When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves

I couldn’t tell you where I was when Y2K clicked over. For New Year’s Eve 1998, I’m pretty sure I was at a high-school friend’s house in New Jersey, a bunch of us hanging out and catching up now that we’d been at college for a few months. Two years after that is I think when my college gaming group’s tradition of getting together to game on New Year’s Eve kicked off, so we were playing Changeling: the Dreaming in Pasadena. The big, endlessly-hyped party-like-it’s-1999 New Years, though? By process of elimination I guess I must have just been at home with my mom and sister, and if I try hard I can perhaps summon up a ghost of a memory of feeling relief that the many Y2K Bug worst-case scenarios hadn’t come to pass (I’d read a couple articles about how our nuclear reactors mostly still ran COBOL).

Fin and Jo, a pair of down-on-their-luck twentysomethings trying to hold onto their dreams, and each other, under the weight of dead-end jobs and familial disapproval, are likewise looking forward to the end of the millennium – they’ve got plans to meet up outside the supermarket where Jo works and celebrate together. But unlike my anticlimactic experience, they’re in for a life-changing evening after which things will never be the same again, at least if they can both make it to midnight.

That description, I fear, might not communicate much about what the game is like. When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves is an odd duck, which is no bad thing, but it is hard to sum up. I squinted in confusion when I saw that the blurb on the Comp page listed its genres as slice of life, crime, and time travel, as those aren’t typically tastes that go together, but actually they mesh in a simple way: the grounded setting of your council flat and its environs, along with the quotidian struggles of the main characters, take care of the first element, and the crime that interrupts their New Year’s plans is a plausible enough addition. As for the time travel, well, this is that parser-game standby, the loop game, where failure to ring in the year 2000 as you’d intended somehow leads to the clock rewinding and the day starting over.

While this supernatural contrivance isn’t explained, or at least if it is I missed it, it does make for a relatively straightforward plot: each run through the loop allows you to get a new item or two that in turn can potentially alter how the next loop starts, until after two or three properly-executed redos you wind up with one or more of the items needed to solve the climactic puzzle and keep some robbers from ruining your evening (there are several different ways to accomplish this, leading to distinct endings). The map is small, and there aren’t that many possible things to try, so while the clueing can sometimes feel a little light, it doesn’t take too much effort to hit on at least one of the options. Meanwhile, at the start of each run-through you get a short except of a conversation between Fin and Jo, often talking about their hopes for the future or fears about the present, which present you (as Fin) with several different dialogue options – the prevailing emotional tenor of your choices apparently winds up affecting the mood, if not the actual events, of whichever of the main endings you get.

Thematically, though, there’s a lot going on, and I’m not sure it all worked seamlessly for me. The relationship feels like it’s meant to be the central element of the piece, but the emotional drama of those sections have to sit alongside the standard medium-dry-goods puzzle-based gameplay, and the often-slapstick time-loop conceit (sometimes the reset happens after violence has been visited on you and/or Jo, which led me to experience some desensitization). While I found the leads appealing and was pulling for them to get to a better situation, the out-of-context dialogues felt like they weren’t well integrated into the meat of the game – when you meet Jo while wandering around, she, like most of the NPCs, doesn’t respond to too many dialogue options, and is understandably focused on getting away from the crime scene – and somehow often struck me as abstract, despite there being some solid details included about the lovers’ lifestyle and class. Or maybe fuzziness is a better word? Like, here’s one of the first ones:

“I’m so excited! what do you think the new year’ll bring us?” She quirked an eyebrow. Of course, I knew what she was pondering on right now. In her voice was the well-known trace of uncertainty.

1 – You asked me about a million times, but still I don’t know.
2 – There are a lot of conspiracy theories out, but most tales are based on facts, Jo.
3 – One thing I know for sure is, Jo, that I truly love you with all my heart.
4 – I know what you mean, Jo, but I don’t believe we’ll have any serious problem tomorrow.

There’s a lot that’s underexplained here, which can sometimes be an effective strategy, but here it stood in the way of my investment. The vagueness I felt about the tenor of the dialogues made the relationship mechanics hard for me to parse: per the game’s help menu, there are four different moods you can pick in each dialogue menu, always consistently mapped to the same numbers, meaning that dialogue option number 1 is meant to be consoling, number 2 is inflaming, 3 is objecting, and 4 is insisting. The differences between these categories are muddy, I think, and I had a hard time figuring out how my choices were going to be interpreted by the game.

This weakness in the prose isn’t restricted to just these sequences. While it’s perfectly adequate for the puzzle-based sections of the game – albeit a bit too ready to drop immersion-breaking Easter Eggs, like having the criminals quote Pulp Fiction – there are occasional tense or other grammar errors, and it sometimes struggles to convey the emotional heft of the relationship, landing firmly on the tell vs. show side of the dichotomy:

Most of the time I called her Jo. We’d fallen in love with each other since the graduating class. We both left school at sixteen, then we decided to live together, mostly because Jo had increasing troubles with her father. Jo’s father didn’t like me, and he had other plans for her future, including whom she would have to love and whom not. Though we each earned quite good certification at school, we didn’t manage to get good apprenticeship positions… No matter, I truly love her with all my heart and I was sure she’s the woman of my life.

So this quirky game didn’t quite win my heart, despite having a unique premise and fairly solid implementation (the scenery is a little thin in a few places and as mentioned the number of dialogue topics could be expanded, but the only real bug I ran into was (Spoiler - click to show)the game letting me light a firecracker without having a lighter on me). The challenge inherent in that premise, though, and the originality with which the game pursues it, certainly is memorable, though – far more so than my Y2K, at least.