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.