The Uncle Sam Atrium

he author’s classification as “educational” is correct, and this KN (Kinetic Novel) narrates the story of an lonely & abandoned former mall, and the broader context of its construction, ending with an appeal not to repeat the past mistakes of demolishing & rebuilding, advocating its refurbishment and repurposing (indeed the lone interior picture clearly shows that is perfect for thing like conventions & exhibitions…)
As a political scientist, I can clearly see how KN can became a powerful advocacy tool. And at the same time, as an Historian, I can easily see also its value as educational tool.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Nonfiction
Played: 7/15/26
Playtime: 5m

There is some art (if not MOST art) that only flowers into fullness when you understand its context. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a harsh fable of power corrupting until you have a deeper understanding of the Communist Revolution in Russia. The Last Waltz was the 1978 film of The Band’s final* live performance, a marathon concert with a stunning array of high wattage guest musicians showcasing an act whose connections to that era of music ran deep and wide. The concert was a powerful musical statement on its own, but it is made that much more powerful when the film dives into the career and personalities of the artists.

Of all the arts, perhaps architecture is the most bound by this dynamic. This makes some kind of sense. Of all the arts, architecture is the BIGGEST. It is an endeavor of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people creating something so outsized to human scale that its artistic statement can’t help but strive in proportion. It is bound by physics in a way few other arts are, its defiance of such a culmination of contemporary material science and static engineering. Simply CREATING something that large requires resources only possible on a grand scale, often limited to collective government. (And where not, that too becomes a remarkable aspect of its statement.) Beyond funding, land allocation and zoning must be navigated, deeply integrating politics and so the mores of the times into its bones. And the active creative span can stretch across decades if not centuries. With such a span, history inevitably leeches into the artistic statement as well.

“Wow, reviewer, you got all that from a 5-minute Ren’Py piece?” I mean, yeah. I don’t NORMALLY just sit around thinking up stuff like this. USA (wait, THAT’s the acronym for this???) is a contemplative piece experienced as a Visual Novel except Real. It starts by introducing us to the most time-bound of projects, a 1980’s vintage shopping mall now in deep decline. Then it jumps us backwards to expose the historical, political and social context of it, ultimately introducing the idea that at conception the COST of such endeavors are are no better understood than the ultimate VALUE of the completed piece. Both must be negotiated by history and society.

Translating art from one media to another is a fraught prospect. See also 2019’s Cats movie. USA is focused on the CONTEXT of its subject rather than trying to somehow recreate architecture in words and pictures. And yet, the words and (super evocative) pictures can’t help but tickle our brains and flesh out our appreciation. The building is not an UNinteresting piece, and its photographic presence alludes to that. USA is a piece as much about local government’s best if all-too-narrow intentions, what they are willing to pay for them, and the ultimate large scale crapshoot these things become. It becomes simultaneously a cautionary tale of ill-considered consequences and an almost nostalgic look at civic hubris.

I think its really cool that a work this short and focused generated all this noodling. Just don’t read those last two lines of the previous paragraph without context. That just makes me sad.

* ok in the music industry there is no such thing as ‘final,’ not even death. Final in its classic composition.

Hot on the heels of Blossom, NY comes the author’s other local-history game focusing on upstate New York. But while the gently-pedagogic intention and conversational yet informative style are the same, actually Uncle Sam Atrium is notably different from the former both in approach and in subject matter.

Taking the first thing first, here we’ve got a visual novel in RenPy rather than a Twine game. Sure, in both cases the presentation is words plus pictures, but I found Uncle Sam Atrium to be more, well, visually-oriented than Blossom. I think this is just the nature of a VN engine: the pictures are bigger, spread out to the edges of the game window, while the text shrinks down to a small box that only holds a sentence or two at a time. There are advantages to this, because USA (oh hey, now I see what they were doing with that acronym!) combines contemporary photos with archival pictures showing how the eponymous building has changed over time, so being able to see more detail made these comparisons more arresting. At the same time, I sometimes wished there was a little more text – we don’t need Caro’s The Power Broker, here, but I missed Blossom’s footnotes providing additional depth and context. The narration is clear and coherent, don’t get me wrong, but I think the format wound up make the story the game presents simpler, or at least feel simpler, than it would have in the Blossom, NY format.

As for subject matter, I made that Power Broker reference advisedly because rather than a travelogue through a small town, the topic this time out is a forensic investigation of the death one particular building in the city of Troy. The game shows us the current, near-deserted state of this block-sized mall, then takes us back through consecutive strata of history to unpack the decisions that led to this point – and as with so many contemporary design issues in American cities, finds that a thoughtless, suburb-centric approach to postwar “urban renewal” set the project up for failure many decades on. What’s worse, the game closes by noting that current debates about what to do with the moribund building are in some cases retreading some of that same old ground, which will likely have similar results if followed through on, an eloquent testimony to the importance of paying attention to history.

It makes for a compelling story, but even acknowledging the upsides of the photos-first, limited-text presentation, I did find myself wishing for a bit more meat on the bones. We don’t get a sense of any of the personalities involved, or how the policies and economics around redevelopment have shifted over the decades, for example, which would help USA feel less like a cautionary fable and more like, well, history. I very much don’t want to begrudge what’s here, because I enjoyed it and it’s well done, and I have to admit that the average member of the audience is much less nerdy about this kind of thing than I am. But I think these two games, taken together (plus Swormville Sweep, the Google Maps one that I forgot having tested, thanks for the reminder Tabitha!) stand as a very strong proof of concept, and indicate there’s room to go both broader and deeper on these ideas.