大鱼 | Big Fish

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Sometimes I like to do things to mix up the formula. Some wildly misfiring neurons during happy hour made me think, “Hey, what if I tried to review one of these after too much liquid refreshment?? I mean, I love Drunk History and My Drunk Kitchen, how hard could THAT be? Besides, it’s not problematic if you are drinking for ART!!!”

A lot of my worst ideas happen at the end of happy hour. To be fair, I had no way of knowing Big Fish was lying in wait at the top of my queue. So I topped up my glass and jumped in, giggling madly at my own subversive antics. Here’s the thing. Clouding your mind in a crowded film set, with cameras rolling, then gabbling on about historical facts or trying to work cookware is energizing. The entertainer is performing and must be the motive force. Watching someone struggle against their own decreasing capabilities in real time is kind of hilarious. Sitting in a comfortable chair, sun long set, house quiet as the other residents slumber… me swimming along in a pleasant mental blur… this is not as hilarious as one might think. The struggle was as much with the Sandman as the work. (It for SURE is not conducive to then writing about it! Maybe I should have tried dictation??) This would have been a challenge for any work.

For THIS work, though, this somewhat slapdash mystery chock full of alligator cults, wild religious motivations, typos and misspellings, I was asea. I think I played it like three times that night, never fully able to get my head around what was going on. Thank goodness it was a short work, and replaying next day was an option. Dear readers, even stone cold sober, in the harsh light of day, the experience was more same than different.

This presents as an ‘investigate to clear your uncle’s name’ work, but everything about it is just a little feverish. The protag periodically drops bon mots like having ‘despicable thoughts’ about the victim’s bed. Chapter breaks intrude randomly into the narrative - you are told chapter 2 ended without even knowing chapters were a thing. Then after Chapter 3, the divisions kind of disappear? The Uncle’s name flickers between Fleur and Fuller without explanation, lending the impression the narrative just FORGOT. A key opens multiple safes in different houses. Epilogues suggest one character only recently met and released from an asylum MOVING IN WITH THE PROTAG. She clearly had not seen him brush his teeth. As much as I was struggling to keep my hands around the work, SO WAS THE WORK ITSELF.

None of the characters, neither the protagonist, sheriff, various interviewees behave as actual humans. Characters you only meet in background reading don’t behave as actual humans either. And the crocodile-based lore, hoo boy. There is a world where all these disparate parts build weird on weird on weird into a dream-logic phantasm of mesmeric power. You would think inebriation would facilitate that transformation. The fact that it did NOT suggests the effect was not as deliberate, certainly not as controlled, as I would hope. I like bonkers things. This was just too disorganized to gel even around the nebulous logic of its own crazy. We’re talking about a work with CROCODILE JESUS just not closing the deal - to a drunk guy! The bar could not be lower!

The work had plenty of sparks of WTF? for sure, but that, sadly, is not my metric. Despite a pretty clear, well-worn path between WTF? and Joy, this work did not navigate that for me. Drunk or sober there was not enough charge to get beyond Mechanical.

Played: 10/2/24
Playtime: 30-45m inebriated, 30m sober next day, solved, normal end
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusively nonsensical
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete. Will not play with Drunk Reviewer again, either.

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

This is a mystery game in which you play as a journalist whose uncle has been falsely accused of a murder. By the time the PC finds out, the uncle has already been executed for his supposed crime, but the PC is determined to clear his relative’s name posthumously.

While journalism is a not-uncommon occupation for an amateur sleuth in mystery fiction in general, I don’t think I’ve seen it much in IF, so I thought that was a fun choice. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do much with it. It’s not even the thing that grants you access to investigate—for that, the PC has to show an unexplained, never-again-referenced “other credential.” (Implying he’s actually some sort of undercover agent, I guess? Or has forged an ID to that effect?)

The gameplay is evidently parser-inspired, with a world model and progress that mainly involves finding an item in one location and using it somewhere else. Once you’ve found an item, the option to use it will appear automatically, so there’s no need to solve any puzzles per se; it’s just a matter of remembering which was the location where you needed to see something far away once you’ve picked up the telescope.

Polish is somewhat lacking, with inconsistent paragraph spacing and prose that often slips between first-person and second-person POV (possibly as an artifact of machine translation—the game doesn’t state that such tools were used, but it’s a very common problem in Chinese-to-English machine translation in particular). In cases where text appears conditionally or is added to a passage upon clicking a link, line breaks and even spaces between words tend not to appear where they should.

The logic of the narrative is also questionable in places, raising questions such as: Why was there conspicuous physical evidence just lying around the real crime scene (inside the culprit’s house where the culprit is still living) over a year after the crime? Or: Why was there a key in a drawer in a picnic table on a mountaintop that opened two different safes in two different people’s houses? That said, I was able to correctly identify the murderer based on the evidence I collected, so the internal logic does hold up where it counts.

