Larvae

I was mystified by the first ending I reached in Larvae: for one thing, there’s no clear indication that you’ve reached the final passage, which left me half-expecting that there was timed text still to come or I’d run into a bug. For another, it felt like some horror elements teased in the opening sections (and the genre tag on IFDB) had receded without fanfare, with the story seemingly content to pivot exclusively to low-key teenage melodrama. Wondering if I’d missed something, I backed up and started making different choices – where before I’d picked options having the protagonist I’d chosen, Isla, express contentment with her boyfriend Cam as they spent a month together at an academic summer camp focusing on biology research, I tried to pull back and see if this would provoke a blow-up. But no, this just made the conclusion an understated break-up scene, rather than an I’ll-visit-you-during-all-the-vacations lovefest.

Then I went back to the very first choice I’d made after deciding which of the pair to play as, which bizarrely had me as Isla deciding whether Cam wanted a drink from my water bottle, and this time opted for him to say he’ d already had his own water. This seemingly-innocuous choice was the last one I made, as it put me on an underexplained railroad track to an entirely different kind of ending.

While this kind of non-telegraphed swerve between genres can work – heck, Hanna, We’re Going to School does something not entirely dissimilar – it’s a tricky thing to manage in practice. Ideally, each branch of the story would make sense of what comes before and act as a satisfying resolution of at least the major themes the beginning has put into play. Or if there are less-canonical options that provide a quick off-ramp from the story, that can work if the author signposts where the story is supposed to go, so the player gets a thrill out of bucking their fate for a minute before getting back on the ride. But here, it really does seem like there’s meant to be a “right” option – the horror one – which is less worked-out than the longer set of branches that don’t pay off a key element of the setup, and the contrast between the trivial decision and its fatal consequences lends the game an unintended note of bathos.

True, if you play as Cam you get a bit more perspective on why that choice of potables matters, but why would you? As mentioned, the setup here is that he and Isla are a couple of high school seniors who get an opportunity to attend a prestigious research program bringing together talented students with biologists doing cutting-edge work in a variety of fields. Except it’s Isla who’s the talented student – Cam just gets to come along as her plus one so they can spend some time together before university, and maybe so he can do some livestreaming of anything interesting they see – and if there are any players of IF who are going to pick the bro-y YouTuber over the studious, responsible one, I’ve yet to meet them.

Larvae’s multigenre ambitions are also let down by some weak writing. Neither of the main characters enjoys much in the way of characterization, and the worldbuilding is thin (it’s notionally set in the 2050s, but the world pretty much works the way it does now, except that the only cultural touchstone people tend to reference is 1979’s Alien). The rules of narrative economy are flagrantly violated – there are two different scientific legends who are introduced as potential mentor figures, but who both immediately disappear after the passages when they’re first mentioned. And the prose has the feel of something translated from another language, which sometimes can work to add an unexpected note to a game’s writing, but here is just awkward:

“Come on, you have enjoyed the activities we’ve been doing these weeks, right?” I observe a strawberry, and toss it away as it’s rotten.

“Yeah, yeah I know,” he says, taking my hand as he rises.

“Besides, it does you some good to be away from your truelove the blue-light devices.” I say, taking a look at the beautiful lavender sky. Stars are already sparkling it.

He smiles. “You’re literally my next-door neighbor girl.”

Admittedly, some of the creepier horror elements are effective, especially a viscerally upsetting bit of gore in the worst endings. And even sadder is that I think there’s the germ of an idea here that could have worked really well: when you’re experiencing the last few weeks with your girlfriend before she goes away to school and might forget you forever, it does kinda feel like there’s a monster growing in your guts could explode your heart any minute. But making that work would have required ensuring that all the pieces of the premise come into play in most paths, and sharpening the writing so that we really feel the emotional bond between the core pair, and understand them as distinct, engaging people. Unfortunately in its current version, Larvae is only able to gesture towards the stronger game it could have been.