Join the Swarm

As is now Spring Thing tradition, Senica Thing has contributed an anthology of IF by students (and a few friends), this time all written in Twine and riffing on the eponymous theme. Those three words set up an impressively broad range of experiences, so I’ll write capsule reviews of each in turn:

A Swarm of Spiders, by DiBa

The opening game in my Senica Thing playthrough jumps admirably into the action: you’re awakened in the middle of the night by a strange skittering, and find yourself compelled to investigate. Structurally, it’s a sequence of binary continue the story/back out yes-or-no questions, which I often find a bit underwhelming – why are you asking me if I want to leave the ride early when I’ve already paid for my ticket? But in this case I think it works really well, as it helps align the player’s behavior with the protagonist’s: obviously the counsel of reason would be to just go back to bed and ignore the spiders, but there’s something irrationally pushing you to go outside and follow them… The writing also includes some nicely creepy details, while playing up the combination of fascination and repulsion that gives the story its energy:

"You are pretty scared, but even more curious. You slowly walk up to the window and see plenty of spiders crawling out. They are all moving in one direction, leading to a tree."

It all leads up to a fun twist that nicely illustrates the theme, making A Swarm of Spiders a perfect introduction to the anthology.

Dystopia, by Creator

This time out the theme is take in a more metaphorical direction: the swarm isn’t literal hive-minded insects, but money-chasing video game developers who’ve given up their artistic ambitions to follow the crowd. You play a young indie dev who’s tempted to join a big studio despite some understandable misgivings, and as it turns out there’s more going on than just overly-mercenary suits trying to monetize the latest trends.

While other games in the anthology play up the ambivalent nature of swarm living, Dystopia interprets the premise as straightforward horror. Unsettling text effects, eye-straining color choices, and menacing prose underscore the soul-threatening power that you’re up against:

“You have our gratitude for applying, we shall see you tomorrow at the following address: ▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊ st. Nr ▊▊▊▊▊▊. Sleep tight our little gem.”

Compared to the strong use of aesthetics, the interactive elements feel a bit underdeveloped – there’s almost always one right answer and one wrong one, and if you pick the latter you get automatically put back on track after reading about the bad end. And since the video game company is portrayed as unremittingly malicious, I sometimes had a hard time justifying why I was sticking my head in the lion’s mouth. But the game opens up as it reaches its action-filled climax, and doesn’t just rely on style, adding some philosophical notes to the ending: “WHAT, YOU THINK IDEAS SPREAD BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD? NO ,THEY SPREAD BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE THEM”, the prime evil says, and in this our current dystopia, it’s hard to say he’s wrong.

It’s Here, by Chaos

I feel like one of the principles of good writing that I lean on a lot in my reviews is that specificity trumps generality – a well-chosen, evocative detail can make even the most familiar story come alive, while plodding prose can suck the energy out of every novelty. It’s Here tests the limits of that commonplace, though, because while its language is entirely abstract throughout – so abstract that I think different readers could come away with very different interpretations of what, exactly, has occurred – I nonetheless found it compelling. The action, much as it is for the rest of the games in the anthology, turns on whether to meld oneself into a larger collective, and if so, on what terms. But rather than fleshing it out with the typical accoutrements of narrative (protagonists, antagonists, themes), the game focuses on the dynamics of that action, dramatizing motion and play over substance.

"Instead of chaos, there is a flow of deliberate patterns, folding and unfolding like a single, capable organism that he can breathe. There is no roar or violent rush of wings, only a muted tremor in the air, a living current that bends the light and draws every eye upward. As you watch, a subtle rhythm begins to echo behind your thoughts, steady, layered, impossibly complex, yet harmonious."

In keeping with this ultra-refined approach, the simple choices combine in complex interactions; while most of the early choices reflect the familiar join/withdraw dichotomy we’ve seen in other entries in Join the Swarm, this is more of a dance or an exploration than a final commitment, as you can move in or out as the spirit moves you, and eventually the choices turn not on whether you’ll merge with the collective, but whether you feel ambivalent about your decision, and how to respond to unexpected disturbances.

I’m not sure this approach would work in a longer piece – the human mind, or at least mine, will eventually crave some more human-apprehensible elements in its stories. But it very much worked for me in It’s Here – this is an engaging, self-assured piece.

John the Swan, by Vitalii Blinov

There are a few examples of IF in poetic form, and I’m always impressed when authors make the attempt given that it requires imposing two entirely separate sets of constraints on how you use language: the responsiveness and nonlinearity of IF, and the precision and control of poetry. John the Swan is a good illustration of both the challenges and the opportunities of this kind of thing, I think – the author cannily keeps things short so that the poetry doesn’t drag (there are two choices with two options each), and there are additional text effects further livening up the presentation. And the text employs joking half-rhymes to good effect, undermining the player’s expectations:

Was he a swan?

Was he the John?

Memories gone.

He stays alone.

As that except indicates, the substance of the game is whimsical and doesn’t overly explain itself. While poetry doesn’t of course need to be narrative to be effective, I found myself wanting at least some greater sense of progression, some clearer indication of what conflict the choices were resolving. While the game gestures at some consistent themes – identity, threat – I had often had a hard time decoding the intended impact, or relating this piece to the Join the Swarm theme. Still, it’s a worthy experiment, with some engagingly ambiguous endings.

Jouin Le Swarm, by Neural

This game combines elements of others we’ve seen in the anthology, with an ambiguously-portrayed hive-mind, a variety of endings that feel responsive to your choices, and even an opening that’s eerily reminiscent of that of Swarm of Spiders; there, you were wakened by the swarm’s activity at 2:16 am, whereas here you’re roused by the swarm’s activity at 2:17 am.

While the focus is on how you respond to the part-enticing, part-threatening invitation you receive from the swarm, I appreciated that there were several paths to get to the different endings – in particular, you can choose to bring a friend along with you as you investigate, which can set up a solid late-game twist, though that choice doesn’t actually change the endings.

I also liked the spare way the game communicates the appeal of subsuming your individuality into the swarm, which doesn’t resort to force to bring you along; while I think it’s clear in presenting the paths where you retain your independence as positive ones, it includes some discordant notes that indicate that there’s no way to encounter such a profoundly different way of existence and remain unchanged:

"After a few days, it disappears completely.

"You remain alone.

"But sometimes, in the silence, you almost miss it."

Join the Swarm, by SAT

This most generically-titled entry in the anthology cleverly inverts the theme – and brings in a hoary yet unexpected set of tropes – in a way that I genuinely didn’t see coming (and won’t spoil, given how short it is). It also boasts an impressively open structure in its short runtime: as you’re thrown into a dangerous situation and have to choose how to respond, you navigate challenges both external and internal, with some of your choices looping back around to prior events and others opening up a whole new perspective on how exactly the swarm functions here. While I think all roads lead to the same endgame, you can have substantially different experiences – and substantially different information – as you make the critical decisions.

I’ll repeat that the twist in question is a relatively tropey one, and not an unproblematic trope at that, but I don’t think Join the Swarm is presenting itself as an especially grounded depiction of reality; it certainly counts as a novel way of executing on the theme, and the thriller-style writing keeps things moving towards that revelatory climax.

Swarm of Thieves, by SKIT

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards,” goes the meme, and Swarm of Thieves got the message. This is a Robin Hood allegory where the thief is named TRUTH and the kingdom is called KLEPTOCRACY; any relation to persons living or dead sure seems more than coincidental when reading speeches like this:

"TRUTH replies: 'You must give us the right to decent work for decent pay. Together we can create a more equal society. In KLEPTOCRACY’s budget, prison spending is double that of education and healthcare. You must give us hope of escaping our poverty!'"

The plot is thin but exciting – the king’s guards are close to catching TRUTH, and you get to decide whether they succeed, and if so how the subsequent confrontation goes. Everything’s quite Manichean, which is forgivable for an allegory, but I felt that there was a mismatch between the narrative stakes and the gameplay ones – a notorious thief being nabbed and facing the justice of a corrupt king is a nail-biting situation, but the player’s ability to dictate outcomes via high-level narrative-guiding choices sucks away some of the drama. Heck, even if you pick the option that tells the king to condemn TRUTH, the subjects launch a revolution due to his crimes and usher in a happy ending. It’s a comforting resolution, but one risks turning the game into mere escapism.

The Underground Dungeon, by A.S.M.

