Spring Gothic

This is fundamentally a strong concept, which I find to be unfortunately marred by issues in its execution.

I greatly appreciate what the work is attempting to do here; a realist depiction of long-distance relationship, focusing on the nature of the faces we present to one another and the soft tissue that lies underneath.

However, it suffers from a lack of the technical skill to follow through with its ideas. For a work presented through the internal monologue of the characters, I found the writing to be brief yet lacking the depth of any underlying iceberg. This leaves us with a great lack of subtlety; we are presented with the characters' unstylized surface level thoughts, and what is on the screen is exactly what is meant and nothing more. Often times, the writing is so unrefined that I get the impression the author wrote the unprocessed 'gist' of what they wanted a certain section to contain, leaving it to be stylized and dressed-up later (considering this was submitted under a deadline for Spring Thing, I'm willing to give the author some slack there). While I think this would be a general issue in any work of writing, I find it to be especially a shame in a game focused on personas, concealment and small deceits.

This is especially apparent in the third act, where, devoid of their internal monologues, the characters directly confront one another in that same overly direct, clunky manner. This section is where the game really comes through conceptually and there is still a part of me that really appreciates what it is trying to do. However, the climax is marred by lines such as "If I have to put it bluntly, this poor girl doesn't have a life. She clearly doesn't know how to talk to people after a messy relationship, and that's why she feels that she needs to manipulate them into loving them. And without realizing what she did!" where the author makes the inexplicable choice to have a Nika speak in the third person about Chun even as she is directly confronting her. It gives me the impression of a writer who lacks not just writing experience, but life experience in general.

Only furthering the artificiality of the writing in this act are the strange metaphors
couching it within what is at first a movie and then, once the resolution is achieved, a play. Considering the interest in personas, masks and the characters we play in public, there is clearly something to be read here, but the reason the movie is maligned while the play is liberatory escapes me. Is the camera overly artificial and processed as compared to the natural theater? But Nika is liberated by the artificial process of V-Tubing... Do people act more fake on screen? The theater is where people really play characters, whereas modern movies privilege a more naturalistic style of acting... Regardless of underlying intent, the execution of this metaphor can be extraordinarily heavy-handed: "The audience doesn't have access to her interior thoughts, so they can only watch her gaze into the horizon for traces of Nica. Nica is, of course, not on the stage. Chun heaves a heavy sigh. It is time for her to leave the stage and leave the actor's mask behind. She exists stage left."


On the subject of the play, the story seems to fail to recognize itself: in spite of the aforementioned theater analogy, it does not seem to understand that it actually is structurally a three act play and in consequence does not follow through with the medium it has found itself in. Here I diverge sharply from most of my fellow reviewers who praise the story's digressions into its main characters' interests and the realism of visiting several actual locations. I find that the way these elements are handled mostly only distract from the interpersonal drama that forms the core of the story. The characters simply visit too many places over too many days and during these incursions, the actual plot is dropped in favour of character-forming digressions that don't connect to what is supposed to be the simmering background-tension between our protagonists. I am not advocating here a strict adherence to the classical unities, but I think this part of the IF could have been significantly more focused and tied down to the main plot without losing the charm of its characterization.

In regards to the characterization, there is also the egregious oversight that we are meant to understand that the very politically engaged Chun, the dedicated feminist and adherent to the radical theory of Sophia Lewis, has also read several pick-up artistry books and completely failed to notice the intense misogyny oozing out of the pages. Especially considering the short run-time of the game, I find this mistake to critically harm the character's consistency and the plot as a whole.

In conclusion, it's a charming and likeable game with a good idea at its core, but it is fundamentally rough and confused in its execution. While I really like what it's going for, I can only watch it disintegrate as it tries to stick the landing.