See You Around

See You Around is hypertext fiction about a couple/not-couple of musicians confronting each other about their relationship or lack of one. As far as interactivity goes, this is a straight story where you can choose to not take a diversion. The diversion gives extra context and technically you can choose some of them in different orders for a different experience, but it is reasonably straight text. The side forks are occasionally as long as the whole story, and perhaps provide essential context rather than additional details.

Some of the additional story are in the form of lyrics without music. They are readable, but come across as very literal. They feel like chorus rather than verse to the main story. I appreciate the use of different textual media to expand the story.

The two main characters are initially intriguing. The author clearly has a vision of each. They are detailed, but in a way that is gritty rather than visceral. There are gestures at deeper stories, but we don’t quite get to see them. A third character is a negative space character - never actually present but their presence and absence is felt.

The writing overall is quite competent but lacks depth in what the player/reader can witness. I recognise writing a lot like this in my twenties when I thought long and hard about each and every character, but the actual product that I wrote only projected faint glimmers of the story that lived large in my head. Louwagie suggests this is one part of a larger constellation of stories around the collective, so I can see how over time this world might fill out.

The ending I felt restated the earlier story rather than reinforced it, or recontextualise it. It didn’t feel earned and while the setup was all there, I just didn’t feel delight at the reference to the night at Jasmira’s.

In a way that’s easy for me to suggest but a horrendous amount of work for the author, I feel like I would have liked this game as two smaller games. The omniscient third person POV gave us both too much and too little insight to each character. Too much in that we would get the honest reflections of a character before switching to the other. Too little in that I only felt like I got the surface of the situation. If we saw the story through the eyes of each of the two main characters and really got in there, you might have a really fascinating story. The whininess of Alim might irritate in Jasmira’s mind, but feel justified in his.

I liked how the music in the game was collected as a Spotify playlist. I was hoping music would play a larger foundational role in the game, but it didn’t really. The playlist reveals this - 9 songs and the vast majority are referenced consecutively in a short section. And as a very minor stumble, the game is set in 1995 but the playlist contains versions from 2010 and beyond. But I very much appreciate the extra effort. Song choice is always very tricky... I know this from my first foray into IF with Mix Tape. I think See You Around did a much better job with music and song choice, although I think it had a lot more potential.

I hope to see more from Louwagie – stretching their wings to include more interactivity and more story. This is a bold first game from them, but I think they can go much further.