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Systems of oppression, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.
While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).
Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.
The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.