Portrait with Wolf

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 45m, 13/8 bailed without unlocking Guide sections

Light-fantasy parsers run the risk of become samey in a player’s mind. Both in the moment and more so on reflection. They are such a staple of the field, you really have to cut new ground somehow to get them to stand out. Similarly for slice-of-life relationship dramas, though those at least have the hook of (usually) singular character work. Y’know what I can’t accuse of saminess? Weird poetry- and art- driven works that marry an impish sense of humor, playfulness of form and nearly opaque bizarrity.

Those things stick with you. I offer PWW as Exhibit A here.

The conceit, such as it is, is to select a series of abstractly themed art inspirations, to nominally sketch for an installation. Choose six times from a pool of four categories, three of which are delightfully random. The fourth being ‘a cat.’ In return you get a pithy line, a spot of poetry, a quasi-parser room description, or an anecdote, all very evocative and also standalone and unrelated to each other. All of it presented under a mutating boilerplate ‘restart’ title-author.

Y’know one way to get me to stop complaining about ‘poetry’? Make it good. Y’know the other way? Keep me so off balance, mentally, that I don’t have time to fuss with that, consumed as I am with clawing for mental purchase against the opaque logic of the thing. PWW does BOTH of those things! It would be easy to push into a state where I would just throw my hands in the air in desperation and futility and abandon things. Which I eventually did. But MAN did it take a long time!

The playful vibe of the thing is its overriding impression, just dazzling with inventiveness and unexpected text. This is augmented by a “guide/help system” that seems to be as playful as the rest of the work, if a bit more structured. I say ‘seems’ because I never actually got to consume much of it.

Oh, I was gamely playing along, no doubt about that. I was really enjoying it. After each set of 6, there was a portentous “status is X out of eight” message. Clear enough, right? As I closed in on 8 though, after hitting its wild themes in many combinations.. nothing changed. Well, one thing changed, I started to get some repetition. This did not itself break things, those repetitions were scattered among many novel ideas, but it did make me think ‘if you KNOW the player is going to go for 6x8 = 48 of these things, wouldn’t you have at least that many in the chamber, front-loaded?’ That was only a mild ripple compared to what happened when I closed the 8th run.

Which was nothing. No newly available guide sections were unlocked. No achievements noted. No textual acknowledgement other than the score itself. If the end note highlighted anything, it did not read as significant or different than the wryly fantastic observations of the other 7. So I kept going. 9/8, 10/8… all the way to 13/8. More and more repetition, but nothing new of note. Ok that’s a crazy thing to say about this work. SO MUCH new playful text. Just nothing new ludically.

I mean, I clearly missed the point of this. Let me tell you one more thing about how I engaged this piece. This Spring Thing has inflicted on me a variety of feline-influenced works at this point. You KNOW I am bull headed about this. For the first 8 runthroughs, I ignored that inspiration and only played with the other 3 in many varieties and combinations. All of 1, alternating, cyclical patterns, drum rudiment patterns. I flirted with a lot of them. At pass 9, my thought was ‘ok, maybe the work NEEDS me to bring in the Cats.’ So I tried that, begrudgingly. To no apparent effect. Did this perverse playstyle of mine trip over some subtle code artifacts? Don’t know.

I DO know the repetition got more dense. I suspect there is some sort of selection patterning that might be decodable. I find it hard to believe that 4 full sections of Guide are headfakes, including a bit on Sylvia Plath (whose work I was previously unfamiliar with, but who this piece encouraged me to explore). But after spending so long with it, enjoying the wild disconnects and playfulness of form, I was kind of unwilling to go back and treat those as logic puzzles. They just worked so WELL as disconnected shots of joy, I didn’t WANT to gamify them. It felt.. disrespectful.. to treat these wonderful bits of wordplay as functional puzzle pieces when their appeal was SO not functional.

I mean:

"You are a lot of not much to look at."
"Those who burn meat
to please the gods
know little of meat or gods"

Why do I want to do ANYTHING with that other than just titter delightedly? I am 100% sure I did not crack the code of this thing, and may in fact have confounded it. I am equally sure that it lived up to its FIRST boilerplate title block:

"A fun activity <3 by Drew Cook
Release Nulla / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

"This is a fun game with a gimmick."

That is true even if you never tumble to the gimmick.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Creative Chaos
Polish: Gleaming or Textured, depending on the function of that 13/8 score
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do next if this were my project? Hm. It is so clearly NOT something I’m capable of, so that’s hard to answer. I guess I would poke into that ‘nothing happens at 8/8’ artifact (which I think the author did?). Either sharpen the artistic statement for the dummies in the back row, or fix any bugs that need fixing.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

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.

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 7 May 2025.

This is a curious parser piece, where you ostensibly put together different motifs to create art works (with the art works explained in text format), and aim to fill an art gallery with 8 different art works. I got 4/8 endings, and couldn’t unlock all 8. I gather from other reviews that this work reuses the poetry of Sylvia Plath, but I’m too unfamiliar with that to connect with it.

