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?