See You Around

The thing about patterns of behavior is that they’re patterns for a reason. Like, absent some very intensive work on mindfulness and self-awareness, they will recur despite one’s best intentions. Here’s a hyper-specific case in point: outside of the true giants in the earth, I think of current participants in the IF scene it’s pretty much just Brett Witty and myself who were also active in the first years after the turn of the millennium. Funnily enough, we directly crossed paths in the halcyon days of 2005 because I reviewed his debut game. Mix Tape, I think we’d all agree with the benefit of hindsight, was a noble attempt to write a parser game focused on characters, grounded situations, and emotions that didn’t fully succeed for a variety of reasons. And my review enumerated those reasons in I think a fair-minded way, but did so after a snarky opening establishing my indie-music-snob dominance by saying the game’s preferred cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (Rufus Wainwright’s) wasn’t as good as my preferred cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley’s).

The aughts were a foreign country and we were all a lot snarkier then, and of course many, many (many, many) years have passed since then. Still, I sometimes think with regret of how I gave into my more sneering instincts, and resolve to do better, but it’s a pattern of behavior, so I know I sometimes repeat it nonetheless.

I mention this in finally getting around to See You Around because it presents about the most naked test-case imaginable for whether I’ve learned anything over the past 21 years, because a disturbing portion of my raw notes are yet more nit-picking snobbery, much of it focused on music. Should I give it vent, or try to be high-minded and ignore my impulses?

Well, I think I’ll split the difference (this too is a pattern of behavior) and do the thing while trying to ground it in a principle less idiosyncratic than personal taste. So: this is a short game with only two real characters, and one and a half scenes: the protagonist is a musician living in a St. Paul art collective who sometimes resorts to sex work to make rent, and we follow her as she heads out on one such excursion. But it’s interrupted by an encounter with an ex, another resident of the collective with whom she’d had a fling a few months previous; we get a brief flashback to their meet-cute, then pick up the action from there. We get a big of deeper backstory and a short jump forward at the end, with interspersed lyrics from songs written by both characters (these work about as well as any lyrics do shorn of their natural habitat, which is to say they’re not super compelling but generally not embarrassing either). None of the plot beats are especially surprising, and the gameplay is entirely straightforward – the player is clicking to continue with the occasional opportunity to get a bit of additional context.

All told this means that the game is setting itself up to live or die on its texture: the strength of its writing, and its ability to provide concrete details that can take a familiar plot and make it raw and visceral. And here is where I’ll levy complaints about some of those details, starting with the music: I’m not super acquainted with the mid-90s Twin Cities music scene, but these characters are embedded in it and sure should be conversant with its key figures. But the touchstones the game offers up are the Goo Goo Dolls and Del Amitri and the Smashing Pumpkins – which were in heavy rotation on radio stations in suburban New York, where I grew up – instead of, I dunno, Husker Dü or the Replacements or Lifter Puller or other more locally-relevant folks.

The other detail in this vein has to do with the protagonists’ names. See, the meet-cute involves the ex, Amir, buttonholing the protagonist, Jasmina, by her mailbox: he’s seen her name around the building and his excuse for striking up a conversation is wondering whether it means that she’s Persian, like he is. But “Jasmina” isn’t really a Persian name; it would be “Yasmina” or “Yasmin” in Farsi, but we know he’s pronouncing it with a J because the game specifies that he says it a different way than she does.

I am very aware that I am carping here. But it’s not that the bands the game name-checks are lame and the ones I mentioned two paragraphs up are cool, or that there’s anything inherently interesting about the wonky phonetics of the English J. It’s that these were real missed opportunities to make the game feel distinctive – and See You Around isn’t robust enough to be able to afford not to swing at many pitches. The way it depicts its central relationship is basically fine, but not especially deep on its own: we get the fumbling beginnings of a relationship, a hint of its first complication as Jasmina’s defensive barriers cause her to drift away from Amir, and then a moment of reconciliation as his embittered take on what happened between them triggers an aggrieved attempt to set the record straight. The plot is fine as melodrama – and the sex scene struck me as solidly written, which is no mean feat – but didn’t wind up deeply engaging me in the characters or situation. Perhaps the story of how they broke up for good would be a more interesting one, but since that’s only adverted to, rather than depicted, I can only say that what’s on offer here is a bit too normcore to make a deep impression – heck, with the perspective of 20 years, I might have even preferred it if Amir had paused proceedings to wax lyrical about his love for Rufus Wainwright, misguided though it might be.