I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this piece. I think there’s a lot more depth to it than I was feeling. But I struggled to engage with it. Which isn’t any fault of the author. Just some things click for some folks and not others. I’m also one of those folks who tends not to get on with more abstract works, and prefers things spelled out simply.

I also struggled a little with the parser interface on my low resolution enormous font laptop screen. The game text kept filling the screen and I’d have to constantly tap to show more, but then with my hand control problems I risked entering the wrong next option, which was rather crucial to get right. So it was a rather fraught playing experience for me.

But again that may well have been just me.

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.

I struggled with deciding how to (or even whether to) review this game. It fascinates me enough that I wanted to stay with it, but I also feel underqualified for the task of discussing it. I mean, poetry, really? It’s not exactly my wheelhouse. At best, I hope that my clumsy analysis will, in its wrongness, spark some better insight from People Who Astound With Their Allusional Awareness™, so that I can eventually read more of that kind of review.

At the time I first played this game—as a beta tester late in the process—I knew nothing about the project, and vanishingly little about the author and his other works. I had no recognition that reading this involves wrapping oneself in Sylvia Plath references. When the game admonished me, “Jesus Christ, Sylvia, just pick a stencil,” I tried to “talk to Sylvia,” as though this were a character in the room with me. It never crossed my mind that a specific Sylvia was being called upon until the postgame guide discussed it. If I were pretty enough to attract himbo allegations, I would not be beating them. I think the only allusion I actively noticed was a reference to Isadora Duncan, but not for any high-minded literary reasons—rather, I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid/teen and became familiar with the Quagmire triplets, Isadora and Duncan.

Put more directly, my concern is this: should someone naïve to layers and layers of context in a work, still respond to that work? Ultimately, though, this isn’t anything important. It’s just an IFDB review. People can decide for themselves whether or not my experience with the game is interesting. Nothing here is definitive (nor should you expect it to be, really).

Now that I have overwrought all these self-critical caveats, the wolves will grudgingly allow me to post my thoughts.

On Authority

My first encounter with this game (during late beta testing) was a volatile one. The game’s instructions are relatively straightforward. You face an easel, and you must produce art. But the terms of that production are highly constricted—you may only select one of four stencils. The narrator mocks you for doing so. Subtly at first (“The turnip symbolizes loyalty and resilience. / *** How Fun ***”), then less so (“You are a lot of not much to look at. / *** Convalescence Is Hot ***”).

From the outset, I had a contentious relationship with the narrator, because I did not trust them and resented their authority. After complying to use a stencil for the first turn, I immediately wanted to escape, fiddling with the scenery, reading the help menu, and so forth. Really, of the “harmless cat / blameless turnip / unimpeachable boot / innocuous astronaut,” all four of these templates might as well have read “red flag / red flag / red flag / red flag.” I thought of No Exit, trapped in a sinister void with people who hate me. An abusive omnipresence. And I was determined to thwart them.

You know, in real life, I’m conflict-avoidant. Overly accommodating. I’d rather smooth things over, hide, that sort of thing. But something I’ve noticed about video games and interactive fiction, is that alone with the work and its world, a narrator that I don’t trust can bring out this rebellious and chaotic streak in me. Who knew?

I tried quitting, but the game blocked me from doing so. After using “forget” to maliciously wipe my little progress to spite the narrator, and other attempts to subvert the game’s basic instructions, I recalled my role as a beta tester and settled in to follow instructions and select the templates. I played along for a while, still with an undercurrent of resistance, seeing what would happen.

This next came to a head during series five, when the narrator escalates their control by restricting your output further, demanding a specific sequence of templates. I had to replay gallery five several times because I was determined not to comply, testing out different methods of rejecting the voice (such as: complying for the first five stencils, then snubbing them on the sixth, like I was trying to take power back by performing some malevolent edging against the narrator). Eventually, I decided that I could only proceed by following instructions, so I reluctantly did so.

Entering series six, I was in an intense and paranoid mindset. Now, the narrator is daring me to disobey. But I thought, well, if the terms of resistance are set and structured by the authority, how is it resistance at all? So I did not comply with the noncompliance either. How unruly of me. By this point, I was convinced that the point of the game was to figure out how to quit. Ultimately, I complied with the scripted disobedience enough to reach the end of the game, and fulfilled my destiny to quit and escape the narrator.

You may observe from this narration that I didn’t touch on much of the poetic content of the game. I did read them and I was paying attention, but my meta power struggle with the game and its narrator really dominated my experience. It’s really unlike anything else that I’ve played in that regard. Sure, there have been games where I disliked or distrusted the narrator, but I’m rarely convinced that the point of the game is to figure out how to stop playing it. That feels unusual.

I must have been the worst beta tester ever. Imagine receiving this back as the report of how someone played your game; that I fought with the narrator and tried to quit a bunch of times and refused to follow the instructions as much as possible. This was the first time I’ve beta tested an IF game. Goodness. You really can’t take me anywhere.

