Number of Reviews: 10
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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