting one in my book. While it might seem a bit like a Deux Ex Machina or coming from out of nowhere (depending on your playthrough it may feel like a whiplash), it is the one that has not left my brain since I've replayed the game - maybe because of how strikingly different it is from the others. I think this ending might work best if connections with other characters were not made. It also made me wonder whether Em's life would have been that different if her arcology was still in contact with the others, or whether contact was severed between all arcologies. Honestly, it brought a lot of questions about the world after reading through (sequel of Ending 1, when?).
I don't know if there is a point or a moral to the game. If I were to give one to it, it would be that communities are important for people to thrive, maybe even necessary, and that the world can be a very difficult place when you keep to yourself, worse when your situation is dire in the first place. Even if it seems bleak, there is a glimmer of hope and goodness there...
- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), July 27, 2023
- wisprabbit (Sheffield, UK), July 1, 2023
- Kastel, June 11, 2023
- ilyu, May 26, 2023
- merrybug, March 25, 2023
- dgtziea, February 28, 2023
- Bell Cyborg (Canada), February 8, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, January 12, 2023
- Jim Nelson (San Francisco), January 7, 2023
- Ann Hugo (Canada), December 30, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An excellent gender-dystopic storyletfest, December 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp)
Autumn Chen has had the kind of year that makes one reevaluate one’s standards for productivity. Her impressively-detailed debut in the Comp, last year’s A Paradox Between Worlds, came tenth in a crowded field; New Year’s Eve, 2019, her Spring Thing entry, won nods for Best Writing and Best Characters (and unless I miss my guess, didn’t miss out on a Best In Show ribbon by very much); and just a month or two back, she worked with Emily Short to recover and reimplement Bee, one of Short’s “lost” games.
Coming now to the Archivist and the Revolution, I think it’s that last effort that’s most relevant. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a lot of continuity with the two previous games: we’ve got a ChoiceScript-aping game (actually implemented in Dendry this time) with a slightly overwhelming amount of well-written content; we’ve got a cast where just about everybody sympathetic is a (trans or cis) lesbian; we’ve got a plethora of endings. But the narrative structure is largely procedural with randomly-available and discrete storylet-like passages playing a significant role in what the player understands the plot to be, and the interface foregrounds a resource-management frame where narrative actions produce mechanical rewards that in turn feed into new narrative consequences – it’s all very reminiscent of late-period Short (has anyone done the definitive charting of the arc of her career? I mean the Emily Short who’s interested in procedural text and works for Failbetter).
Think I’m reaching? Check the name of the main character then get back to me.
(Post-Comp update: the author replied to this review and confirmed that I was, in fact, reaching)
This isn’t a critique, I should make clear – far from it! Chen’s take on this structure feels assured and very much her own, with a dystopic, genderpunk setting quite far from anything I’ve seen in Emily Short’s work, and her trademark emotional palette of anxious grays and exhausted blues, illuminated by the occasional miraculous, vital yellow, is very much in effect. The mood is sketched with an evocative, efficient opening:
"The light outside the window was bright and artificial, emanating from a poor simulacrum of the sun hanging on the metal ceiling above. Rows of green and violet macroalgal trees emulated an ancient streetscape, the scene completed by the humans walking by. It was the equivalent of midday in the city without a sun."
(I’d forgotten that there’s literally no sun. Metaphors!)
In this downbeat arcology, the protagonist, Em, works as a freelance archivist, working to recover information have encoded in the genetic material of ambient bacteria – this world has suffered from cycle after cycle of horrific war and violence that appears to have destroyed most traditional forms of information storage, so previous generations of scientists have cannily developed this technique to leverage the hardiness of unicellular life and send messages-in-a-biological-bottle to a future age. That idea, on its own, would be beautiful – except that the shores were these bottles have fetched up are dark ones indeed. After the latest convulsion of violence, the city (and maybe the world as a whole?) has been taken over by a reactionary, oppressive party that brutally enforces traditional gender roles – they’ve recently put down an abortive uprising that Em, a trans woman, took some vague part in – and doesn’t seem able to provide even reasonably economically-productive residents with a decent social minimum.
