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Ingenious take on post-apocalyptic fiction, October 10, 2022There's a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction out there across all mediums -- comics, books, movies, games, etc. -- and there's a lot of retread across many of these stories. Rather than social structures totally collapsing or totally transforming, The Archivist and the Revolution crafts a post-apocalyptic world that perpetuates many of the familiar inequities and challenges even as those social structures crumble into ruins. The other ingenious aspect of how this work approaches the post-apocalypse is that the story is told through a limited perspective, one person's experience of struggling to keep a job and pay bills in an irradiated world bereft of non-human animals.
The player character's job puts them in an especially interesting position between the past and present, allowing the game to explore the impact of a dramatic break from a previous cultural history. The player character is an archivist (pushed into contingent contract labor) who decodes and classifies fragments of documents that had been coded into DNA -- this preservation strategy engineered precisely in fear of an apocalyptic catastrophe. Through this work, the player learns bits and pieces of the events leading up to the world's current ravaged state, as well as wonderfully decontextualized bits of history and present pop culture, like a fragment from a Wikipedia entry for the Food Network show "The Best Thing I Ever Ate."
This is a great world building trick as the game can slowly reveal the contours of the universe and not dump everything on the player all at once. And this is a richly detailed world with an intriguing, complicated history. I feel that I only got a glimpse of the full story of this world from a single playthrough, and know that I would glean a lot more on multiple playthroughs. But this is also a brilliant meditation on how the past constructs the present and forecasts the future: through the workaday acts of cleaning up and classifying documents for later retrieval, the activist, though marginalized and precarious, fulfills a critical social role of putting together a patchwork of the past so that we can understand the present.
Ostensibly, this is a resource management game, though one that's very difficult to "succeed" at in a conventional sense. The player character has mounting expenses and gets paid very little for their contract work. The other options are reaching out to people from your past with whom you have very complicated relationships. In addition to money and expenses, you must also manage your energy and psychological well-being; these aspects are not quantified but certain actions can be closed off if lacking in energy or motivation. The game creates an experience of precarity as most choices are difficult and compromised -- there's no easy path forward.
The player character's personal story and identity are developed as the game proceeds, and the player learns how this personal story is deeply imbricated with the cultural history of the Cataclysm and the Revolution. (Spoiler - click to show)The player character is a trans woman and we learn that the Revolution was catalyzed by oppression of trans folks -- transgender and transhuman. Without spoiling the main plot points, the story deals very powerfully with living as a trans person in an oppressive society.
This personal story of the player character is one aspect of the game that I wish had been developed a bit more. While we learn some of the key details about the player character's past, it's not always enough to understand the significance of taking certain actions over others with regards to the two people from the character's past. The end of the game also came somewhat abruptly, after I made a major choice regarding one of those other characters, the game ended and succinctly summarized the implications of that decision. That said, this was a game made for IF Comp, so perhaps a fuller, longer narrative was curtailed to better fit the expectations of the competition. I would gladly play a longer version of this game, or another game set in this world.