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Review
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
