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About the StoryPurgatory as (semi) abandoned bird park. A surreal wandering game. Four endings. Option to play through all endings without replaying the entire game. Game Details |
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Entrant, Back Garden - Spring Thing 2024
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Purgatory of some sort, May 22, 2024A bizarre and beautiful game. As given by the description, you are in purgatory after having apparently... died? But the nature of your death, or even your life, doesn't matter much. It's not that kind of story. Instead of learning about who you were and what you've left behind or that stuff you often see in those "I died and now must come to terms with my existence" stories, you're just wandering around a strange bird park and having strange encounters with strange people. At the end of it all, you... transcend? It's not entirely clear.
This one Youtuber made a video about how game journalists will describe every single game as a combination of some other game, and I think about that every time I tell myself "this thing is just like that thing plus that other thing", but I'll do it here anyway. Provizora Parko is a bit like You are Standing at a Crossroads meets Beautiful Dreamer. Like You Are Standing at a Crossroads, it has a bizarre purgatorial world, a sense of unease and "how do I get out of this?", questions answered only by more questions, and many allegorical happenings. But the overall tone and ending are far more lighthearted, which brings me to the second comparison. It shares with Beautiful Dreamer a strong sense of whimsy and a world that feels consistent in a strange way, adhering to a set of unknown rules, even if those rules aren't at all explained. And both have strong writing.
Is it that similar to either of those games? Not really. But I'd recommend them if you liked this one. Play more games, they're fun.
Time to finish: ~10 min
Quote:
Every evening, a stork would peer into a lake looking for fish and shrimp to eat. One night, under the full moon, her shadow spoke to her from the bottom of the lake. “Come join me at the bottom of the lake. But you must pluck out your eyes first. You will not need them any longer.” So the stork plucked out her eyes and passed into the world beneath the surface. Only a few drops of blood remained on the water, but soon they, too, disappeared.
Birds, flight, baggage, May 16, 2024I am not usually one to police genre boundaries – these are useful shorthands for discussion, analysis, and (mostly) marketing, nothing more – but I have to admit my ears pricked up when I saw a slight inconsistency in the tags the author provided for Provizora Parko (which as far as I can tell is Esperanto for “provisional park”, reinforcing my conviction that Esperanto is just a monoglot American putting on a fake accent and pretending to speak Russian). The primary genre is tagged as surreal, you see, while there’s also a content warning cautioning about implied violence “in a magical realist context.” And while the border between these two things is admittedly vague, there are real differences, beyond just that I tend to like magical realism and am more frequently left cold by surrealism. The former is more likely to accord with the traditional plot dynamics of a literary novel, with occasional fantasy elements introducing moments of illogic into a familiar structure, whereas in my experience the latter eschews linear narrative and tends to put conventional elements and outré ones at the same level. My complaint about surrealism is that it can often feel lightweight: a bunch of stuff happens, but there’s no throughline of dramatic progression ensuring that actions beget consequences in a comprehensible way. For a poem, that’s completely fine, but for a story – and most IF is structured as a story, of course – it’s a riskier proposition.
Provizora Parko definitely falls much more on the surrealism side of the line. But! Like a good poem, it’s also admirably disciplined about the language, imagery, and themes it deploys, which mitigates that feeling of weightless contingency: this is definitely not a world where anything could happen. As you (it’s unclear who “you” are) explore the titular mostly-abandoned zoo, there are certain elements that recur: crowd scenes, birds, travel, disaster. While you’ve got freedom of movement (this is a Twine game that allows you to navigate, though there’s no compass directions or inventory or any other parser-like touches) the map imposes or at least suggests a particular progression through the space that leads to something resembling an arc, with individual, memorable set-pieces gaining significance by the way they’re juxtaposed.
I want to zoom in on the language, since to my mind that’s the primary draw here. It’s evocative and clear while still remaining elusive, like this bit of landscape description:
"Rainbow shower trees with sherbet-colored blossoms border the plaza and cast crisp shadows in the midmorning sun."
