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Review
Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review
Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 45m
This is an ambitious look back at and interrogation of an underserved character in the Monkey Island franchise. It bounces back and forth between old style point-and-click play (translated to Twine link-select), and some authorial side bars and digressions into the franchise history, the character, and their engagement with both. This kind of thing is very appealing to me.
From the outset though, it seemed plagued with technical burrs and frictions. For one, it makes use of the dreaded timed text. I find myself more forgiving than most in the community, but this implementation tested that sorely. For one, the opening scrolled intro both had no concept of window size, nor any concept of screen integrity. What I mean is, the text played out, below the bottom of the window requiring scrolling. If you found yourself fussing with slide bars and fell behind… the entire screen wiped before you finished it to start playing out the next one! Eventually, I full-screened the window (which you DEFINITELY HAVE TO DO), but still found myself unable to keep up. It was simultaneously too slow and too fast. For SURE there must be a pause for more at the end of every intro screen. (I am given to understand the current release tweaks these artifacts to some extent.)
This was not the end of the technical woes, however. There were link chains with no back or reverse, which, if you clicked on you needed to cycle through the entire thing again before returning to start. Different colors were used for character dialogue, at least one of which was chromatically close to the color used for links, resulting in link confusion. Graphic elements overlapped words or were completely missing. And oh that timed text, pervasive and stalling through it all. It seemed to be reaching for a conversational paradigm, the author/work talking to you in ‘real time.’ I can squint and see that. Honestly, waiting for text to present itself gave me time to do that.
You get it. Technically it is problematic. I will waste no more time belaboring the point. It is unfortunate that the technical issues intruded so deeply. There was real wit and verve in its homages to the Monkey Island era fonts and layouts.
The content of the game is more rewarding, assuming you can fight through to it. The light ‘point and click’ style puzzles were evocative of, though nowhere near as challenging as, its inspiration. Part of that is that while you can mimic the motions of mouse-to-hotpsot with mouse-to-link, pictures are famously worth orders of magnitudes of words, and you just get fewer hotspots with the latter. While unsatisfying as a puzzle, it surprisingly and pleasantly echoed that playstyle. It is the first time in a long time the Twine paradigm seemed more than an arbitrary UI choice.
Far more interesting was the interplay between that puzzly work, and the author’s inter-scene commentary on the game, the character and the history that informed both. It used the textual complexities of the inspiration to openly engage the boundaries between PC and NPC, and what ‘reality’ means in the context of fiction and gaming. Clearly the author had cause to pour a lot of thought into a character they found compelling but the narrative did not, and how that tension kind of exploded the whole thing for them. Leaving them to pick up and examine all the different pieces without the distraction of the functioning whole. Explosive deconstruction, baby!
There was a really encouraging amount of depth to engage here. Which made the ending kind of anti-climactic. Towards the end, after some time toggling between light puzzle/escape-the-boat play and digressions into lore both real and fictional, it unexpectedly and abruptly turned into (Spoiler - click to show)Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead territory. All the talk of ways to appreciate, deepen and reclaim the character, including actually PLAYING as her!, were (Spoiler - click to show)abruptly forsaken into..literal nothingness.
It is a jarring climax. After all the explorations of ways to interpret the character, to confer agency or broader depth, it nevertheless ends with a repudiation of that very effort. Is it a comment on fan culture’s propensity for putting emotional weight on elements not meant to carry them? (see the first 20 years of Boba Fett fandom) On the tyranny of narrative, whose choices are quite literally the final word? Or are we supposed to cling to the sweetness of that exploration in the face of its doomed fate against an unchanging lore?
Honestly? I don’t know. And that’s kind of cool, but also kind of unsatisfying. Which, why should I have it any better than Elaine?
Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Memoir-y
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure the first MUST DO is to add ‘pause for more’ inputs to every opening screen. While doing that, I would seriously revisit the timed text implementation, to make sure its use was intentional, strictly under control, and far less intrusive. Then, either fix or eliminate the Journal. Unless its inaccessibility was also part of the commentary…?
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
