The Deluge

In The Deluge, floodwater doesn’t pollute, drown, conceal, or cleanse–at least not totally. It mostly just makes everything–the town, the landscape, the protagonist’s sense of themselves, their memories and relationships–kind of vague and eerie and unstable, which is a vibe that I am super into.

Many of the locations have a kind of generic placelessness to them: the mall with its thrift shop and basement club, the school (designed by a “moderately famous architect”), the town square, the forest. There are vague references to the history of the town and the Indigenous people who lived there first, but nothing specific enough to actually place it anywhere on a map (besides being somewhere in an ever-widening flood zone, I guess). Similarly, the main character is going through what seems to be kind of generalized early-20s soul-searching: “In the half-light from the rooms outside, your face’s reflection looks unfamiliar. You can’t look at it for a moment before turning away, colder than you were before.” The other characters feel just as hazy: the “frenemy” who is committed to staying in town, the friend (perhaps more than a friend?) who got out. Everything in this game seems to float just beyond the edge of feeling “real,” which I suspect is very intentional, especially in light of the H.D. poem that closes the game.

On the Review-a-thon poll, the author mentioned that this is their first game, and I did get the sense that, in addition to telling a story, the author might have been testing out a location system, a clueing system, and using conditionals to gate off progress. The clues did help me proceed through the game pretty smoothly, but in future efforts, I think stronger narrative motivation for actions (beyond, e.g., you have a feeling you need to come back here) would be more effective.

In general, though, I thought this was a solid first effort, and a great depiction of a town and a character suspended between here and there.