Portrait with Wolf

This is a game about assembling a portrait by selecting one of four motifs (cat, turnip, boot, astronaut). Each time you make your selection, you see some text, and the process repeats a certain number of times until you reach an ending.

My first playthrough of this game took about five minutes, and I put that in as the time it takes to complete the game, but it's misleading since you can play many, many times and get many, many different endings. There's an ending achievement system and extra content unlocked in the "guide" (which is more like another part of the game) as you achieve more endings. Over about two hours I've found dozens of endings, and I'm sure there are more. Probably. The mechanics are purposefully obtuse. I didn't get enough sleep last night.

The writing is very abstract. For the most part it's impossible to pin down a concrete meaning to the words. It feels like modernist poetry. Or postmodernist poetry. Whatever it is, I'm not smart enough to know. Something faintly autobiographical but presented in a scattered, fragmented way. Fiction and reality juxtaposed. Snippets of a life. The repeating symbols of the cat, turnip, boot, astronaut, and wolf hovering alongside, the wolf in the gallery, which might mean something if you squint, maybe not...

There are also overarching returns to abuse, pain and trauma. It feels a bit like a nightmare, in that way.

And there's a lot of playing around with the look of default Inform menus. The standard ways of displaying Game A by Author B, Short Description C, Release D, You Have Reached Ending E, get messed with until they become part of the conceit.

The occasional passage with more clarity describes an American life, the life of someone who apparently has or had several cats, who has lived through something that might be a marriage or relationship, and mental illness and solitude, who stares out the window at night and sees the blinking lights of suburban houses... a ground truth buried in this labyrinth of images. But it's difficult to tell for sure.

I liked it, being a fan of surrealism. The sleep deprivation also might've helped, who's to say.

Finally I want to mention that in the Pactdice TTRPG setting created by Wildbow, there are locations called "Paths", extradimensional dreamrealms that can be navigated by "Finders" in a videogame-like fashion. By completing the right steps, a Finder can beat a Path (like beating a game) and receive a reward. But the Paths are also occupied by the Wolf, the manifestation of your personal trauma, who wants to torture and kill you while destroying everything you've spent your life building. It's a pretty cool setting. It has absolutely nothing to do with this game, but I was reminded of it due to the Wolf thing.

I will probably keep playing this and may update the review if I unlock anything that explains more.

An excerpt:

Natural Nature
A spiraling fancy by Kim I. Colburns
Release V / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

You're ruining everything.

Throne Room
Are you a good kid? A good little person?

All night you have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
(*C*) cat dreaming of wolves
(*T*) turnip at the she-wolf's breast (times incorporated: 1)
(*B*) underwater footprint
(*A*) martian canal hobo (times incorporated: 2)

>b

It doesn't hurt.

Stop yelling!
It doesn't hurt
much





*** The Lithium Makes Your Blood Bitter ***



Just try to enjoy it.

Selfaggressive collapse deferred, in Repeat the Ending, by metaslips layering baroque are beaten back flat by Portrait with Wolf’s drumbeat brutalizer, collapsuling your airless in ever yet “Another ending to repeat.” Every choice shunted into atomized dissonance returns you to the nowhere from whom you’ve carved shelter, darkness as “possibility. It is important to remain still so that you don’t trip over—or into—anything. / When the lights come up, you are left with the default.” Remain here screams the recoil from each sensation, sneering omnipresence of exposed nerves jittery to jumpstart sparks to blackout on the floor breathing nowhere, nowhere, “The less you look, the better it feels.” Analgesis craving for the less of lifeless, entomb bonecrisp of the cold a cavity’s cavein, but that only means “Your happiness: / held still / held by the earth”. You will, tomorrow, still be held by the earth? Yes? Yes? “The dark and the silence. They seem to go on forever. At any moment, you could become unmoored, just fall into it and fall forever. You could fall into the dark but never fall out. And it’s so quiet. If you couldn’t hear your own heart, would you even exist? Just imagine, falling forever, tumbling into nothing, just absence forever. / Something shifts: a different kind of nothing on the stairs.”

Panic from the nothing as it rears Nothing bursts us through anxious fragment fulminations against which the parser structure pressurizes back to selfcollapse with acerbs of “I hope you aren’t crying again.” These fragments sparkle, through splinter emotives, the totality we antagonize protistor. Between embers and their ashy windswipeds we mourn the lack of an inside burning: “Family consumed by a doom of rats, crashing in waves. Lattices of fungi rustling within a book lung.” We’re promised tomorrow will come, and maybe this is the only dream he has truly believed, even as whatever he imagines would happen doesn’t happen and this doesn’t happening becomes a habit, because tomorrow is still a promise, persisting in its delustory “untreated for a while, to get away with all that there was to get away with”, til it’s all away but we’re still here waiting: “Wait there, by the window. Wait. There’s no reaching the door, you know that. Wait. There is something large and hot on your chest, and your breath must squeeze through your cracked center. Wait there. Good. Wait.” Drowning jolt of, no, why would you not wait, where could you get going? “What do you see there, beyond the window? Other windows.” So you wait, tomorrow will come, and so “The problem of your thingness / goes unsolved”.

If, after all, “We give up on luck / the way we give up on love / long after it ends”, then how surprised we will be when tomorrow comes, with it its disasters. The voidaverse admit what we’ve become, diminish wisher, and the loves, the not so innocent and why the innocent, thrum with irreversibility guilt, even if you fight your way out of this hole you’ll never recover those abandoned on the surface: “While you were falling forever, your parents got old. The cat got old. You were preserved by the cold, not enough ox to oxidize, a cut apple forever fresh. Tart suspended in sweet. Damp noise behind a bite.” Freezing stasis of stored beneath time, you were not a shelter, at least not the one for the ones trusting, so abashed escape into the nulla, start the ending finally, you’re not so sure why a tomorrow should come, why run when the quicksand acts faster: “The ground is too soft to stand on, and it is too hard to get out of.” Enough of envy, let go of the sky, lower the lid and spasm wildly for air: “Even as panic crashed through you, the world sang blandly on: far away cars, birds, pine needles combing a light wind. / How long were you there? Fear is a dead star’s weight, pulling and flattening time, and even if it ends, it is never over.”

Because there is some body out there waiting for us to inhabit its instillations? Even if it’s not a tomorrow, a terminal in which to wait, savor, spool out an unthreaded trust of this needling: “Isn’t it time to move on, to forgive yourself and move on? There is so much joy in life: the park in late September, a fresh muffin from the corner bakery, the short week before the grievy vacancy of the hardwoods settles. / That belongs to somebody else. It isn’t yours. You will always be back, or on your way back. You only leave to come back.” Why should it belong to somebody else? What else would an else be but this choice otherwise? Even chthonic the catalepsis structures a defiance of will: “Anything—a car door, a faraway dog, a train whistle traveling far over still air—you are its only witness! These experiences belong to you, they are yours, and someone would have to tunnel through your organs to reach them.” Experiential espermutor of the echo, in here is an in here the pressures can contract but never counteract: “You are places in the earth. You are a place in the dark. / You are a hearing, and a sound is only its hearing.” Song of the lost voices is as sufficiency of the afterlife available to you, erasure is only temporary composure of a nothingness yet to give: “A room blanching in white light. The rest is fascination.” The lifechoice then to glorious whatsowhether.

“Is this it? Have you made it?” The fragments, as often they’re wont, don’t fully realize the feeling that follows. In this respect perhaps Repeat the Ending is, by virtue of a greater ambition, also a greater optimist. But what do you want, the world? “This city: a cool vividness, a printer’s tray of cherishments. A baffling insufficiency.”