Portrait with Wolf

How does one talk about a game like this? By saying everything? By saying nothing? If someone speaks a certain language — English, for instance — then you'll probably need to speak the language, too, to converse with them. If you're playing a game and it has its own language, then you'll need to adopt that same language, as the player, to converse with the game. Some games teach you their language as you play. Sometimes the lesson is a trial-by-fire. You emerge blistered, impassioned, alive — or you burn and you die.

This game isn't going to kill anyone, but it might burn. It will certainly bite. It feels impossible to describe, because it already describes itself perfectly with its own language, and what other language is left? How can a reviewer possibly translate the experience for someone who hasn't experienced it?

Well, that's the trick about art, isn't it? You live your life, you experience things, and you try to put those things into artwork to share with other people — other people who, invariably, cannot have lived your life, and therefore cannot know what you experienced! But you try anyway. We all try to bridge the gap.

This game is explicitly concerned with making art. That's what you do in the game: you make art. You put things into that art. Four things, again and again. Cats. Turnips. Boots. Astronauts. These four motifs shape every piece you create.

But the cats, turnips, boots, and astronauts in this game are not synonymous with the cats, turnips, boots, and astronauts that you might find outside the game. They are words in another language, the game's own, and their meanings warp and change.

Artwork can liberate the spirit. Artwork can also trap the spirit, like a demon imprisoned in a bottle — or a wolf in a cage. Artwork can pin down a shifting definition, anchor an unstable world, and also unmoor everything. Portrait with Wolf presents artwork as therapy, as a method to vent the spleen, capture a nightmare, process trauma. But to process trauma is to confront it. To put the wolf in the cage, you must handle the wolf, and wolves have fangs and claws and appetites. They fight. They draw blood.

How much relief can art really provide? Can a person in pain truly purge their pain through painting? What if they paint their pain again? And again? And again, and again, and again. And again. What if you force them to paint it again, because it's "good" for them.

The difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose.

This game, I think, has a cousin: Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes by B Minus Seven. Maybe the cousins haven't met, but there's a family resemblance. (Besides, we're all related in the end, aren't we?) Both games are drunk on language. Both games play with it, deconstruct it to let something out, reconstruct it to lock something in. Both games rip themselves open to show their beating code. They demolish conventional narrative structures and build wonders in the rubble. They fight you. They lash out. They resist. They know how to resist, and they're good at it, because they have been hurt and they've learnt how to protect themselves.

Portrait with Wolf is beautiful and ugly. It's funny and depressing. It takes the "collect all the endings" mechanic (which I typically dislike) and actually leverages it for a thematic payoff! That's rare, in my experience. This mechanic, which is common, commonly hampers narrative flow by making you replay the same sequences, with diminishing returns, until the drama has been sapped. Here, it isn't sapped; it's sharpened.

Portrait with Wolf is also incredibly, unabashedly artsy. It experiments with just about every element of the parser medium. Some players will love it. Many, I imagine, will not. Wolves aren't known for their affability. They can be difficult, even deadly, to approach. But what great eyes and ears this wolf has! And what a way with words.

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.

Portrait with Wolf is a poetic game. Or, a collection of smaller games. When you open it, you have a one-room game and a standard Inform header but with Info for a different game. You have 4 choices you can select from. Choosing one of them gives you a brief ending, then reboots to a new miniature one-room game with four choices.

The choices have different words each time but represent CAT, TURNIP, BOOT, and ASTRONAUT. Wolves are also a recurring theme.

After making 6 choices, you are given an ending. How much of different choices you've made affects which ending you get.

After collecting all the standard endings, you can go on to get a few more complicated endings. I played until I was able to unlock all the GUIDE options.

I initially wrote a review of this game saying that I didn't really understand it, and documented my extensive efforts to find hidden meaning in the game. I didn't feel satisfied with my review, though, so I sought out more clarification on the game, reading other's reviews and asking the author for clarity.

I found out that I had framed the game incorrectly. I had thought the point of the game was to find clues in the text to piece together a mystery. While I enjoyed the art that reminded me of Van Gogh's thick oil style (with brighter colors and subject matter reminiscent of lovingly-illustrated German fairy tale books I read as a kid), I thought it was tangential to the work as a reward for solving the text mystery.

Instead, the game is meant as an experimental work. Had I paid closer attention to the Spring Thing blurb and in-game explanation, I would have seen that it was an homage to the former IF art shows, where I think it would have fit well; Emily Short and Ian Finley would likely have seen this game as a great fit for those competitions (I mention Ian Finley as he also excelled in artistic, artwork-centered experimentation).

As an experiment, this game does many things that are highly unusual. It takes parser affordances more typical for challenging puzzle games (like careful explanation text, error messages, guides, etc.) and incorporates them into a non-goal seeking context. (I say non-goal seeking even though the game does have goals, but the goals are more 'here is what you can see', like Jacqueline Ashwell's The Fire Tower, another IF Art Show game, rather than 'solve the puzzle). Additionally, the creative use of the Inform game header was something that struck me as the game's most intriguing part, using the most dull and tedious part of a regular game and turning it into one of the more fascinating portions of the game.

Part of the poetry sections of this game have been spun off into extensions. The complex menus and ending systems are also an experiment that I could see find use in a variety of other games, especially the presentation of endings and unlocked material.

I played the original spring thing online play version, which jumps directly into the text. The new version, which I played on itch after writing my initial review, has a beautiful opening image that significantly enhances the initial impression. I'd be interested in learning more about how the image scaling was handled.

I was glad to get a new perspective on the game, as I had set out to do. It was on my mind for the whole day after I wrote my original review, and I didn't feel settled. I do now.