TOITŪ

TOITŪ provides a compact pitch for itself midway through its first part:

the house has a perfect view of Serpentine Avenue as it wends past the roll in the hill, thru the darkness, past the little houses to the rusty fence of the car graveyard

• the road disappears into the shadows
  but reappears again further below at the little blue square of the Scottish Pipe Band Hall
  which sits across from the plumbers, the road then skirting to the left back towards the Chinese District, the Crown, and in the distance…
  the spinning covenant of churches, cathedrals, clocks and belltowers
  spires reaching like the hunched shoulders of mourners

This is a psychogeography of a place called Dunedin, and since, as a 45-year-old with no particular connection to New Zealand, the prospects of my ever visiting its seventh-largest city are quite dim, it was very appealing to vicariously wander its streets, feel its rhythms, sense the almost-strangled waters flowing beneath it, read the words of its hometown writers, and learn the dark history that tried to chain them all. Each of those areas is elaborated upon and given its due and context in poetical language. Even the most banal of them, the lot filled with rusted-out cars, occasions a proper elegy:

they seem to crumble and confer with one another
you have long held the understanding that cars have eyes, faces in their headlights and radiator grills
…
all the miles underfoot wind up here
all those trips to the supermarket, to school, to work, to the cemetary
forgotten

As you visit each stop along the way, there are two cross-cutting elements uniting your itinerary: first, the eponymous stream, which has been calverted and channeled through various tunnels and grate and dams, which you’re charged with finding and, if you can, help the waters run clear and clean again after the detritus of the city dirties it, and second, the words of a local writer, Janet Frame, pages from whose stories keep turning up in the strangest of places. The game isn’t shy about equating them – Frame, you see, was mentally ill, and subjected to shockingly invasive “treatment”, so both she and the Toitū present analogous cases of unruly natural strength subjected to patriarchal, colonial efforts to rationalize them.

I wasn’t previously familiar with Frame, but I liked the excerpts the game offers up – though I suspect single pages from different short stories, presented out of order, can’t fully convey what’s special about her writing – and similarly, while I’m familiar with New Zealand’s history only in very broad strokes, there’s more than enough context provided to understand the poignancy of what the protagonist’s explorations reveal. And for all that the content is heavy, there are enough tone shifts through the journey to avoid the game slipping into being overly lugubrious: there’s a magical-realist interlude where you help a talking trio of animals and get to pick which of them will be your buddy in the next sequence, for example, and for every awkward interaction with a skinhead, there’s a moment of communion with barely-tamed trees.

It took me a while to find my groove with the game’s use of interactivity, but once I did I appreciated it – for the most part, you’re on a fixed, linear progression, with occasional choices enabling you to explore some locations in more depth. But in addition to these lightly-branching nodes, most passages boast a rotating link or two, which will have three or four options you can click through. Sometimes this is just a way to present information in a more interactive way, but fairly frequently a later passage will call back to whichever phrase you’d had selected when you clicked the link to move on, which can make for some effective moments of recognition. The effect winds up being somewhere in between a traditional choice-based interface and something more akin to literary hypertext, striking a nice balance between poetic possibility and obfuscation.

There is a rub here, though, which is that so far I’ve just been talking about part one of the game – there’s also a prologue and a part two, both of which are quite robust in their own rights. They’re recognizably of a piece with the section whose praises I’ve been singing, but didn’t work as well for me, and since they constitute the game’s beginning and end, they unavoidably have a significant impact on how I felt about the game overall.

We’ll take the prologue first, logically enough. In many respects this serves as a proem or prelude, introducing the themes and subject matter that will be explored in greater depth in the full work – indeed, there are several short passages that show up more or less verbatim later on. But this section is much more focused on the stream, with no mention of the writer or, most impactfully, the city. In fairness, it does alternate pastoral sequences with passages focusing on the protagonist – his body, his understanding – which do serve to establish a baseline for the rest of the game. But this is a very long, very abstract sequence that lacks any clearly-communicated structure like the physical journey of part one and therefore doesn’t provide much sense of progression; without those grounding elements, I found this part of the game dragged on and felt flabby.

As for part two, it’s even more similar to part one, so I feel even sillier drawing distinctions. But there are differences – in terms of interaction, instead of following a linear path, you’re given a vehicle that allows you to pick one of half a dozen different locations to visit (or revisit), with some light puzzles or at least gating where the order of your exploration might open up new possibilities. And the various plotlines you’re following reach something resembling a climax: in part one, for example, a vaguely sinister figure tasks you with following the stream, seemingly out of the blue or perhaps because he assumed that, as a fellow white guy, you’d be complicit with his agenda. There are hints about his identity and the scale of what he’s done sprinkled through part one, but these are significantly ramped up in part two as he shows up repeatedly putting his fingers in more and more pies, culminating in a full-on villain monologue that explains some things about Dunedin, sure, but also brings him down to the level of comic opera.

Let me be clear that I found some bits to love in part two, as well – there’s an early sequence that grounds you in your day to day, before you venture into the city again, where you log onto an early message board (the game is a period piece, set in 2001) and do a sort of exquisite-corpse activity with other posters, and I was pleased as punch that given the prompt “what a stallion!” I could answer with “they tend to meet with fame or disaster”. And the ruins of the asylum are a legitimately creepy addition to my mental landscape of the city. But as befitting the fast-travel system that you use to traverse this chapter, it feels more like a series of isolated vignettes than a travelogue demonstrating how all these places connect to each other. And, frankly, it’s also just a lot – I enjoyed reading Toitū’s words, but it’s still a high-overhead activity (beyond the density of its poetics, most of its passages are also quite short so combined with the rotating links, there is a lot of clicking) and I think I was ready to be done by the end of part one.

These critiques can’t take away from the game’s high points, however. I’m a fan of the (now decades-old) New Game Journalism, which conceptualized the critic as being a travel writer reporting from imaginary places; Toitū, as it turns out, is real, but no less imaginary for all that, and I’m glad to have had a chance to participate in that imagining.