Deliquescence

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.