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Straight Story? Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is a fine example of a work that embraces deeply weird, vaguely sinister and supernatural-tinged narratives. But rather than commit to the well-laid Twin Peaks tracks, instead has the nerve to be its own thing instead! I'm sorely tempted to add a special grading system for this stripe of game. I have a great hook for it too, the pseudo-Lynch scorecard!
Is there cherry pie/coffee? Kind of. There’s (Spoiler - click to show)corn liquor
Is there a Log Lady? Eeh, no but there is a (Spoiler - click to show)Contemplator
Is there a Laura Palmer? No
Evil behind a cookie cutter face? Can’t tell at the 2hr mark, no.
Imagery pulled straight from our collective unconscious? No
Lynch-ledger: 1.4/5, Between Dune and Blue Velvet.
The protagonist finds themselves on an unscheduled stop on their bid for a new life, in a tiny town, just left of normal. Must solve puzzles to resume journey! The presentation is appealing. Crude uSoft Paint geometrical pictures and jaunty music pepper the experience. There is a map to follow, with a unique NPC guardian at each location. The map amusingly changes state with the world in a nicely weird touch. The NPCs range from deadpan, to flighty to just deeply weird, all of it combining to present a deliciously off-kilter vibe. The puzzles have some flair, but don’t seem to match the environment in weirdness. They are oddly pedestrian (Spoiler - click to show)deliver envelope, find matches, buy stuff. The main mechanism is simultaneously clumsy and clever - matching narrative notes or items to characters/places. It has a little more textual flair than TELL X ABOUT Y, but it requires multiple clicks on multiple screens to effect, and can devolve to mimesis-breaking exhaustive trial and error.
There’s a lot to like here, but a lot of it is qualified. None more so than the text itself. At its best, the text disappears and just straight-forward describes the weirdness around you. All too often though, it throws in flourishes that come out of left field in a distracting way. “long and empty like my intestines” “Tall green pillars stuck out their immature cobs like rattlesnakes” “door opened the silence of the room, releasing it right in my face.” See if you can guess what this one refers to:
"However, the snake opened its mouth, and I got out of this bell, as a lost sound finally flies out of the French horn, scrolling and traveling through all its convolutions, bends and nooks."
(Spoiler - click to show)Exiting a series of alleys! I had literally just done it, and took a minute to realize that’s what it was describing. I think it's the snake that doesn’t work there, I probably could have gotten on board with just the French Horn. Between the textual excesses and the puzzles that didn’t seem on the same level as the rest of the narrative, I couldn’t breach into Engaging here, but definite Sparks of Joy. No bugs found!
FTR, the Lynch Ledger scoring system:
0 - The Straight Story
1 - Dune
2 - Blue Velvet
3 - Twin Peaks original series and movie
4 - Lost Highway
5 - Eraserhead
Played: 11/11/22
Playtime: 2hr, Day3 (incomplete)
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, my sweet spot is Blue Velvet+
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless