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.