Ataraxia

Rarely has a theory been as tempting, and as wrong, as the Whig view of history – which is to say, history that views the past through the lens of the present, imposing a progressive, if not teleological, interpretation on all that’s come before. It’s an easy habit of mind for us moderns to slip into, because so much of our experience does tend to fit this frame (it’s no coincidence that this approach gained ascendency in 19th-Century Britain, when evolution, technological development, and the shrugging off of the vestiges of feudal oppression really did make it seem as though it was an iron law that previous developments would lead to an ever-better future). But of course it’s not true: things happen for their own reasons, on their own terms, and the chains that connect them to their consequences are often nebulous, contingent, and far easier to see in retrospect than they ever were at the time. As for the idea that all forward motion is upward-striving progress – well, at least the 21st century has mostly disabused us of that notion.

Sadly, identifying the trap is a far different thing from evading the trap, so while I know it’d be a far better critical practice to view Ataraxia as a player first engaging with it in 2022 would have, I can’t help seeing it as a spiritual ancestor to Eikas, the author’s two-years-later cook-for-a-community-kitchen Comp entry. This isn’t pure error on my part, since the games have quite a lot in common – they’re both farming/crafting sim-ish Twine games with a long runtime, and a handful of appealingly-drawn NPCs to woo or just hang out with, set in an isolated, vaguely-British area of rural splendor. The central gameplay loop is often quite similar, too, with the day starting by popping out to your garden to harvest some produce, then a trip to town to sell your goods and pick up a few bits and bobs for your crafting projects, before wandering in the woods and perhaps visiting the lighthouse-keeper or innkeeper for tea and some light flirting.

This is all grand, let me be clear! I love that one of the main engines of progress is buying new books, since they teach you recipes or help you learn more about the island where you’ve arrived to settle (I dig how grounded the history is, literally in the case of the discussion of the economics of coal-mining). Meanwhile, being able to buy a pet helps make your home that much homier, and the ability to play the field with the four NPCs is lovely since they’re all a great, cozy hang (albeit perhaps not the most passion-inspiring partners), and it’s nice that very few interactions with them are gated behind the romance Y/N toggle. And the writing richly evokes an Atlantic idyll that I just want to snuggle into, even when it’s a bit forbidding:

"The sky hasn’t made its mind up about what colour it wishes to be, and the pale vastness of it is mottled in slate-grey, cobalt, lilac. Gulls wheel in the briny air, squawking impatiently at one another. The wind is cooler than you are used to."

There’s a painterly eye for detail, and a naturalist’s for the evocative use of names:

"The island is at its most pastoral here; grass speckled with cowslips and gentian, black-tailed sheep grazing on the distant slopes, light reflecting off the surface of the water. As you round a bend you see an old red-painted windmill, its sails unmoving."

While the nature of Ataraxia’s gameplay does mean that there’s a lot of repeated text as you once again comb the beach for seaglass or visit the bookseller for one more fix for your reading habit, this lovely prose meant I was always alert to any new words I might get to enjoy. There are also a few – well, I was going to call them “quests” or “adventures”, but that gives too intense of a vibe; let’s go with “diversions”, maybe? – that nicely break up your quotidian routine. Some of these are one-offs, like the island’s regular series of festivals where you can observe some local customs, catch up with one of your neighbors, and maybe do some gambling. Others kick off longer investigations, where a mutilated sheep or distant shipwreck will prompt you to poke your nose into other people’s business, learn more of the island’s history, and choose how much you want to drag the past into the present.

So Ataraxia is grand, and I had a lot of fun! …but here lurk the Whigs, because I also couldn’t help seeing at as step along the way towards Eikas. Crafting here can sometimes either feel pointless or overdetermined: at first you’re building things just to make money, but there are more efficient ways to do that, and later, you’ll need to build specific things to complete events, but you know the exact recipe so it’s just a matter of spamming the gather-ingredients task in the appropriate place until you get what you need. There’s also not much sense of time pressure, which also means there’s not any need to prioritize or focus your actions; as a result, I wound up bouncing around between different plot threads. Eikas’ cooking-focused structure resolves a lot of these issues; planning a meal means you’re looking for synergies between different recipes, and the wide variety of ingredients means the crafting system has more constraints, and more room for improvisation and creativity. Meanwhile, the regular schedule of feasts adds shape to the days, and gives you lots of short-term goals to work towards.

Some of the systems here can also feel slightly underbaked by comparison with the later game. Money stops being useful about a third of the way in, since you can’t buy most ingredients, until suddenly you need to spend a bunch of money to unlock the endgame. Taking an idle stroll around the island’s biomes is also separated from ingredient-gathering, where they were linked in Eikas – which means I almost never took in the scenery except when I had a task that specifically prompted me to do so.

And then there are a few notes that seem slightly out of place with the general vibe. Why are the achievements named for tarot cards when nothing else in the game does much with that imagery? What’s with the somewhat-thin four-humours-based personality system, which doesn’t seem to do much except gray out the occasional dialogue option? Since the game’s title comes from a philosophy of equanimity in Stoicism or Epicurianism, maybe you’re supposed to keep them balanced, but I never figured out how that would be possible, as it seems to shunt you two a couple main ones and then doesn’t let you revisit those choices (for that matter, the title and concept don’t feel like they’ve got a strong connection to the game’s themes as a whole – unlike Eikas, an also-Epicurean community celebration).

This comparison with Eikas is deeply unfair, since as I said, Ataraxia is a great game that’s easy to recommend to anyone who’s remotely interested by the pitch; prose that conjures up a real sense of place, engaging characters, gameplay that throws up just enough friction to be enjoyable, but not enough to stall things out. And having the later game in mind did make me appreciate the places where the earlier one does something different – in particular, there’s a vein of folk-horror that runs through much of the story, lending some welcome spikiness to proceedings (the forest-spirits sequence has some genuinely unsettling imagery!) even though it never wholly undermines the island’s appeal. So if you’ve played Eikas, stuff your inner Whig into a closet and you’ll have a grand old time. And if you haven’t, well, you’re even luckier since now you’ve got two things to look forward to.