Deliquescence

I found this game deeply moving on multiple playthroughs (including the one where I accidentally left the menu open too long without clicking anything). Writing which concerns grief always has a special place in my heart, as do interactive fiction works that encourage you to play through a single moment over and over again, whether or not you can change the outcome. This is the kind of game I'm just glad exists.

This is a very short conversational game in which you spend time with your best friend in her last moments before she melts into goo. The writing is sharp and nostalgic, and the friend is a well-realized character who I became attached to as I replayed the game over and over, trying out all the options. The custom web implementation is beautiful, and enhances the mood of the game a lot. The background dot pixel grid made me think of a grid of molecules lined up in order, in contrast to your friend's sickness.

Unfortunately, in the approximately fifteen minutes I spent playing Deliquescence, I encountered two different major glitches that blocked the game from continuing. For such a short game, it's no hassle to restart and just play options that don't lead to glitches, but I really wish my experience with this game had been less buggy.

I got pretty emotional playing this one because it made me think of a close friend of mine who died very suddenly a few years ago- I sent her some messages when I learned she was going to the hospital but by the time she got there she wasn't in a state to read them, and I often think about what I would've liked to have said if I had the chance. Instead our last conversation was about something totally mundane. In Deliquescence, the most mundane conversation options seem to comfort your friend the most. This game really encourages you to be a thoughtful friend and cherish every conversation.

'She has been a solid and your friend for a long time.'

This is a solid opening for a game about your friend turning liquid in a fatal way.

This game has an utterly unique (to me) presentation, with a kind of game-boy looking feel and collapsible menus made with plus signs.

It's very short, and that shortness adds both urgency and futility to the game. What are you going to do in the precious time that you have?

This kind of game to me feels 'right', like someone's using interactive fiction in a way that it's always been meant to be used. This makes so much more sense as a text game than as a text (where the sense of unfinishedness would be absent) or as an illustrated game (I think the mind's eye is so evocative here).

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)I’m torn on this one. It’s like a bleaker Queers in Love at the End of the World—you only have a brief amount of time left with someone close to you, and you have to choose how to spend it. Both play out in real time, with a clock far too short to exhaust your myriad options. In this one, though, only one of you will die when the clock runs out, which brings an entirely different (grimmer) mood.

There were moments where I really felt the emotional weight of the situation, but also moments where I was thrown out of it and felt very disconnected. The game starts in media res; the PC is already here with their friend, both of them knowing these will be the friend’s final moments. But the game didn’t fully sell that; the range of options you’re given includes things like “do research” and “ask if she ever learned why this is happening, neither of which makes sense when she’s literally dying in front of you. There was a tension between “let the player try all the things” and “these two people know each other and have history together and would naturally already have exhausted some of these options.”

Going along with this, on my initial playthrough I felt a bit overwhelmed at how many options there were and wanted to know more about the situation, which immediately put me at odds with the PC, who would already know all the things I was curious about. Instead of roleplaying as a good friend, at first I was just seeking out information to give me more context for the present moment.

In general, there’s a feeling of coldness and remove, which contrasts with the horror of the situation. In the friend’s final moments, as her death is actually described, you can no longer act at all; she melts away and all you can do is sit back and watch. Over and over if you replay, which I did, wanting to try different options, and seeing her die repeatedly left me desensitized to it. Replaying also made me very aware that while the game is about trying to comfort the friend, the emphasis is very much on the PC. They’re the the only one with agency; the friend has no last requests unless you prompt them (e.g., if you bring up her family, she asks you to keep an eye on her brother after she’s gone, but she won’t mention that otherwise).

But then, there are some excellently written, emotionally hard-hitting details that convey so much in just a few lines. If you take her hand:

"You hold it lightly. There is a shocking amount of give to it. You could squeeze, and her whole hand would gush out from between your fingers. It wouldn’t even be a hand anymore."

In response to this gesture, she tells you, “My mom wouldn’t hug me, wouldn’t even touch me, the last time I visited. She said the ‘goop’ I left would stain her sweater… she said to keep off the rugs.” Damn. No wonder she values my simple company so much. The line that hit me the most with its pure evocative horror was: “You listen to the steady drip of her toes and feet along the rim of the drain.”

