The Lost Artist: Prologue

This is an early portion of a game about a detective who has been asked to rescue somebody from the drudgery of office work — though the job seems allow for a little bit of rebellious creativity.

There a few things that the author did well. The written voice is very direct, conversational, and concise, which is refreshing.

And, mechanically, this is Twine at its most straightforward. It has choices that lead to other passages, and those passages usually return to the mainline plot.

Possibly Dada

However, as others have noted, it’s a bit unclear exactly what’s going on. Some people have called it surreal.

I visited the main author’s website and found he’s done some other work in dadaism, which seems to be distinct from much of surrealism.

Here’s an explanation I found by Googling:

As Dada’s artistic heir, Surrealism presented a contrasting idea: instead of wishing to overturn society, the Surrealists sought to re-enchant life by probing the inner-workings of reality by exploring irreality.

That’s just one explanation, but building on it: I’d say that this game isn’t surreal in the same way as Verses is, which seems like a more common type of surrealism.

Verses has tightly interconnected themes and images that don’t necessarily point to anything in real life (especially the core analysis process), but which do point to things in the reader’s internal being.

By contrast, The Lost Artist has a lot of core parts that are pretty grounded individually and draw on real things (like bank heists, private investigations, and corporate jobs) rather than abstract ideas — they just don’t connect in a normal way, and they rely heavily on non-sequitir.

The Lost Artist also has the anti-institutionalist themes that apparently define dadaism. The fact that the characters are trying to apply originality on top of corporate work makes me think of possibly the most well-known example of dadaism: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which turned a signed urinal as an art installation. The Lost Artist’s repurposing of corporate/industrial stuff is less crude, but the idea is similar.

Sometimes Confusing
If dadaism is the author’s intended goal, it’s natural that the game feels disjointed. However, I’m still going to highlight a few jarring things, because I don’t know whether they’re intended or not.

First, the prologue has its own prologue. The story begins in media res with a bank heist, then transitions to an office scene. It seems like the characters become indentured servants as a result of the heist — but maybe not, since it’s a fuzzy transition.

Secondly, the story tells you what’s artistic and what’s drone work in a way that’s hard for the reader to infer for themselves. As Mike Russo noted in his review, the bit about saving money on logos is confusing. The work that the characters are doing isn’t clear on the whole, and the game is currently very short, meaning that there aren’t really enough examples to make this all gel. (The game is unfinished, so my impression could change as more content as added.)

Third, there’s a co-author, Martina Oyhenard. I have no idea what she contributed. Perhaps she refined the main author’s ideas, or perhaps the idea was to combine two authors’ disjointed contributions exquisite corpse-style. Or maybe the goal was something in between.

It’s impossible to say. It would be interesting to hear the authors comment on the writing process. Maybe they will in a post-mortem, but this strikes me as the kind of game where a magician never reveals their secrets … so who knows?

I didn't actually understand this game, so I'll try to summarize it. It's a twine goal filled with surreal, non-sequitur type descriptions.

An artist named Leben is stuck in a dead end job due to losing inspiration. They hire a detective to find it, using a raven to communicate that message.

Hmm, there was also a part at the beginning about a heist. I'm going to go replay that part...

Yeah, replaying it didn't show anything. There's indication of meta-narrative travel, so maybe the different stories will unite at some point.

Honestly, I've really got no clue here. I wasn't able to construct a mental model of the game's structure, intent, or world. I will try to do better in the future.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It seems every year there is an entry or two that just catch me so offguard, that are so unabashedly playful and bonkers, that I can’t help but play right along. This is nominally a detective/mystery solving game, but in its blindingly fast playtime displays neither. It cycles through one bananas setup after another, with little regard (until the end) for how they connect. You meet bank robbers, a corp-slave artist and a marginally engaged detective. On the way you get meaningless choices to make, each with snicker-inducing specificity and daffy breadth, where the whole time you are basically white knuckling along a ride that doesn’t seem to care how bad it whipsaws you and is unclear it even knows where it’s going.

But the ride is so zippy and good-natured it kind of doesn’t matter. I feel like I want to give an example, but the work is so short I’m cheating you just a little. I can’t resist, here it is:

(Spoiler - click to show)This case is a dead end. All the contacts are hippies. They’re all probably ‘fishing for trout’ in their private trout-fishing lake.
The criminal Balding wanted to capture had stolen all the angst left in an aging punk drummer. Right before the trial the drummer moved back to Ohio to start a new life. The criminal was freed.