One of the highlights of previous Senica Thing entries was coming across stories, usually by young authors, that delighted in messing with player expectations, introducing out-of-nowhere plot shifts that keep things fresh and display a wild imagination. It’s absolutely a technique that works best in short doses, but when it works it’s a lot of fun, and I confess I was a bit disappointed that the previous anthology entries were generally more focused, not to say staid, affairs.

So I was very ready for The Underground Dungeon, a madcap romp of bad behavior through a fantasy kingdom. The first line is “far away from your home is a castle,” which made me think we were maybe going on a quest to rescue the king from the eponymous oubliette, but no, actually the king is our boss, we’re the chef, we just have an absurdly long commute. Before work one day you discover a locked door to the undercroft, and since you don’t have the keys, you come up with a couple of plans and are presented with these two choices:

-Steal the keys

-Poison the king

What?! Why would we poison the king?! Well as it turns out he’s not very nice – depending on how exactly you choose to poison him, he might fall into a frenzy, leading to this vignette:

"The maid enters the room. The king bites her, but she doesn’t find it weird since the king throws a lot of tantrums."

I don’t want to spoil any more of the game, but suffice to say there’s a lot of this sort of thing, and it always made me smile. Navigating to the best ending isn’t too hard, but there’s just as much fun to be had exploring the various dead ends and blind alleys the authors have cooked up. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with joining a swarm, or what the cook thinks they’re going to find down in the dungeon, but when I’m having such a good time, it’s hard to care about any of those details.

WHAT A MESS, by T.H.K.

WHAT A MESS takes a similar approach to Underground Dungeon, which as I’ve just said, really works for me – this is a story that zigs and zags, though with more of a time cave structure that allows for significantly different plots to play out depending on your seemingly-innocuous choices. Here there are two protagonists, the plucky duo of James and Emma, though depending on your choices they might not both make it to the end. Many of their adventures also involve a kingdom of alternately threatening and welcoming bunny rabbits, which, yeah, that seems about right for bunnies, they’re cute but there’s certainly something untrustworthy about them.

The game’s jokes largely rely on misdirection, and I thought they generally landed:

"When they got up, there was a rainbow cake with a unicorn on the top. Emma and James were surprised. They cut the cake into many pieces and each of them ate one piece of the cake and then they died."

Though seemingly-ominous choices sometimes lead to better outcomes:

"The bats were flying arund them for a long time. At first they were scared, but then they figured out that it was actually very romantic. James and Emma fell in love and got married."

(I love that it’s unclear whether the “they” who were scared and then felt romantic are James and Emma, or actually the bats).

Too much of this sort of thing can of course wear one out, but WHAT A MESS isn’t something to take too seriously; it’s short and light-hearted, and perfectly enjoyable on those terms.

The Yellow Swarm, by HOT

I’ve gotten used to Senica Thing games being way more about content than styling – sure, Swarm of Thieves had a background image and Dystopia a couple of illustrations and text effects, but for the most part they stick to basic Twine aesthetics, which is fine in my book. Still, I gotta admit that the slick visuals of Yellow Swarm made for an arresting, and very pleasant, surprise. There are bright yellow/orange colors making a bold contrast with the black background, scan-lines and terminal fonts that recall Aliens, and an intense, military sci-fi vibe that demands attention.

Fortunately, this isn’t at all a case of style over substance. The prose is dead on, alternating between po-faced special-ops speak:

"The facility went dark six days ago. Meridian Biotech, sublevel research station, built into a hillside in rural Romania. Forty-two personnel. They were developing something called Apis-7: a neural synchronization compound derived from insect pheromone chains."

…and effectively creepy body-horror when you get into the facility and see what’s become of the people:

"It used to be a person. It walks in a straight line toward the far wall, stops, turns, walks back. Three more behind it do the same. Their skin has gone yellow-grey and the surface of it shifts slightly, like something pressing from inside. Their eyes are white, opaque."

The story is straight-ahead, but it’s well-paced and hits all the beats it aims for. The choices similarly avoid over-complication – your mission is clear, so you’re typically just offered binary options about how best to infiltrate and destroy the incipient hive. It’s more of a roller-coaster ride than a tactical challenge, with the player needing to really try to get a suboptimal ending, but it’s hard to complain when the ride is this thrilling and good-looking.