Portrait with Wolf

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!