Those are not two separate quotes, just one continuous flow. Don’t even get me started on the wonderfully incoherent sentences that form the UI links! The whole thing makes very little sense, but in the most appealing way possible. By the end, the detective has been engaged by the corpdrone for reasons, and ‘ravens’ have been established as somehow being a connective thread. All of this, as the title suggests, will be worked in a future episode. Yeah, it doesn’t end at all, it just stops. McFly-y-y? It’s a Prologue McFly!

Ordinarily this lack of meaningful choice, lack of clear characterization, lack of narrative throughline or plot and certainly lack of closure would infuriate me. Or disappoint me. Or repel me. But here, the language, the flights of fancy are just SO enjoyable I kinda don’t care about any of that. It was a terrific ride for its short duration. I have only the vaguest of ideas what I just experienced, but am damn sure I will engage the next episode. Yeah, this scattered focus probably can’t sustain an extended multi-chapter mystery. There are signs the threads COULD come together though, and that’s good enough for me. Viva la bizarre!

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 10min, 2 playthroughs, likely 100% of text
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/seamless
Would Play Again?: No, but followon has my attention

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

The Comp welcomes all kinds of IF, but it’s also an awkward place to enter a teaser. As the most, well, competitive of the community’s various events, it tends to be where long, polished games by seasoned authors tend to wind up, so an incomplete effort will look even slighter by way of comparison. But beyond that, the audience simply expects complete experiences: while the Comp’s been home to multi-part series, like the Earth and Sky superhero trilogy that dominated the winner’s circle in the early aughts, or the game I’m going to be reviewing next for that matter, those games had full beginnings, middles, and ends, with linkages to future installments being akin to Marvel-movie postcredit sequences. Well, I say “the audience” but I mean “me” – for all that the blurb clearly discloses that we’ve got here is “simply the prologue” to The Lost Artist, I was still disgruntled to reach the end well before I expected to, all the more so since there’s no indication of when and where the continuation might show up.

But admitting that putting a teaser in IFComp is probably not a good idea, is this prologue nonetheless an effective one? I’d have to say no. For a preview to make me excited to check out the full experience, I think it has to establish the premise and end on a moment of drama, when things are opening up and you’re left on the edge of your seat, half-imagining what might happen next but sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises beyond what you can think up. Think about the Lord of the Rings: you could cut things off after the hobbits take the Buckleberry Ferry just ahead of the Ringwraiths, say, and have a solid teaser. If that’s too much movie to give away for free, you could push back to the moment where Frodo tells Sam that he’s about to go farther from home than he’s ever been before: we don’t get the excitement of the Black Riders or the other hobbits yet, but we know what’s at stake, and that the journey’s about to begin in earnest.

The Lost Artist: Prologue, by way of contrast, basically decides to cut off just as Bilbo slips the ring on at his party, and excises the opening historical flashback besides: we have a disconnected set of characters who’ve barely interacted with each other, some kind of inciting incident that seems like it’s going somewhere, but no real idea of the shape of the story, what the themes or conflicts to come will be, and little reason to care about anything we’ve just seen. Here, instead of hobbits we’ve got a pair of bird-sanctuary-keepers turned bank robbers, an artist trapped against her will and losing her creativity, and the world’s most generic detective; instead of the dark lord Sauron we’ve got an ominous megacorporation with decidedly odd ideas about profitability (we’re told that at least one part of their business is making corporate logos, and they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?), and instead of magic rings we’ve got low-context invocations of time travel and a mystical raven. Possibly there are rules and thematic linkages that unify all of this, but the vibe is that anything could happen, and not necessarily in a good way:

Balding picks up the envelope but notices that his name is misspelled.

“Damn.” The Detective whimpers to himself, looking off to somewhere else.

The letters of his name are floating in the center of his view. The letters continuously disassemble and reassemble into hallucinated shapes.

He gets all weird about that.

Better to find something else to focus on.

Hey! What’s over there?

Let’s just say that the word “huh?” recurs a lot in my notes.

There are one or two possibly-intriguing images here – I liked the bit where the captive artist, who’s stuck working on the aforementioned logos, has a moment of clarity after she clumsily spills maté tea powder on one of her doodles and is arrested by the “depth and texture” it lends to her work – and just at the end, it indicates that the detective is being brought in to investigate something to do with the artist’s predicament. But there’s just not enough here to make me care about what happens next, even without the wacky tone, barely-there characters, and underexplained worldbuilding. It could be that after another act or two, the Lost Artist brings its disparate parts together, establishes compelling themes, and creates an engaging narrative – or it could be that it doesn’t. But either way, this prologue doesn’t allow the player to give it a fair shake.