The Goldilocks Principle

I was drawn to this game by its title and I'm really glad I played. As I write this review, I'm still waiting for a piece of me to return to my body. The game opens with the option to select how potentially triggering you would like it to be, on a scale of 1 to 5. As someone who has struggled with disordered eating habits, I selected 4, then changed my mind and selected 5. Knowing that the author is in recovery makes the game more personal, and the writing speaks with a voice that can only come from experience. The linear storytelling and delayed text really captures the same type of obsessive thinking behind a compulsion, and even now, my skin still has goosebumps.

This is a short game (less than 15 minutes long) that takes its central idea from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to examine eating disorders.

What It Is

Like some other Twine games, The Goldilocks Principle plays with choice and limited options.

Apart from advancing passages in a mostly linear way, the player mainly decides how triggering an episode is, based on a scale marked 1 to 5.

(The game uses the word “triggering” to describe the scale. But more accurately, maybe, it’s a scale of viscerality, since not all players are necessarily going to have a strong response to the subject matter. The writing is reasonably strong and definitely unrelenting, but I didn’t have a very strong response to it, probably due to my distance from the topic.)

Each of the five segments stands on its own, and each is very short, so I won’t comment too much on those. I did want to say that I thought the timed text was done well, contrary to @JoshGrams. This game overall is a good example of light styling and effects.

Anyway, the third choice, in the center of the range of options, makes it clear that it’s nigh-impossible to get things just right — subverting the Goldilocks lesson.

For the player, that means you’re not going to get a fully satisfying ending. For the author, presumably, it means eating disorders are something that you never sure you’ve full kept in check, though I don’t want to speak for them. But it’s a structure that allows for a bit of extra empathy between both author and reader, I think.

What It Isn’t

I also wanted to comment on what this game isn’t. I went into it expecting a full-fledged, dark parody of Goldilocks and the Three Bears centered around eating disorders.

Obviously, that’s partly because Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a children’s story. The cover art seemed to double down on that – it looks like children’s book illustrations, particularly the rough-line styles of Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Andy Stanton, and the like.

On one hand, I’d like the author to have taken the risk of writing a full-fledged parable that really plays off the Goldilocks story and its characters.

On the other hand, this is clearly meant to be a somewhat minimalist game that gets its point across about a personal experience, then leave you with it. And the central mechanic holds it up pretty well – maybe even better than it would with a larger game.

This game lets you select how 'intense' you want it to be on a scale of 1 to 5.

The level 1 game version is very brief and succinct, and provides almost no information.

The level 5 is visceral, removing control from the player and filling the screen with text.

There are two layers to the game. One is the story, which is someone's authentic and personal story communicated in an effective way that fits with a lot of experiences I've seen in myself (a little) and in others (a lot) over the years. You can't really measure a story like this as a success or not, but you can say whether it was transmitted in an authentic-feeling and competent way, and it was.

The other layer is the selection of the different levels. Seeing the variety of them was really telling and compelling, because it showed what the author considered most disturbing and least disturbing, and the choice of some background information only being in level 4 was particularly interesting. I'm not sure how I felt about the response to level 3; it seems like a value judgment separate from the main message of the game. If the author had just (Spoiler - click to show)provided a description for level 3 that was in between 2 and 4, I wouldn't have thought 'that's silly, there's no such thing as middle ground.' It would have just been normal. But, the choice does provide an interesting talking point for discussing the game and leads to the name of the game.

I hope everyone who has suffered from eating disorders in the past or currently are suffering gets help, patience, and kindness from those around them, and if you're reading this while going through it, I support your efforts, whether big or small, repeated or rare.