What this means is that you’ve got rent to pay, and to earn money you need to use your skills to decrypt your pick of two or three of a randomly-selected set of snippets of genetic information, and then send the resulting information to the archive (you do this by clicking, there are no cryptography puzzles or anything). Sometimes the information is garbled or no longer meaningful; sometimes it contains important scientific information; sometimes it contains the personal musings of the recently-suppressed revolutionaries; and sometimes it hearkens back to the very dawn of history, and the events that put the city on track to become the hell that it is. And then you pay for food and hormone treatments, hope you’ve netted enough on the day to be on track to make rent, and do it again the next day, with a new set of randomly-selected snippets waiting on your work account.
The game isn’t limited to just this loop, though. You get opportunities to decompress or interact with others in between, or even instead of, shifts of decryption. Some of these are minor-key – like trawling the CityNet for news stories (Em, in a display of obvious self-hatred, always reads the comments), or tooling around in a samizdat MMO. Others, though, unfurl into major character arcs, largely centering on two of Em’s former partners – one who’s also trans, but “de-transitioned” to hide from the authorities, and the other who’s raising her and Em’s son – and just from those short descriptions you can tell there’s a lot to dig into. Oh, and there’s also a mutual aid society made up of folks who share her revolutionary past and want to recruit her.
If this sounds overstuffed, that’s because it’s overstuffed. It’s here that the more procedural, storylet-based design proves successful. There’s no way you could see a fraction of the content on offer in just one playthrough, and you’re somewhat at the mercy of the RNG because what snippets are presented to you will have a significant impact on how much you can guide the story. And while it’s clear that you can focus more on one partner or the other (or neither) depending on your choices – simple enough – there are also ongoing plot threads woven into the DNA decryption. Some of this is game-mechanical, since at the beginning you lack the technical skills necessary to analyze certain cryptographic algorithms, but you can pick up the needed techniques if you find certain snippets that provide a how-to guide. But it’s also narrative, too – there are prefixes to the snippets that I think mark each as belonging to a particular genre, from deep history to the suppressed diaries of revolutionaries to literally Wikipedia. You can lean more towards one set rather than another, but ultimately, you’ll have a very hard time exhausting even one while spinning all the other plates you’ve got to keep an eye on.
This could be a recipe for incoherence, but I found the engine was tuned to create a satisfying story regardless of what was surely the suboptimal course I charted. I began by largely ignoring my job to meet all the different characters I could, then realized I was going to be short on my bills and overcorrected into work mode, then stumbled across a sequence of snippets that put into question many of the things I’d assumed to be bedrock truths of the city, then went broke nonetheless. At the end, my version of Em achieved an unexpected sort of apotheosis, riding a series of twists I saw coming just before they hit, and leavening the grimness of the story in a way I didn’t think would be possible. It felt lovely and inevitable, but it was only one of nine endings! I doubt they’re all as satisfying, but even so, the way I was able to retroactively construct a clear, clean narrative arc out of so many randomly-generated pieces, quite sure that I missed more words than I saw, was little short of magical.
Do I have complaints? By now I feel like y’all know me, I always have complaints. First, for all that the setting is established as violently repressive, in the game itself didn’t feel much sense of immediate threat, even when choosing somewhat-risky options, and the very real threat posed by Em’s rising rent comes off impersonal and inevitable, rather than terrifying – hell, even the online trolls seem significantly less vicious than the kind you see in real life. Beyond that, there’s a closing revelation that doesn’t quite play fair with Em’s backstory. And in a world where my morning paper included Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian civilians, Los Angeles City Councilors taped being absurdly racist while dividing up the city’s districts, and Iranian geronto-theocrats murdering dozens of women and children to prop up their illegitimate regime, the idea that the world’s conflicts would reduce down to the single point of gender identity seems a bit hard to credit – I’m certainly not complaining about the game foregrounding what it’s about and reading the rhetoric of various contemporary right-wing ideologues you’d be forgiven for thinking transgender rights is the only contested ground in our society. But still, there might have been opportunities to explore some intersectionalities around race, since Em is depicted as Asian and I don’t think it’s implied that everybody else is, too (in fairness, some of these dynamics might be explored in DNA-storylets that I didn’t find).
Finally, I ran into some bugs. Several were found in the resource-management side of the game, though since, as I previously noted, that’s not where the action is they were fairly low-impact: A few times, I decoded DNA but failed to get a message the next day telling whether I’d classified it correctly and giving me my payment; on one occasion, I’d decoded and archived two sequences but only had one acknowledged, while the other time I’d similarly archived two but saw only blank lines when I clicked the link to check for messages the next day. And the finale sequence opened with a two-paragraph warning that I was behind on my rent and would be evicted if I went another week in arrears, followed immediately by another paragraph telling me actually I was being evicted now.
