Maximilien

Maximilien is a maximally stylish Lovecraft-baiting work of occult horror that immediately grabbed me with compelling ideas and enticing questions. Why is Maximilien, a psychology student in the 1920s with a crush on his landlady’s daughter and a grudge against his alcoholic stepfather, a youth so frail he gets bullied by children barely into their teens, sleepwalking to the nether regions of the city? Can he follow the clues laid down by a horrific piece of automatic writing and decades-old cemetery property records to find answers? What connects the Dybbuk of Jewish folklore with the dream-image of a brothel that’s traveled from Pittsburgh to Massachusetts with the preternaturally savage killer the yellow press calls the Ogre of South Boston, and who seems to have a special animus against those who wrong you?

No, I’m seriously asking, what connects the Dybbuk of Jewish folklore with the dream-image of a brothel that’s traveled from Pittsburgh to Massachusetts with the preternaturally savage killer the yellow press calls the Ogre of South Boston, and who seems to have a special animus against those who wrong you? Despite having finished the game, I’ve got nothing.

See, despite the game feeling relatively on rails as I was playing it, apparently it actually gives you a lot of rope, and I guess I wound up hanging myself with it. There’s a fixed rhythm to its two-hour runtime, with segments where you’re sleepwalking and inhabiting a dreadful dream-realm alternated with more prosaic ones, where you can pursue your investigations in the real world. The dream sequences feature terrible, repeated imagery – they all start out with being buried alive, and as you explore more and more of your surroundings, you come across disturbing intimations of long-buried secrets and confusing confrontations with entities whose goals are obscure, all playing out through traditional choice-based gameplay, as you decide where to go, how to navigate through conversations, and whether to delve deeper into the mysteries or try to escape.

The waking sections are much more rational: most days start in your boarding house, where you can check the newspapers for recent events, some relevant, some merely there for color, and perhaps talk with Telma, the aforementioned object of your affections, or rest or call the doctor if you’re feeling ill. You can also head into the city, perhaps visiting your university’s library to do some research, or chasing rumors into the Boston demimonde. There are a few in-vignette choices to navigate, but the most impactful decisions you make on this side of the wall of sleep are just about how to allocate your time: some actions are free, but most take up one or two of the five “slots” you have available each day. When you run out, it’s time for sleep, and what dreams may come…

It’s a solid structure, and there’s plenty of extra bits built on top of it. Beyond all the different plot threads I mentioned at the top of the review, there are a host of sidebars with an inventory system, a notepad, a sanity tracker, an “intuition” page that I don’t fully understand, achievements… I should also mention the video trailer that runs on the opening page, and the interstitial animations that transition from one phase to another with images of clock’s hands and blood.

This all makes for a nicely put-together package, but given how comprehensively I failed to reach a satisfying conclusion, I can’t help feel that there’s something player-unfriendly about the interface, the design, or both, because I still don’t know where I went wrong. Despite the day mechanics seeming set up to provoke FOMO, I actually was able to fully complete every avenue of investigation open to me: I read every book I could find in the library, tracked down the brothel’s phone number after a night of ill-advised revelry, went to as many college lectures as I could attend, and exhausted the avenues of inquiry at city hall. Heck, on day four (out of four) my only options were to read the paper and just wait for sleep, since there wasn’t anything left to do. Heck, I even got to make out with Telma! I’m guessing that means that I must have missed something in the night sequences, but it’s even harder to figure out what that would be, since I was pretty assiduous about trying to poke my nose into sanity-risking situations instead of fleeing like a coward. Maybe I was meant to do more running away? Or maybe it was something even more seemingly-innocuous: I tended to take a skeptical attitude with the gravediggers who show up at the beginning of each night, maybe I should have been spreading out my choices a little more?

Still, having so recently complained about SCAVS being too low-friction, surely I’m not bold enough to take the opposite position here? Why not reload a save and try again? Well, for two reasons. First, there aren’t actually saves; the game backs up your position so you can resume your session, but you can’t go back and undo a choice to pick something different. There are shortcut links allowing you to replay an entire day, but that’s a large chunk of gameplay to have to repeat, all the more so when I’m very unclear on what I should have been doing differently. And then there’s the second reason, which is that the prospect of re-reading that much of the game’s writing is profoundly enervating.

It’s not that the prose is bad, exactly. It often manages to be a very good Lovecraft pastiche, in fact!

I reel… a frail skiff making its way through streets swollen by a thunderous tide, borne along on the swell of the clamor of laboring workmen, the pitiless hammering of hooves striking the paving stones of the boulevard, the hawkers bawling their wares to draw in customers… To the acrid fish smell are joined the exhalations of leather flooding my nostrils. My temples throb, and I must lean for a moment against one of the barrels cluttering a narrow alley. There, in the shadow cast by the austere wall of the Petty-Fitzmaurice fish warehouses, I am able to catch my breath.

Okay, the idea of a fish-warehouse being “austere” is silly (there are a couple of other malapropisms in other places, like a reference to “coveted vegetation”, which may be typos or artefacts of translation from French). But the details are generally good, the adjectivitis feels authentic to the inspirations, it’s overall grabby. It’s just, it never stops:

Trying to reason with myself as to the nature of these disturbances, I loosen the vise formed by the bitter grimace of my jaws.

…

The choice of script, the interlacing of Kabbalistic signs, the nature of the symbols, such as the Seal of Solomon formed by a six-pointed star or the nine- and seven-branched candelabra, and the remarkable characters of the Hebrew language all indicate that this cemetery belongs to the Jewish faith.

…

At last, the chapel bells, blessed deliverance, announce the mass migration of students toward the refectories, where I am able to fortify myself after a particularly emphatic blessing. Though I seek isolation at all costs, I am forced to endure the social exchanges that bring me face to face with my classmates, to which I respond with terse politeness.

What works in small doses starts to get monotonous as the game goes on, as there aren’t really any action sequences to break things up, and even straightforward dialogue scenes are few and far between (all the night-time conversations are just as portentous). And on top of the words themselves, the way they’re presented also makes them increasingly hard to enjoy reading – as your grip on sanity slackens, the text on the screen often gets blurry, shifting in and out of focus, which can mean waiting through five or six blurry-clear-blurry cycles in a single medium-length passage. Combined with the sheer length of the game, it all makes me loath to start all over again in hopes that blind chance will let me do better than I did before.

I am looking forward to reading other reviews, for all that, in hopes of seeing what those who got to a better ending wound up thinking about the game – and I would definitely read the plot-summary section of a Wikipedia page, if one ever gets written, because Maximilien rearranges its familiar tropes in novel ways, so I’m really not sure where things were actually headed. But for all that, and all the effort that clearly went into making it, I’m content to be finished with the actually-playing-it part.