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Can't Hear No Buzzers and Spells, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part five of the review sub-series “Twinesformers: Parsers in disguise.” The latest reviewed work to derive gameplay from parser traditions, but bend Twine to the task. In gameplay, I found this to be on the rough side of the spectrum. There is a main story pane, which has links to interesting objects inside location descriptions, and a side pane which contains command buttons (Explore, Go, Action, Talk, Cast). You bounce back and forth between location pane and command pane, often needing two or three clicks to get anything done. In my head, this seemed like an interesting paradigm to maybe apply to Texture, building on what All Hands showed us was possible. Here, not only was it clumsy, it was also… visually unappealing? New links could spring in above the text in a disruptive and laundry-listy way.
The spell system has a nice idea behind it, but similarly suffers inelegant UI. You learn spells throughout the game, eventually discovering (Spoiler - click to show)prefix/suffix combos can be recombined to do new things! That is a really cool mechanism, narratively well timed! It is undermined a bit by text choice. You get SO many of them, it is almost impossible to keep them all in your head, so casting becomes a (Spoiler - click to show)lawnmower of combining sub-words until you get the effect you want. The prefixes at least have some kind of mnemonic juice to them, the suffixes felt totally, unintuitively random. The puzzles are mostly straightforward, more pushing at the interface model than brain burning, but there is a nifty time loop one.
In isolation, these gameplay challenges kind of straddle the Notable/Intrusive boundary. Against a bland narrative they would be the dominant takeaway and tip Intrusive. Boy oh boy is this narrative not bland!
It throws a lot of things against the wall, without having any idea how to unify them. The main narrative tone is light bro-comedy, a fraternity of wizards literally called BRO engaged in a low stakes paintball game. It is twisting Potter lore for comedy, but also background, and can’t decide which it wants more. Sometimes Potter lore is fictional, sometimes real depending on the needs of the scene. It is also an allegory for persecution and prejudice, diving into dissonantly serious flashbacks of disturbing magic-user abuse by not-even-thinly-misnamed Muggles. It kind of inverts the whole Potter engagement with these topics without a lot of thought or control or comment on the inspiration’s takes. It also feels a bit off. The wizards in question are uniformly white dudes. Casting them as an oppressed minority has kind of a squicky, coopted ‘no, I’m the victim here’ vibe that doesn’t sit right. Or it wouldn’t EXCEPT…
It is ALSO, and this is my favorite, weirdly homo-erotic! There are almost no females in the game, barring one whom the protagonist showed complete ambivalence toward in the face of her clear romantic interest. The frat bros are super emotionally supportive of each other, a tack not typically associated with sexist Animal House vintage comedies. And OH those wand descriptions. Yeah, wands. Y’know sometimes wands are just cigars. Deeehfinitely not here though. Paintball attacks are openly, gleefully ejaculatory. The spell to paint an opponent is SPLORT. One character’s wand is, and I’m spoilering this not because it’s not great, but because you’ll laugh more if you find it while playing, (Spoiler - click to show)TURGID. It is sold I think by the completely deadpan delivery. It’s not QUITE clear the narrative knows what it’s doing here, even though it definitely does. This playful comedy subtext lends deniability to the ‘poor, persecuted white dudes’ angle. Not a lot, but maybe just enough.
So I guess it’s a gay Potter prejudice-trauma bro-comedy? Well now that I see it written out, there’s almost certainly slashfic of this out there. Despite its loose stitching and contradictions, I kinda love it for that? I think the tone saves it - even its most dire parts focus on the puzzle in play, backgrounding the worst excesses in shadow. Kind of. Usually. Also, isolating the harder themes to flashback provides a narrative break from the lighter, subtext-oblivious paintball sections. You can see I’m bending over backwards to try to justify this strange, strange melange. I’ll tell you one thing, with all this going on, for sure the UI paradigm was NOT my main focus as I was playing!
Just too internally dissonant for Engaging, but raging, bouncing Sparks of Joy showering the place, just splattering all over a Notably intrusive UI.
I am so, so sorry for that. I am an adolescent.
Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 2hr, not finished, 4/5 foes, 4 medallions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable kludgy interface, bonus point for unhinged narrative stew
Would Play After Comp?: Yeah, I kinda think I have to… (oh no, I just, I have no excuse…) …finish.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless