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Review
EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION: Use caution when opening attachments, clicking links, or responding.
Inspired by Tabitha’s recent poll, “Underrated (literally) games,” I’m taking a break from reviewing IFComp entries to share this game since I was already in the process of writing a review for it.
This is also an analysis-heavy review so get ready!
Tiny cafés are a staple in urban settings. They serve as meeting places, provide wi-fi, and of course, you can always get a bite to eat. And yet, they can feel soulless and devoid of life even if every table is occupied. People trudging along their daily shuffle without energy or passion or human connection.
Pauline Yael, our protagonist, dreams of starting an art café that will inject patrons with a zest for life and facilitate community through the arts, noticeboards, and of course, food.
3D-printed food.
Gameplay
The game begins by congratulating you on your purchase of a CookEasy 800 Pro™ which will surely make you a successful café owner.
[EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION] is linear and story driven. Gameplay is conducted by clicking on links in text boxes that pop-up in response to clicking on said links. There is only one puzzle (discussed further in the Story section) which involves (Spoiler - click to show)buying and combining the right combination of printer solution.
And if the game tells you to write something down, WRITE IT DOWN.
A big weakness is that the game does not allow you to save. Restarting and clicking dozens of links to reach the part that you want to revisit is tedious after one or two playthroughs. It detracts from the replay value and may discourage players from finding every ending.
Not being able to save is especially frustrating when it’s possible to put the game into an unwinnable state by losing the box with the link needed to progress the gameplay AND losing the box that came before it. Also, the main boxes on the center of the screen are immovable, which was a problem when a crucial box got stuck behind it.
One helpful alternative to a save function would be to make it so the player can play the game once and then unlock an option to skip ahead on their next playthrough, perhaps when Fyodorov- I’ll get to him in a minute- shows up. But going through the whole intro all over again gets tedious when you just want to get to the meat of the gameplay.
Story
Background
Pauline’s vision always seems to be right around the corner. Right now, she has a café, but surely it will soon become an art café, just as she envisioned. Then, one day, her machine ceases to work. A news article explains why:
Nibbl LLC Declares Bankruptcy, Ending Support for its Line of Popular Culinary 3D Printers
In other words, printer solutions and proprietary software for anyone with a CookEasy 800 Pro™ are no more. The machine is useless, a “mute obelisk.” Until Pauline’s tech-savvy nephew, Greg, comes to the rescue.
Greg introduces her to the world of biohacking and jailbreaking. Pauline is surprised to learn that not everyone has been using their food printers for food creation. Biohackers have tinkered with their CookEasy 800 Pro™ (now technically OpenCook 800) to use it in ways beyond what they were manufactured for.
…overworked mothers and motherly cafe managers were alike were having to figure out the nearest food-grade bioscaffold they could order from industrial lab supply catalogs to load through a funnel into the modified proprietary hoppers...
He shows her how to run her printer on an open protocol, allowing her to join a community of business-minded tech users that now download recipes from the internet (instead of only using company-approved ones) and experimenting with printer bioscaffold solutions to print even more possibilities.
With just a bit of guidance from Greg, Pauline is back in action. He does, however, warn her to avoid any recipe-related emails in her spam box. She agrees. Then one day, she gets an unexpected spam message from someone named Nikolai Fyodorov.
Spoilers!
The story centers around this email from Nikolai Fyodorov, (Spoiler - click to show)a digital ghost contacting Pauline via her printer's email.
Nikolai Fyodorov
Nikolai Fyodorov is not a fictional character. He was a Russian philosopher who was born in 1829 and died just at the start of the 20th century.
Fyodorov founded the cosmism movement which sought to realize humanity's "cosmic destiny" through the intersections of science, religion, and metaphysics. This included establishing a unified worldview shared by humanity that would drive our efforts to pursue immortality and further explore the universe. These philosophies would later become a precursor to transhumanism, a belief that technology can and should be used to extend the human lifespan and enhance quality of life.
He focused on life extension, immortality, and challenging the permanency of death. A key principle he embraced was called the Common Task which argued the importance of working collaboratively to remove the barrier between the living and deceased. To make death obsolete so all of humanity can be reunited. The Common Task also forms the backbone of the game's story.
His Proposal
Somehow, despite having died over a century ago, he transcended in a way that allows him to contact Pauline through her printer. He wants her to help him with the Common Task.
[email protected] #EXTERNAL# Hello Dear Friend - I understand we d 4:21 AM
Pauline is pretty sure this is a scam, but she’s curious, nonetheless. The way he writes is more eloquent and sincere than your typical scammer and her lack-luster life as a struggling business owner have made her desperate for meaningful human interaction.
He claims that he knows how to return to the physical world by being printed with Pauline’s CookEasy 800 Pro™ which, after all, can supposedly print non-food items. His plan is for her to print a physical body for him, allowing him to share his insight with the world and take the first step forward towards fulfilling the Common Task.
As I mentioned earlier, there is only one puzzle. That puzzle is making sure you (Spoiler - click to show)follow his instructions to the letter. Your success in doing so determines the ending.
Because there is no way of saving the game, here’s a tip: If you want the best ending, make sure you (Spoiler - click to show)get the Medical Grade (MG) Stratasis, not the Food Grade (FG) Stratasis. It’s meant to trip the player up. Remember, we’re printing a human body here.
Endings
There are three endings. (Spoiler - click to show)Success, partial success, and failure.
