Dead Sea

Dead Sea sells itself immediately with aethereal wispiness echoing last night’s etude: “Rows upon rows of tombstones stretch endlessly. / White orbs float above them.” In softchill breezes such as these Dead Seas’ feathery couplets lift flittery with the wind, “You walk a sandy path dotted with soft grains. / Palm-like plants grow sparsely.” To keep this stimmung from dissipating upon any errant arpeggio, a surprising humor stays our focus in puzzles where you freeze JRPG slimes in mixing up a Fanta® to sate a thirsty gravedigger. Such competing uplifts and downdrafts catch us liminally in an otherworld with all the lightness of a dream. When the gravedigger says, “How do I leave? Walking. I live in that town”, the joke’s spark stagelights carefully the scene its halfdark implies.

What a shame that this sylph succinctness starts to smudge with the offwhite writing, watercolors you didn’t realize would run and mud, and sadly the sensuousness of the symbolist sparseness slabs mudbricked when we linger long enough allowing it to dry: “Before you lies an endless sea. / Lead-gray water flows sluggishly. / All seems melancholy under thick fog.” In the first sentence, place, but also perfectly a lack of place; in the second sentence, a resonant specific to paint the scene; then a third sentence to impasto out the pleasure. Even when we keep quick to the path, sometimes still the sparse offwhite doesn’t blur into mist, the simplicity simply stays simple: “A white lighthouse stands on the cliff, / signal light rotating with mechanical clanks. / Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.” This has described a lighthouse to the benefit of those not in the know.

We do get imaginative imagist dabs of “Midway to the castle, / a hill rises from the calm sea” to Turneristically mark a whale that carry us through, but the weight that sags that finely first struck chord piles up, alas, as it always seems must, exposition. Somehow, in these lambent milds, we’re supposed to sustain all this: “That was before the God fell. / Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here. / This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt. / Even angels fell because of it. / Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’ / To remake the world, God first had to remove the ‘Stake,’ sparking a long war. / That era was called the ‘Dirt Epoch.’ / This lighthouse was built after the Dirt Epoch ended.” If that’s not enough, then I kid you not, the Mayflower.

This is intended to ballast the plot as the story’s symbolist purposing, but the plot already bobs on the surface: a Duke marries a medievally young bride, an illness nearly blesses her with death’s escape, but her soul’s then vesseled in a whale, so the Duke kills the whale to recapture her soul, which doesn’t work, we’re not sure why. Certainly, this works wonderfully as a watercolor expression, “He spreads his arms as if to embrace it, / but it floats skyward, unstoppable. / The Duke kneels silently on the whale’s back, watching it vanish”, but its effect doesn’t enjoin any of the machinery made to effectuate it.

More charming is the game’s ability to take the basic, plinth it, fog machine it, then gloom in the mood music, such that a saltshaker sings out “The whole land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste; nothing sown, nothing growing.” In its humor and its echoes, Dead Sea spirits our seeking more than the crumblings we collect from its scrolls.

At the heart of this game is a quite compelling story. Our protagonist wakes in a strange graveyard with no memory of who they are or how they got there. They wish to go home, but with no conception of where that is they follow the only road out, enter a castle in the sea, and stumble into a tragic tale of love and desperation. They can watch as story plays out to its natural conclusion, or intervene and continue discovering the whole truth. There is an interesting magic system around capturing souls of the dead and glimpses into the wider history of the world.

It is a shame that this story is hampered by awkward design decisions. The game is structured around the player exploring the map, collecting and using items, talking to people, but the Twine implementation leaves much to be desired. For example, to leave the starting area our protagonist needs to trade a chilled Fanta for the Duke’s invitation. A convenient cart holds the three items needed for this, except for some reason you only can take one at a time, so the fetch quest becomes unnessarily trekking back and forth several times between the two locations. Later on you need to catch worms as fish bait, I ended up trekking between the worm-site and fishing-site 5 times because the fishing is luck based, consumes your worm even if you don’t catch a fish, and you can only carry one worm at a time.

That first scene establishes a curious blend of high fantasy (dukes, castles, souls of the dead) with Fanta drinks and freeze rays. I was looking forward to seeing how these disparate elements would interact, but sadly the game does not expand on the concept, and as a result the non-fantasy elements feel rather tacked on. Also, why do you need the Duke’s invitation to leave? What is he inviting people to? Why am are you even heading to the castle? These questions are never answered.

The initial confusion could be interpreted as reflecting the protagonist’s own disorientation, waking in an unfamiliar place and following the only available paths in the hope of finding answers or a way home. The later mention of fate suggests being unwillingly swept along by destiny. I’d be willing to take this interpretation if there was more introspection or a clearer sense of the protagonist’s thoughts/desires beyond an initial wish to return home, which is not mentioned again. Instead, it feels like the player is simply solving puzzles and advancing along the only route of plot progression, without understanding of what I’m doing or why.

The inventory system has designated slots for left hand, right hand, and pockets, plus a special items section. If you have an item in each hand and then pick up another, it replaces the oldest one. I found this out the hard way when I had a plot critical item in hand, then decided to arm myself with sword and salt before going on, not noticing my plot-critical item had disappeared into the ether and I’d soft-locked myself. Now I’d also been seeing statues that “reset chapter parameters”, with no explanation of what that means. I prayed at one hoping to reset to a point before losing that item, but nothing seemed to happen? I was able to back button my way out of being actually softlocked, but the experience was rather frustrating.

Once you get past this point, the story becomes more of a focus, and I found this last section a lot more enjoyable. I loved the part where you uncover backstory through poetic fragments in paintings, each fragment opening up a new door to go through. I appreciated the author’s efforts at introducing elements early on, tying them back in a satisfying way towards the conclusion. Finding the extra story for the good ending was very satisfying. I wish the game had more focus on the castle and the story there and less on the awkward beginning parts.

I enjoyed this game. Its intentionally minimalistic, with simple styling, short sentences, and brief paragraphs. I thought for a bit there that might be some consistent poetic meter or a syllable thing like haiku, but I don’t think there was.

You explore an afterlife with melancholic and strange characters. They have desires ranging from finding release from the pain of the loss of their loved ones to a desire for orange fanta (relatable).

The game progresses in different stages, each unlocked by crossing some barrier, like a guard who must be bribed or a river that must be crossed. While barriers are the bread and butter of location-based interactive fiction, I felt like they were good symbolism for stages of the afterlife (like ‘crossing over’); not that I identified any clearly distinct and symbolic stages, just that crossing over repeatedly felt symbolic.

There are multiple endings, some shorter than others. I got one named ‘true ending’ but was able to get into the lighthouse after that, but I couldn’t find any ending after that ending.

Gameplay revolves around picking up items (with a limited inventory) and then using them in different spots. One location has numeric codes.