Everyone's Invited

The eternal debate about whether fiction needs sympathetic characters is, I think, mostly wrong-headed – like, if you frame to the question in those terms, it’s easy to get muddled. It’s obvious that insisting that a story’s protagonist have a big “look, here’s the good guy” sign flashing over them is unnecessary and kin of callow, but at the same time it’s also obvious that anyone who’s read (or watched movies, or played games…) widely will have walked away from a book (or movie or game) annoying at what a waste of time and/or nihilistic mess it was, with that impression based largely on the characters all being utter assholes.

What squares the circle is realizing that what’s at issue here isn’t sympathy as such, it’s whether anybody is a good hang. I 100% do not sympathize with its nameless narrator, but Notes from Underground works because for all that he’s an irredeemable misanthrope, he’s got a way with words, he’s got something to say, there’s an odd anti-charisma in his self-abnegating antics. This isn’t a theory to endorse in real life, of course – sociopathic narcissists who are intermittently amusing so long as they’re not victimizing you are not good people to hang around with! – but it hasn’t steered me wrong in fiction (with the important caveat that the author can’t have been too charmed by the terrible person they’ve created).

The narrator of Everyone’s Invited is maaaybe sympathetic, if you squint: he (I’m not sure if gender is ever definitively nailed down, but let’s be real, this is a dude) may be pathologically unpleasant about pushing others away and have developed an incredibly off-putting superiority complex to cover for his antisocial tendencies, but when he goes to a party and gets overwhelmed by all the strangers he races for the bathroom, because at least he can be along in there for a little while, and buddy, I get it. There are also indications that he wasn’t always this way, and a bad experience with a close friend has led him to becoming this closed-off. So even though his head isn’t a fun place to be, it’s pretty clear that the author isn’t endorsing his awful opinions, and we’re meant to stand apart from them and, perhaps, pity him as he’s tested in a cosmic-horror phantasmagoria that’s also, as I mentioned, a totally normal apartment party.

So that’s all fine, but there are still two problems. The first is that, as adverted to above, he’s just a total drip. He’s constantly judging people for being vapid, but just does so silently in his head, with no withering bon mots uttered or even thought. He just goes along with whatever he’s prodded to do, protesting on the inside but drifting along in practice. He’s reticent to share his backstory, and speaks in direct language that’s largely devoid of insight or flair. And the second problem is that, for all that he loudly insists that he wants to be alone, you just can’t get rid of this motherfucker.

See, Everyone’s Invited is written in a custom, visual-novel style system that illustrates its story with pulsating, EGA-palette graphics, which helps provide some apt vibes for the low-fi horror here on offer. But it also takes a page from VNs in requiring you to page through short passages of text one at a time, each of which unscrolls in glacier-slow timed text that can’t be skipped through or even, contra the false promise of the about text, sped up (allegedly the C key will manage this feat, but couldn’t figure it out and let me tell you I was highly motivated to try).

It makes for a maddening experience the first time out, but what’s worse is that the game appears to be structured as a loop. After playing through the intro and reaching the surreal party full of strangers, I was given a choice of three places to go, and after picking one, a medium-length vignette played out, I reached an equivocal climax – and then found myself back at the front door of the party, forced to go through the lengthy and molasses-paced dialogue before I once more hit that three-way choice. And then it happened again, and again. From looking at the spoiler file that comes with the game, there might have been a fourth branch waiting for me, since one of the three core choices has two variants, at which point the experience might have blessedly come to a halt – but after spending 40 minutes on a game alleged to be 15 minutes or less, with half of that time hammering on the keyboard desperately wishing I could skip stuff I’d already seen and/or praying for death, I couldn’t muster the strength of character to go any further.

Again, I don’t mind a game with a protagonist who’s an awful person. But the combination of a design that’s contemptuous of the player’s time, with a main character who doesn’t say much compelling, either in substance or in style, when he’s got the floor, is deadly. Holden Caulfield, let me never complain of you again; Bartleby the Scrivener, your monomaniacal noncompliance is divine inspiration by comparison; Iris Murdoch, I apologize for everything bad I ever said about the Black Prince; Becky Sharp, I always thought you were amazing, please just take me away from this place!