And in all my replays, I managed to find some options that felt the most right, the most meaningful. There aren’t any wrong choices—even if you do absolutely nothing, just let the clock run out, she’ll still say she’s glad you were there—but my favorites were the things that made her smile or laugh (dancing, and drawing in the goop of her melting body). Like in QiLatEotW, seeing those moments of joy in the midst of horrible circumstances made me feel something.

Deliquescence is an emotionally charged game presenting one of the most painful experiences possible – being with someone you love in the minutes before they die – so of course instead of engaging with any of that I’m going to start off by talking about the interface.

This is of course a choice-based game, but the presentation of those choices is almost unique in IF – rather than a typical set of inline links or radio buttons, the options available are offered via nested menus. Talk, Touch, and Do are the initial three, each with a little + next to them indicating that they can expand to offer a further set of choices, which of course can expand in turn to offer additional refinements another layer down, ultimately reaching three or four levels deep in some cases; you might select Talk, then About her, then Tell me a story, then finally About your grandmother to trigger a short reminiscence. Even something as comparatively simple as touching her hand is actually Touch, Her, Hand – and the way the nesting works, you don’t know what options are available until you click to fan them out.

I suspect that this choice of interface was partially a practical accommodation to allow for quite a lot of choices – there are something like thirty different courses you can pursue – to be displayed at once, without requiring the player to fumble with the back button or locking in any path-dependence (the game does shunt you into one of several different endings based on what you do, but each interaction works the same way every time). But it’s also a perfect fit for the game’s subject matter: in such a high-stress situation, with seconds ticking down to the inevitable (yes, the game does have a real-time limit hurrying things along if you dither), I think your brain really does work like this: I should say something, what should I say, maybe a question, what was a story she told me, oh the one about her Grandmother. And there’s so much you might want to do, but the likelihood that it will be the right thing is so low given the stakes, that you do find yourself considering action after action, jumping around in the list, all the time knowing you can’t get through even a fraction of what you’d like to do or say before the end, and actually by searching for something perfect you’re frittering away the little time that’s left.

The setup is so neat that the specifics and the writing are almost besides the point; happily, they’re quite good, though I inevitably have a quibble or two. The main one of these is that Deliquescence is not nearly as emotionally devastating as it could be. For one thing, as the title indicates your friend is dying because their body is turning into water; this can be read as a metaphor for all sorts of things, and could be rendered as a terrifying bit of body horror, but in the event the author succeeds in giving the friend’s physical decay an odd, terribly beauty; her death will make you sad, but it’s a wistful kind of sad, and a sadness leavened by the invitation to restart and experience it again. For another, neither the friend nor the protagonist are especially characterized, nor does their relationship have much flavor to it; there are a couple of nice anecdotes, and from the fact that they’re in this situation together the player understands that the ties that bind them together must be tight ones, but I felt an intellectual rather than a visceral understanding.

The endings also pull some punches. There aren’t any good ones where you say exactly the right thing to make you and her feel OK about what’s happening – because of course there aren’t – but nor are there ones where you say the wrong thing, or one or the other of you breaks down irretrievably (er, emotionally, that is). If you futz around with the interface so much that you never actually do anything, she says the important thing was for you just to be there; if ask her to tell you stories, she tells you she was happy with her life. One ending that threatened to become a bummer ended with her saying “My death is not for anyone but me. It’s just another thing that is happening. Don’t make it a burden.” I’m not saying that’s unrealistic – in fact my sister told me something not unlike this a few weeks before she died – but it is a pretty direct instruction to the player not to feel too bad about things.

This all seems to be a matter of choice rather than mistake on the part of the author, though – based on the quality of the writing, I have little doubt they could have gone all-in for melodrama had that been their goal. Instead Deliquescence allows the player to get their toes wet exploring an awful moment, experiencing all the ways it can feel overwhelming and go wrong while still having a safety net that blunts the worst excesses of emotion and reassures them that it’s going to be OK no matter what. That’s an admirable thing to offer, with impressive artistry going into the design, even if the situations it’s emulating are nowhere near as domesticated in practice.