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A trailing walk through memory park, March 26, 2023I loved this.
I've always had a tendency of railing against the traditional narrative experience in my reading and (most especially) in my writing. In my view, the point of prose is to deliver an accurate representation of reality (or any reality, fantastical or slightly-less-than, as you would have it), and reality's always shifting, to me. It always presents a myriad of options and is often beyond the writer's grasp. Therefore I frequently get bothered by the dialogue in some writing pieces, such as when a character says something and then the other replies with something of its own — and I'm like, wait, why would they have given that reply, when there was something else they were this % more likely to have said? (Ah, me. Assigning percentages of probability to people's responses in fiction. I would make a better computer programmer than writer, although I suck at writing enough already.) Some people might say that's just due to the dialogue being unrealistic. But, in my point of view, well, we all have different experiences of reality, right?
So how to resolve this? Well, skillful manipulation of some type or version of procedural generation, such as was seen in this game, is one way. And it's a good way. I loved the dissonance and atmosphere of whimsy created by the author's choice of words and the machine's mixing of them in a short walk in the spring. Some people might note that this actually makes the writing seemingly veer off into the bizarre and nonsensical territory, but I'd argue that this is a better representation of reality than most works. I don't know how other people 'experience' reality, but for me it's definitely not in ways of straight prose and predetermined decisions. This style captures it much better. To the extent it feels homey to an extent, for me. Natural.
Besides that, I also enjoyed the thematic use of 'spring' (which I always do whenever any markers of time — seasons, weekdays, hours — are used as an important element in creative work — it gives the work a certain poetic quality) in this game. The storyline seems so mundane on the surface — (Spoiler - click to show)a traveler embarking on adventures to honor a dead friend, or in this case, so they can meet with a dead friend's ghost (it's all a bit of the same thing at the end, isn't it?) — but this work does a perfect job of portraying that experience, of relaying the narrator's feelings and the comings and goings of his world, his memories to us, the readers, the players, so that we could understand and interpret them, and by extension, him.
Overall, highly lovely work. Give it a try if you haven't already. Have some patience — it actually took me two playthroughs to get into it — the first time I closed it almost immediately upon reading the first two 'pages' (transmuted by a click in-between), but the second time, when I bothered to play it through, it grabbed hold of my interest and I eventually went back to replay the game a third time.