requiescat

I work in policy advocacy and one of the big no-nos in that corner of the world is Christmas trees. That doesn’t mean actual Christmas trees, of course – the forces of godless heathendom haven’t advanced that far yet; it’s just a term of art for campaign platforms that amount to a bunch of disparate issues and policy ideas with only the thinnest of connective tissue explaining how these things are related or why they’d work well together, much as a gawker looking at a really first-rate Christmas display finds their eye drawn to one bauble after another, barely paying attention to the timber and fir-needles providing the scaffolding.

There are sound reasons to deplore these things in politics (ideally your platform should tell a cohesive story, and bring people who support one piece of it to endorse the others too). But in real life? Christmas trees are great, they’re super pretty and there’s no inherent reason why it’s bad to be drawn to one ornament after another rather than come to a considered and mature appreciation for the branches upon which they hang.

Turns out the same is true in IF! requiescat, spruced up from its original showing in last year’s Ectocomp, doesn’t have an especially unique spine. It’s a choice-based relationship drama that relies more on sudden dramatic escalation than deep character work or originality of plot to generate interest – the core story is fine enough, but it’s a bit too abstract to be memorable. Similarly, the prose is unexceptionable but unexceptional, and I can’t point to any particular thing the game does to put its own spin on the premise.

And yet, there are a bunch of nice flourishes, interesting ideas, and clever pieces of implementation which don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts, but still add quite a lot to the experience. For one thing, there’s a slight element of comedy threaded throughout the game, especially in the excited, slightly-defensive bits of dialogue that close each passage and provide a clue that the great romance depicted in the early parts of the story is a bit of a pretense. For another, the game does occasionally slow down to provide some specific details that provide color to the sweep of the game’s arc, like a karaoke night that proved a turning point in the central relationship. And I liked the use of text-expansion links: on most pages there are several places where you can click to get an additional sentence or two of context or elaboration, which occasionally are daisy-chained one after another and take the reader to quite a number of different places in a short paragraph or two – it’s an accumulation of effect that left me enjoyably bewildered. The thing that I liked the most was the way the game turns back on itself to recast some of its earliest scenes in light of the final revelations, which helps them sink in and lends some needed depth to what at first seems like simple puppy love.

Admittedly, there are some issues here that do drag these high points down – in particular, the way the game skips over a decade of the main characters’ married life only to have a completely mundane incident trigger a shocking act of violence, with no apparent warning signs or buildup, makes it very hard to see the characters as anything but playing pieces being moved around, semi-arbitrarily, to reach a preordained end (either that or one of them is incredibly thick). That kind of thing is hard to completely avoid in a five-minute game, though, and again, the central story elements aren’t the major draw here: the nice thing about being distracted by a Christmas tree’s lights and tinsel is that the luster of the trunk is neither here nor there.