Later, I came back to play the official release, and then again postfestival to work on making sense of my thoughts for this review. On replay, my relationship to the work shifted significantly. It transformed from a heated power struggle into a kind of choreographed fencing match, wry stabs and parries between familiar combatants. The last time I played, series five felt like something vaguely BDSM-coded, like yes, I’m being stepped on, but I returned knowing that I would be stepped on, and allowed it to happen. For all the boots and astronauts and authority-play, I didn’t get Sylvia Plath so much as Eden Robinson, an Indigenous Canadian (Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations) author whose dystopian short story “Terminal Avenue” (2004) was often on my mind while playing this.

On Wolves

A question I return to when replaying this game is, who is my wolf? Not who is “the” wolf, as I gather there are many wolves, and Sylvia’s wolves, the author’s wolves, and my wolves might be almost completely unrecognizable to one another. The narrator speaks in the cadence of an abuser, picking at the reader’s progress, perceived faults, physical appearance, and so on. Despite that, it’s also a charismatic voice; perhaps that is why I kept reading and re-reading despite the negging and gaslighting. As much as I recoiled at times from the narrator’s comments about the player character’s weight from my own personal insecurities, there is part of me that laughs darkly at a line like, “Time is a fat circle.” Yes, very good, tell me another! How perverse.

To get a bit psychological, I guess, my wolf is not a specific person, but rather, an aspect of my inner voices. A malicious inner critic. I had been working on this realization while playing, but it really clicked for me when I considered Callie’s art at the beginning and in the postgame guide.

The art is tactile, using thread and layers of watercolor paper cutouts to create a sense of depth, inked and welcoming with unthreatening pastel tones. It contributes to the game’s veneer of approachability. So what do I notice here?

The title screen depicts a detailed, wide rectangular frame, surrounding a blank portrait space (except for the title). The templates, the framing devices for the work, are made a literal frame surrounding the white space, waiting for author and reader’s meaning to be imposed onto it. Or... something else. (I’ll get to that in a bit.)

There are also renderings of the four archetypes. The more I look at these, the more I am convinced that they function like in-universe tarot cards. Not in the sense that I mean to perform any divination with them, but rather, they contain within them a collage of associative symbols, much like how each actual tarot card depicts pieces of their myths—the Hierophant’s keys, or the Devil’s chains.

Take the astronaut, sealed away in their suit. They hold onto a sunflower for support, surrounded by a network of watching, writhing neurons. The cowboy boots tread across a flat Texan landscape, threatening a tornado even as they are threatened in turn by the talons of a raptor. The cat stretches in front of their handiwork, shredded blinds allowing light to filter onto a fruit-patterned tablecloth. The turnip grows beneath a clothesline, its roots driving a patchwork quilt (and hopefully not Sylvia Plath’s lampshade...) apart from dense soil, reaching an umbilicus out to connect with a cozy grub yet to emerge.

It feels like I am looking at tarot cards that, instead of being attuned to broader cultural archetypes, represent a deeply personal mythos that I have limited access to as a viewer/reader. In this sense, the art echoes the poetic vignettes, which feel similarly personal-yet-detached given my lack of deeper context.

But, getting back to my main point, the fifth template is what helped me understand the work a bit better. The wolf. A portrait is not the only thing with a frame. This is a mirror, isn’t it? The wolves are in the mirror. And the wolves in the mirror are, as the saying goes, closer than they appear. It’s what I see when the game forces me to look at myself. The frame itself is an ouroboros, the wolf consuming itself, uniting the narrator and reader. Perhaps it says something about artistic expression, this idea that you consume your own traumas and experiences and perspectives to produce art, or criticism, or what have you. And the audience consumes that consumption. And that consumed consumption leads to the next. So is the title screen not only framing a painting, but also, a mirror? Am I looking at a distortion of myself, the manifestation of all that lurks within?

My wolf is my inner critic, which is perhaps a bit narcissistic, but it’s not just, you know, my voice. It carries with it the imagined expectations of audiences, internalized social conditioning, and so forth. “We are the police,” the wolves say. “More of this, less of you.” Does it not feel uncomfortable, like I’m trapped in a void with myself, when I try to do my own writing? That I am menaced from within by a voice distilling the outside perspectives? What does it mean to still, even with templates as constrained as cat, turnip, boot, and astronaut, produce something meaningful? Isn’t there something self-exploitative about doing art, and despite that struggle, still returning to do more? Is that abusive? There are parts of me that can never be rendered because they cannot slip past my self-censorship and self-rejection, qualities earned from a lifetime of ill-fated validation seeking.

On Endings

I wrote a lot, but did I say enough? Did I say anything? I barely touched on the poetics, never describing the way that the game appropriates the structural elements of a parser game to put on its sinister art show. What about themes? Did I explore the motif of toxicity, the parasitic relationship between artist and audience, the black walnut tree and its allelopathy? Medical trauma, the carving out of oneself from the effects of disharmonious medications, the impossibility of consenting to be born, the subsequent unwitting entrapment within a doomed body? None of that? Certainly, I did Sylvia Plath no justice whatsoever.

Goodness.

At any rate, there is still time to do what is apparently the essential work of the reviewer, to say whether or not I recommend the game.

I do!

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.