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Number of Ratings: 35
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Previous | << 1 2 >> | Next | Show All - Rovarsson (Belgium), November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Ola (Sweden), November 1, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Struggle to live in a future where you extract text from bacteria for cash, October 29, 2022This game was played at the Seattle IF Meet-up with the author narrating the game and adding her thoughts, and then I played again on my own.
You play as a future trans woman (now known as Lavernean) who has been let go and now has to do basically gig-work to make money. You also have a longterm fatigue-related illness and there's 'nanoplague' going around.
Each day you can decode more dna to make money. You also need to deal with your illness, find food, and deal with your impending eviction.
This game was hard to play because it is very realistic. I've had to do day jobs and night gig work to make food money and/or rent in the last few years, and it's pretty stressful. Three of my closest family members have fatigue-related illnesses, too, so there's a lot that hits home.
Things are pretty rough for our protagonist. It's sad but also accurate for some people I know that (Spoiler - click to show)hitting up and/or sleeping with your married ex-flame is the best way to make money.
There are a ton of endings; the writing is on-point and well-done, the characters distinct and vivid. I did find that the difficulty was (realistically) pretty high, and I kind of felt like I was slowly drowning. It takes a lot of work to be able to impart that feeling, but it was also stressful. The level of craft evident is very high, and I'm glad I played.
4 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I don't feel fine, October 24, 2022In this choice-base game, you play as Em, an archivist in post-apocalyptic world, who just got laid-off. History is a bit unclear, but several hundred years ago there was a war between transhumanists and those that rejected the "enhancements". The war left the earth scarred and base-model humanity seeking the shelter of huge arcologies to survive. But then within your lifetime there has been a breach of the arcology wall with devastating effects, and also an uprising against the Ruling Party that was quickly put down. And to top it all off, your rent is due. How will you navigate this dismal world and find a way to keep a roof over your head? The choice is yours.
I'm of two minds about this piece. On the one hand, the world is interesting and the writing is good. On the other hand, I think there is a war going on inside the piece between the Setting and the Main Idea. The game takes the form of a "simulator" rather than a story. You are presented with stats (money in the bank, days until the rent is due, food in the fridge) and ostensibly tasked with the problem of figuring out how to make rent and stay alive. But then the Main Idea happens, using the futuristic backdrop as a commentary on the issues of today. For awhile I was able to leave the Setting behind and focus on the Main Idea, the interpersonal relationships of the PC, the philosophical and introspective musings on the meaning of identity and belonging. But then the end of the story kind of threw me for a loop again, mixing the Setting/backstory in with the Main Idea in a hurried way that left me unsatisfied with the final outcome. There are 9 endings that you can achieve, and if after one playthrough you aren't interested in playing again, as I was, then the author provides some notes as to the origins of the piece and what all the possible outcomes are.
Interesting piece that was good, but just didn't quite work for me in the end.
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), October 19, 2022
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
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.
- Kinetic Mouse Car, October 4, 2022
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), October 2, 2022
8 of
8 people found the following review helpful:
Survive as an archivist in a hostile future world, October 1, 2022I loved the concept of this game, where you decode archival information from bacteria and decide whether or not to keep the information. It has a simulation element where you need to find food, medicine, and rent money. I wanted the game to focus more on ethical archiving practices, but it seemed more practical from a simulation standpoint to ask my friends for help. The game did address (Spoiler - click to show)the negative mental health effects of persecution on trans people very effectively. There were some similarities to pandemic stresses as well.
I liked that the game gave me many choices in interacting with my friends--I could ignore them, I could interact with them, and I could choose to have romantic interactions with them. At the same time, I felt a disconnect between the player character's (PC's) interactions and my own feelings. My interactions with were reduced to this bare-bones of asking them for money or helping them out, without me really growing to like the characters like the PC had at some point. In a short game like this, there isn't a lot of time for relationship-building, so maybe the caregiving tasks the PC can do can stand in for that.
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