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Review
The identity of Black Thumb’s protagonist is never made that big a deal: this is a magic-realist game about the lengths you’ll go to to make sure your new succulent can get enough sun. There are no other characters to talk to, no moments of self-actualization or revelation, just a short series of object-interaction puzzles that escalate in delightful ways. And yet part of what I like about it is that it’s unmistakably teenaged. Take the game’s single full location: a messy room short on conventional decorations or well-appointed furniture, but full of the main character’s obsessions: half-completed knitting projects, piles of sketches, and plants. Here’s the description of the bed:
Your bed is pushed up against two walls. You like to sleep pressed up against that corner sometimes. The blankets — for there are many — for you are never warm enough — somehow managed to twist themselves up into tight spirals while you were asleep.
In just a few lines of lazily discursive text, and with just a few implemented objects, the game captures a very specific phase of life, when you’re brimming over with energy and relatively unburdened by responsibilities, free to jump into anything with single-minded focus and a lack of concern for proprieties. Like, when I examined the desk and was told it was super dusty, I of course tried to CLEAN DESK, only to face reproof:
It’s covered in dust. Even if you were to clean it off, it would just come back eventually.
Man, sometimes it feels like half my life these days is neglecting to make progress on the stuff I notionally care about because I’ve got to clean stuff that’s just going to get dirty again eventually. So I enjoyed the chance to leave that way of being behind, at least for a little while, and that early-established vibe helped me stay in sync with the wilder directions the game goes. See, what starts as a straightforward exercise in following the instructions on your new cactus’s care-card – get them out of the box, place them on a windowsill where there’s plenty of light – quickly shifts gears. The sun just isn’t sufficiently bright by your room, and the care-card encourages you to try an impossible action to remedy the situation. It doesn’t quite work, but you’ve got tools on hand that can fix that…
Games that require you to type something physically impossible to progress run a big risk, because while the payoff of seeing your out-of-left-field idea work is potentially huge, in practice it can be very tough to get the player to take that leap. There’s clueing both direct and indirect to help with this – beyond the care-card, the few interactive objects serve to prod you in the right direction – but it’s the pervasive mood of whimsy and potential set by the more quotidian elements of Black Thumb’s intro that helped make this moment land for me, in both puzzle-design and thematic terms. There are a few small infelicities of the kind that bedevil many authors making their Comp debuts – trying to TOUCH stuff gives you customized text as well as the default “you feel nothing unexpected” response, the special one-time thing that happens when you TAKE GLOVE fires on subsequent attempts too, and the logic of making a clay jar fireproof by stuffing it with paper eludes me. But who cares when the author is offering something so clever, lyrical, self-possessed, and absolutely committed to its vision?
