198BREW

(Some unmarked spoilers here, it’s that kind of game).

Rarely has a game’s opening left me with more whiplash than 198BREW’s. After a cryptic couple of paragraphs telling me that my soul is suffering eternal and well-deserved torment, which smash-cuts to a fantasy-ish vignette where a queen urges her consort to kill and cannibalize her, control is handed to the player – only to find that you’re in a My Dumb Apartment game and need to get some coffee because you’re all out. It’s two different lazy late-90s parser IF tropes in one!

Well no, not really. While 198BREW does end once you finally get some sweet, sweet caffeine down your gullet, this is no wacky slice-of-life comedy; and while the first couple of locations are a mostly-nondescript flat with unnecessarily detailed fixtures, it quickly opens up, and that “mostly” is covering for some real eye-poppers. As the prologue indicates, neither the player character nor the world they inhabit are quite like our own, and the gameplay as well isn’t typical parser fare. Sure, getting to the end requires surmounting a series of obstacles laid out as a daisy-chain of fetch quests and medium-dry-goods puzzles, but while your next step is generally obvious, the context for what you’re doing is often left deliberately incomplete, and the outcomes of each action are surreally divorced from the traditional logic of cause and effect. Midway through the game, you’ll stab a woman because a painting asked you to and receive three quarters for your trouble, and that’s only the weirdest puzzle by like 20%.

This is the game’s greatest success, I think – it commits to its enigmatic, downbeat theme, successfully infusing it across the prose, plot, and gameplay. This is the kind of world where just about everybody is trapped in a private hell, mostly of their own making, and their external circumstances match their internal torment. 198BREW’s subtitle – The Age of Orpheus – seems to conceal, but actually reveals, the thematic focus: we’re concerned here less with the best-known portion of the myth, where Orpheus journeys to Hades to rescue his lover, and more with the messy aftermath, where after having lost Eurydice through his own mistakes, he’s torn limb from limb and his still-living head floats down the river, singing lamentations all the while. The player character, you see, like many of the other significant characters, is cursed with a vicious sort of immortality, which means that they displace the mind and soul of anyone who eats their flesh and drinks their blood (in fact, this Dumb Apartment isn’t quite your own; it belonged to your now-dead lover, whose body you now inhabit after she willingly butchered and consumed you). Others are doomed to remain breathing even as cancer wracks their systems beyond what once were the limits of human endurance, while some fall victim to time-loops making a single day an endless, repeating ocean. And then there’s the Evangelion-style ruined mecha crashed in the public park, with a perhaps-still-living pilot deathlessly entombed within.

There’s a fair bit of complicated worldbuilding to establish, in other worlds, and while the approach is a little idiosyncratic – examining prominent objects often prompts multi-paragraph exposition that ranges far beyond describing what you see – it’s well managed, doling out enough details to help you understand what’s going on while avoiding didactically spelling things out. I can’t say I have my head fully wrapped around every detail of the setting, with some questions remaining about that aforementioned sentient painting and those mechs, but I much prefer that to having the mood ruined with dry lore, and I did get the sense that everything here does connect, even if those connections aren’t fully visible to the player.

Beyond over-detailed infodumping, this story is also the kind of thing that would easily be ruined by inadequate prose; happily, it’s largely up to the task, remaining engaging even when there’s not much to directly narrate, as in this near-abandoned train station:

"It’s quiet. Not even the storm’s wailing can breach this place. The only sounds are the echoes of your own footsteps. With every click-clack, the station feels like it grows in size — the ceiling grows higher, the steps further away. The longer you look around, the more convinced you are time itself is somehow expanding, too; the grand clock above the ticket booths seems to move slower and slower as you stare at it."

On the gameplay side of things, well, things are a bit thinner. As mentioned above, your coffee quest ultimately requires you to jump through an increasingly-absurd set of hoops. Each step is generally signposted quite directly, with whichever NPC whose desires you currently need to assuage spelling out what you should do next, even where their ability and desire to provide this direction is a bit unclear. With that said, I sometimes ran into challenges due to the game’s less-than-robust implementation. There’s lots of scenery missing, important NPCs don’t appear to actually be people under the Inform world model, a cat bowl is “hardly portable”, the player has a default “as good looking as ever” description, and as for actions, well, that assassination unwittingly provided one of the few bits of levity to crack the game’s bleak surface:

> hit woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to hit the strange woman.

> hit woman

Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

> cut woman

Cutting him up would achieve little.

> cut woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to cut the strange woman.

> use knife

You can’t use that.

> use knife on woman

You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.

In principle I am right there with you, game, yet here we are (KILL WOMAN did the business, so that brought the mood right back down again).

With that said, these are all typical first-time-author issues – nothing a bit of experience won’t improve, and nothing that substantively reduced the effectiveness of the game. For all that I admire 198BREW’s commitment to subverting expectations and leaning hard into a mournful, uncomfortable vibe, though, I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I have other similarly bleak, well-written works. Partially that’s because a preoccupation with the downsides of eternal life is theoretically interesting but by itself isn’t that viscerally engaging to me – when it’s clear this is a fictional way of talking about survivor’s guilt or depression or what have you, I think it’s a trope that can work, but this game is so defined by negative emotions and negative space that it doesn’t really communicate what positive things the player character, or most of the others for that matter, has lost. And the game’s themes seem to mirror these subjective experiences, basically just saying that life sure is a bummer.

The one potential exception is a minor character: a cameraman who’s filming the rally of a doomed political candidate who rails against the corrupt status quo, and who hands you a ticket when you feed him a keyword. The cameraman is a member of the orthodox church that upholds said status quo, but some of the things the politician is saying make sense to him. He’s listening, he’s feeling torn, he’s questioning things – he seems like a person whose fate isn’t sealed and whose mind could still be changed, someone who still has things he cares about (heck, he even makes a pass at the player character before they make their lack of interest plain). Let the world as a whole be just as fucked, but I wouldn’t mind playing a sequel about that guy.