There were also what seemed like a few narrative glitches, in particular two sequences that seemed to assume information that I don’t think was established on-screen in my playthrough (Em references a leaflet leading her to the mutual aid society, but I never found such a thing, and in one scene where (Spoiler - click to show) K- has a breakdown, as it’s wrapping up she glancingly mentions getting a new job, which Em rolls with without comment despite not having previously known that K- got fired). And I found one dialogue option in the first meeting with the mutual aid society misleading: one of them said something about how I probably wasn’t a government infiltrator, to which I responded “no”, thinking that would be interpreted as agreement – but the game took that to mean refusing their recruitment pitch.
None of these did much to dent my enjoyment of the game – I’m flagging them in the hope they can be ironed out for a post-Comp release, since The Archivist and the Revolution is richly deserving of a second visit after the present frenzy of games wraps up. I’m curious to see how the narrative engine holds up to repeat play, and what happens if I try to focus my energies on a single plot thread rather than playing the field as I did this time out. But even if you just go through the story once, this is a clear highlight of the Comp.
4 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
So Much Cleverer Than Me, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
“The world is ending, and you are still paying rent.” Ah game, you had me at tagline.
This piece collects a handful of speculative fiction ideas, each of which was so deeply, deeply cool it could support an entire story on its own I think. Then it mixes them together in a surprising and unique heady brew of world building. World building is a delicate balance of information and reader-filling gaps, and it kind of has to be carefully tuned to the tone, themes and length of the piece. You can’t let the detail overwhelm the narrative, but you need enough so that contextual dramatic moments hit big. TAatR feels like it hits exactly the sweet spot for its narrative, and does so while juggling multiple Big Ideas. By the end screen, I raised a proverbial glass to the accomplishment.
The central mechanism is filing: in order earn money you must file snippets of data from “the past” on behalf of a faceless bureaucracy. You’ve got to do enough of it to make rent. So much good stuff is wrung out of this mechanism. For one, the “snippets of data” are world and personal background, which you navigate based on your interest. You will start to recognize narrative threads based on data “encodings.” As you assemble more background, you realize the protagonist was more than an impartial observer to some of these events, and then get to decide how much you actually want to give the government. This in turn can create a money problem that the game offers character-defining ways to solve. This mechanism melds grind, data dump, and character moments in a very compelling and Sparky way.
You’re already like 4 layers deep in your IF parfait, and more to come! On top of all this, the protagonist’s uniquely complicated personal life gets folded. Here’s where things pushed at me a little, and I can’t figure out if the text needed to do more, or maybe if I did. There are choices to make about how the protagonist prioritizes and interacts with other cast members. Only (very!) belatedly did I realize I was fully empowered to collaborate on defining those things. Early on, I thought I was trying to pick the ‘right’ choice based on the character so far presented. As such, some choices made no sense to me and felt false. Often the results left me wanting more. If I shift the blame, I think the text could have nudged the narratively collaborative nature of its choices a little better. I realize this is weird feedback to give an INTERACTIVE FICTION piece. It could be I am just a dummy. I will say, once I realized (whoever’s) mistake, I appreciated that the choices were actually really interesting and varied and opened up the dramatic space tremendously.
There was another narrative, I don’t want to say ‘problem,’ how about ‘inelegance’? Because you are selecting which historical and personal events to pursue in juggling your day job as data filer, and because you cannot pursue all of them (I guess you live in a world with no coffee?), you will not see the breadth of narrative possibility in one sitting. This is cool! It effectively conveys a world so much bigger than what you see. However, it also doesn’t guarantee a fully satisfying narrative arc. In my case, the ending ended up leaning directly on less than 10% of my overall gameplay, and maybe indirectly on another 25%. I did dig the ending as a story twist fwiw, just didn’t find it fully satisfied my investment. I can’t help but wonder if I bypassed a key file or two that would have driven it home for me.
This game did so much that is hard to do, and did it so well, I feel a little ashamed that I couldn’t push past (lots of!) Sparks of Joy. The perceived but probably false choice steering, and not-quite-crisp narrative closure just kept me out. That said, this game is probably the first Sparky game I’ll revisit after close of IFCOMP.
Played: 10/20/22
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished 1 of 9 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I think I will, once I work off my backlog
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- jaclynhyde, November 23, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
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