So I’d sum it all up as a messy but enthusiastic first effort with a few interesting ideas (largely related to the small town's dark secret, which involves a crocodile cult), but there was one thing that really soured me on it: the PC is established out of the gate to be inappropriately horny, and when he finds adult magazines under the bed of the murder victim, a 12-year-old girl, this is said to inspire in him “despicable thoughts”. To me this is hard to read as anything other than an implication that he is in some way fantasizing about said 12-year-old. (Alternative possibilities mostly hinge on assuming the author is using “despicable” incorrectly, I feel.) Obviously this isn’t exactly condoned by the text, but it’s also not treated as very important. In the good ending, (Spoiler - click to show)he adopts the murder victim’s older sister, and this seems to be intended to be heartwarming rather than alarming. I think this aspect was in poor taste, and although it doesn’t come up much, it made me like the game much less.

This game is a murder mystery (one of several in this comp! Which isn't bad, there was one year where the 1st, 2nd, and 4th games were both murder mysteries) written in Twine, and fairly short to finish. It makes use of colored text, with red indicating closed off options, yellow with options to return to, and green for things found.

The idea is that some time ago, a girl disappeared, with her clothes being found in your uncle's basement and her body found eaten by crocodiles. Your uncle is convicted of sexual assault and convicted to death by crocodiles.

The gameplay consists of you searching around various locations in town, gathering clues and talking to individuals. You soon discover that things are far different than you might have been led to believe.

This feels like it might be a first game or a game of a newish author, as it has some classic mistakes new authors make (like having links that you can click over and over that repeat events like finding a key). If it is new, it's actually pretty good.

I didn't like the part where [spoiler]we look under a 12 year old girl's bed and find something undescribed that makes us aroused[/spoiler]. I did like the religious background we learn more about.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t really believe in “so bad it’s good” art – my experience is that even stuff that notionally seems like it would be campy fun winds up, if realized by sufficiently unskilled hands, leaden, poorly-paced, and dull. Sure, there’s definitely trashy stuff that’s executed well out there, but I’d argue that’s not really “bad”; likewise there are some things that people enjoy laughing at rather than with, but that usually feels too mean for me to enjoy, and regardless surely mocking something doesn’t magically transmute it into being good.

I do believe that there are games that can be so bad they’re interesting, though, and my notes for Big Fish are littered with pop-eyed what-the-absolute-fuck-am-I-looking-at-here moments. The framing of this mechanically simple (you go to some places and pick up a couple of items) Twine game led me to expect something true crime-ish: you get a letter from your favorite uncle, telling you that he’s sending it on the eve of being executed for a murder he was convicted of committing a year ago. He protests his innocence, though of course by the time you get the message it’s too late for him, but you nonetheless decide to posthumously vindicate him by investigating exactly what happened in the lakeside village where the girl lost her life. But the actual story Big Fish has to tell is far wilder than that, and by the time you’ve uncovered the truth you’ll have encountered crocodile cults, a crocodile Jesus, and genetic experiments with crocodile DNA (crocodiles are a pretty big deal here, is what I’m saying – your uncle was even executed by being thrown into the water for crocodiles to eat).

That’s all pretty weird, but the way the story is told is weirder still. Like, what’s going on with the protagonist? Here’s one of the very first things that happens in the game:

"You pick up your toothbrush and start brushing your teeth.

"The repetitive in-and-out motions bring some lewd thoughts to your mind."

Look, people are horny perverts, I get it, but find me someone who gets turned on by brushing their teeth, I dare you. Later on too I think the game indicates that you find some pornography(?) under the bed of one of the people you’re investigating, which seems to trigger an elliptically-described episode of some kind:

"You found a few things that shouldn’t be here under the bed.

"This led you to some despicable thoughts."

It plays coy about the protagonist in other ways too: the opening segment indicates that you’ve taken a leave of absence from the publishing house where you work to look into the killing, but here’s how you convince a policeman to give you access to his files:

"He only becomes slightly more respectful after you show your reporter ID.

"After showing another credential, he becomes very respectful."

So actually we’re a reporter? Or… something else?

Then there’s the bizarre stuff that seems like it might reflect bugs or incomplete edits? Like one of the first places you can visit in town is the hospital, where you’re told:

"Here we met the victim’s sister, Sarah… When I was in the archives, I saw a photo of her just after she was admitted a year ago. Her hair wasn’t as long then."

But I came to the hospital right after exploring the police archives, and not only wasn’t there a photo of Sarah, the fact that the victim had a sister wasn’t even mentioned! There’s also a medium-length sequence where the name of your uncle changes from Fleur to Fuller, and then back again.

There are whiplashes in tone, too – there’s an old woman who starts talking in oracular mumbo-jumbo that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantasy novel, and the game often veers wildly between goofy fun and e.g. clumsy speculation about sex crimes (one of many, many nonsensical twists is the game asserting that your uncle couldn’t have raped anybody because he’d been impotent since the death of his family which, uh, is not how any of this works and also ew).

There is an attempt to create a mystery that “plays fair” – at the end you’re given a choice of which culprit to finger, and it does seem like there are right and wrong answers, with the clues you’ve found helping you find the best outcome. But the game’s plot to that point is crammed with so many arbitrary assertions and illogical deductions that the process feels like playing darts while drunk and blindfolded.

With all that said, I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t enjoy some of the time I spent playing Big Fish with my jaw agape, utterly gobsmacked about where it might be going next. It’s definitely not a good game; it definitely needs content warnings more assertive than “maybe violence, gore, or sexual themes”; and its vision of a crocodile nailed to a cross is definitely implausible given the stubbiness of their arms. But it’s the memorable kind of bad, and at least that counts for something.