After spoiling much of the story, I am hesitant to spoil the endings as well, so I won’t go into detail. I will say, I found the (Spoiler - click to show)partial success to be kind of dorky. The game's description describes itself as "creepycozy," and while I was hoping for more of the creepy side, it does lean closer towards cozy. That said, the (Spoiler - click to show)success ending was rather eerie.
Also, I wish the success ending had more of an epilogue, though I cannot deny it ends on a suspenseful note, leaving it up to the player’s imagination on what will happen.
Characters
To supplement what I’ve already shared about the characters, I will use this section to provide further reflection.
Fyodorov
I understand that Nikolai Fyodorov’s character portrayal is abstract. We’re supposed to take it at face value and not chew the little details.
Our objective of printing a human body out of a machine designed for food is summarized as "reensoulling a resurrected body from the panpsychic ether of atomic-level consciousness." I’ll admit, it took time for me to piece this all together.
Fyodorov is a believer in panpsychism, the notion that all types of matter contain consciousness, and that the concept of the mind is interwoven with the fabric of reality itself. It also explains Fyodorov’s continued existence. As the game puts it, panpsychism “seemed to be the mechanism by which Fyodorov could intermittently communicate with her, even over 120 years on from his seeming death,” and he explains this concept to her.
However, it can get a bit too abstract to follow. Like when the game says, “he still made sure to greet her every time the atoms aligned somewhere, well enough, that his consciousness could travel out into the world.”
By “greet her,” are we still talking about sending her emails? I think the game starts to overly rely on hand waving without giving the player a chance to absorb what’s going on.
Then again, maybe we’re not supposed to fully understand it, allowing us to experience these developments like Pauline does: exhilarated, confused, yet willing to make a leap of faith because, why not? I think it’s safe to say that he is not merely a digital ghost. I suppose the meaning of the word “external” in “[email protected] #EXTERNAL#” and the game’s title refers to communication from an external source outside of physical reality and the digital realm.
Lastly, I am curious to know why the author chose Fyodorov, specifically, to be the person who contacts our protagonist. I wonder if there were other candidates under consideration. After looking at the illustration of Fyodorov shown in the game (taken from Wikipedia), I have a really hard time visualizing someone from his era ever being tech savvy enough to email someone in the year 2034, but you never know.
Pauline
Pauline is a single, 30-something woman from the UK who, like most of us, seeks to fulfill goals and navigate the mundanity of everyday living. And while one may not necessarily identify with her desire to open an art café, her frustrations about stagnating in life are relatable for many.
Throughout the game, she makes realizations about herself and the modern world. She realizes the exploitable nature of the advertising used to sell the CookEasy 800 Pro™ and how it targeted demographics, such as herself, by appealing to the consumer’s desire for convenience- a convenience that would enable one to devote their time and energy into pursing life passions. It sold a dream, not just a product.
In Pauline’s case, she wants to use her CookEasy 800 Pro™ to start an art café. A space to foster community and brighten people’s lives. However, the day-to-day logistics of running a café has made it difficult to honor the art part of “art café.”
And is it something she still wants?
…it didn’t fulfill the original fantasy that it was sold on. Her cafe didn’t feel more chic, or like the food was making customers that much more happy.
Her café hadn’t transformed people’s lives like she had hoped. Plus, 3D-printed food is, honestly, not that great. If you live off it, it tastes decent enough but fails to get anywhere close to handmade cooking performed by a human. This is yet another realization she makes.
(Spoiler - click to show)And so, learning about panpsychism and metaphysics has enriched Pauline’s view of the world. The drudgery of daily life is invigorated with the knowledge of a consciousness in everything. Suddenly, mundane choices have meaning, and the possibility of actually meeting the entity behind the mysterious emails is something she looks forward to.
As eager as she is to embrace Fyodorov’s teachings, Pauline still reserves some room for skepticism. She ponders the feasibility of the Common Task, as well as the implications if a unified view of the universe were achieved. Would that stifle individuality or make it obsolete? Nonetheless, she is willing to embrace the unknown by taking this first step.
Visuals
This game is made with Jupiter, a nifty choice-based system that uses pop-up boxes containing text to tell the story. It works perfectly here since the story spends a lot of time on emails and user interfaces, and the pop-up boxes reflect this. Some even have scroll bars.
It also experiments with different colours, fonts, text sizes, and even includes two photographs, one of which depicts a piece of 3D-printed meat. While it mostly uses a black background, there are moments where the background is a cool 3D grid pattern.
Final thoughts
If you’ve read through my review and made it this far, congratulations, I’m almost done.
[EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION] covers a range of themes familiar to today’s world including biohacking, generational differences in tech-savviness, the overlap of consumer and industrial sectors, and the use of exploitive advertising to sell a dream with the goal of getting people like Pauline to buy a product. It also delves into more abstract and philosophical themes related to (Spoiler - click to show)panpsychism and Fyodorov’s Common Task.
A World Not Unlike Our Own
Ultimately, it points out that Pauline’s world is a near-reflection of the one we currently live in. We may not have CookEasy 800 Pro™ on store shelves, but we can relate to the commoditization of the individual and a desire to find meaning in a dull, modern existence. If we came across (Spoiler - click to show)our own equivalent of Nikolai Fyodorov, would we jump at the opportunity?
I enjoyed this game for its build-up of suspense and the creative visuals used to tell the story. I even learned a bit of history in the process. If you are interested in science fiction that intersects with metaphysics, give [EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION] a try.