This approach extends even to the unfamiliar or fantastical elements – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which, in fact. Take this bit:
"Sunlight dances on the path, which is carpeted with layers upon layers of exploded figs. In the heat and humidity, the sugar sculptures are beginning to sweat, the beads of moisture hardening into tiny pimples."
I don’t really know if that’s how a sculpture of sugar really starts to melt, and that tentative sense of alienation, that tension between the alien and mundane, helped keep me engaged. It also helps that there’s a real sense of variety to the half-dozen different areas: one uses timed text to create a delightful emulation of luggage coming down an airport’s baggage claim carousel, while another takes the shape of an extended, absurd dialogue with a man and his perhaps-imaginary bird.
For all that I enjoyed much of the experience of playing Provizora Parko, I ultimately did find that its surreal aspects were too distinctive for my tastes. In particular, while I can identify some of the game’s key concerns, and squint at the endings to see how the theme of substitution or transformation that runs through them finds echoes in earlier parts of the game, it didn’t feel to me that this was an organic climax that brought everything that came before into coherence. This might just be a reflection of wanting the game to be more prosaic than poetic, but even very abstruse poems usually strive to leave the reader with a pop of insight at the end that refigures what’s gone before. Someone else more on the game’s wavelength might feel differently, though, and just based on the quality of the writing I’m certainly satisfied by my visit to this park.
Dada or Deep? Dunno., May 13, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/16/24
Playtime: 15min
This is a fully realized work that really weaves a spell. A full-on Dada exercise, it leans into dream-logic more effectively than any work I can think of. To the extent there is a frame to this, the protagonist is wandering around some rundown tropical resort. Yeah, that’s it. Everywhere they (she? probably she.) goes, eerie stuff happens around her. Human sized cats. An extended airport luggage claim sequence, where luggage are bird masks. Sugar sculptures of off-putting folktales. Sassy teens. All of it taken in stride by the protagonist.
The text is magnetic. It conveys so much, so singularly, with economy and punch. Each encounter is starkly realized, yet has its own vibe. Most of us have a limited well of imagery to draw on. When composing absurd Dada, it can become all too easy for fascinations, phrasings or images to repeat or resonate with each other in a way that ultimately constrains the effect. This author is wildly, perhaps distressingly, without bounds. I found the encounters to be singular and unique, and that breadth of vision coupled with the protagonist’s even responses set the tone of the piece more than any other thing. I cannot laud the vision and articulation highly enough.
I particularly like the head fake of (Spoiler - click to show)the luggage claim sequence. Pretending to (Spoiler - click to show)‘wake up’ only to discover no, still immersed in weird. The most effective use of interactivity for me were the links that replaced text on the page. The linked text was tightly integrated into the page layout in a smart way that ALSO reinforced the weirdness of the links. Even the navigation links, while not providing much influence over things (you are always going to click all the links), nevertheless provided a sense of exploration.
If I have a quibble with this piece, it is ‘What is the point of it?’ There are four endings that only kind of resonate with the one impactful choice you get to make. And only kind of resonate with the antecedents to that choice. Very much of a piece with the vibe of the thing, and very much aligned with the mission statement of Dada. So I guess my problem is with Dadaism? Except, there is a robust credits sequence that suggests there might be something decodable in the symbolism of the piece. Yeah, given the idiosyncrasies of my life journey, I’ve got no hope of decoding any of that.
Ultimately, it is a tight mood piece of fascinating breadth and weirdness and I sure appreciate it on that level. To the extent there are more layers I can’t find, my loss I guess? In my favorite words of the piece:
"maybe I'm the bird and she's the asshole"
Wait. No. The other way around.
Mystery, Inc: I dunno, Scooby I guess? Maybe this is how he dreams? Weird dog.
Vibe: Deep dream
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : No thank you. This work is deeply dependent on authorial voice, and no one else should, ah, aloha with it.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Not my type of game, but still very well made, April 2, 2024It's a bit... surreal for me. I know, calling a surreal game too surreal is a bit unfair, but often I was just plain confused. (That's probably the point). The game is very creative with Twine. Definitely I'm gonna steal some of its tricks for my own games.
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