The Lost Artist: Prologue

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.

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.