Reviews by GlassRat
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A World Both Magical and Mundane, December 7, 2015Arcane Intern (Unpaid) is an unapologetic homage to the Harry Potter generation, but it's more than fanfic. Rather, it's a response to the Harry Pottery generation in the same way as Lev Grossman's The Magicians -- a story that will resonate with anyone who grew up with the books, but which contains a rich magical world all its own.
I'm a sucker for stories where the magical and mundane collide, and they do so beautifully in Arcane Intern. The story is pretty simple: After many fruitless attempts to break into the publishing business, you finally land an unpaid internship...at a very strange publishing house. Instead of an ID card, you receive a sigil, and with it the ability to see the magic that had previously been hidden from your mundane eyes.
The game follows you through your various internship tasks, which are simultaneously very dull -- taking coffee orders, finding office supplies, making copies -- but also fascinating thanks to their magical embellishments.
It's the kind of premise that you'll either find charming or not -- and in my case, I thought it was delightful.
The Damaging (Damning?) Power of Loneliness, December 7, 2015Capsule II is the second in the Sandman trilogy by Paperblurt. I played it in IF Comp without having played the first, and it stands well on its own -- although some of the plot may make quite a bit more sense in context of a series.
The story takes place on a massive arkship transporting millions of cryogenically frozen people to a new world. In order to keep the ship operational, one person is kept awake at all times, working in 8-year shifts. You play as one of these "Sandmen," beginning with your awakening and following you in a series of vignettes through your life on the ship. Things eventually take a very dark turn.
There are a few places I struggled with the premise, and the writing style is a little uneven -- sometimes serious, sometimes funny, sometimes apparently trying to be one or the other but not quite being either. The first time I played I honestly wasn't even sure how I felt about the game. but something about it stuck with me, and I found myself thinking about it often afterward.
There are a few things Paperblurt has done amazingly well. The first is the visual style. This is one of the sleekest Twine games I've seen, from a visual standpoint, and it all comes together beautifully. The other thing this game does very well is illustrate loneliness and isolation, and the damaging effects of it.
Capsule II reminds me very much of the game Presentable Liberty, both in thematic content but also aesthetic.
A surreal adventure, and metaphors about life, November 23, 2015Summit takes you on a surreal, dreamlike journey. You play as someone who is unsatisfied with their placein life, and goes on a journey toward an unreachable summit. There is a legend that if you are able to reach the top of the peak, you can attain anything -- including immortality. But no matter how far you travel, you never seem to get any closer to your goal.
Instead, you spend some time traveling through various strange lands, meeting various strange people, and you have the option to stay and enrich the lives of those people, and have them enrich yours, or to move on with your journey.
Summit is full of symbolism, the most obvious and unique of which is the idea of the "fish stomach." Essentially, everyone in this world has a stomach full of live fish. If you vomit up a fish and eat it, the result is ecstatic, possibly orgasmic -- but the fish will travel through your body, nibbling at your organs, and eventually kill you. On the other hand, if you abstain from eating the fish, your fishstomach will eventually burst and you will die of fish rot.
As a metaphor, this really worked for me. It seems like a memory for nothing less than life itself. No matter what you do, you will eventually die. But you can hasten that death, or ward it off, and sometimes avoiding death also means missing out on life. So like the decision of eating a fish in Summit, life is often about finding that balance between risk and safety, indulgence and restraint. And I thought the fish thing was such an incredibly evocative way to portray that, with enough nuance to avoid bashing you over the head with themes.
And of course, the "life" metaphor is woven through other things, as well, like the aspirational nature of the summit, that nagging dissatisfaction you feel when you should be content, the way you give up on good things when you're searching for something better that you may never find.
Playing this when I did, it definitely resonated with me on a personal level. I will say it felt like it ran on a little long; not that the game itself needs to be shorter, but that it's probably better digested in smaller chunks rather than tackled all at once. But for an otherwise incredibly evocative game, that's a pretty small complaint.
Questions about the nature of sacrifice, November 21, 2015Taghairm is a game about magic. Real magic -- blood magic, the kind performed by desperate people in desperate circumstances. The kind that leads you to a secluded barn, where you perform an atrocious act without knowing whether or not it will work, because you are desperate enough that a chance at the reward can drive you to make terrible sacrifices.
Practically, it is a game about roasting cats. The ritual performed in the game is historical -- as many awful things are -- and the narrative that unfolds is essentially a dramatization of the only written account of the ritual being performed.
As such, Taghairm is not so much a narrative as it is a simulation. You are invited to play the role of one of these desperate people, committing a desperate act, and the effectiveness of the game really hinges on what you bring to it: How you feel about the things that happen, and what those feelings mean.
For me, it is a game about sacrifice - in both a literal and sybmolic sense. It's a game about what happens when you've come too far to turn back. It's a game about achieving what you want, only to lose everything in the process. It's a game about forgetting what it was you had even wanted to begin with.
What makes it really effective to me is the design. It's not immediately obvious, but this game was really created with care. There are multiple sound files for atmosphere. The UI takes up a tiny amount of the available screen, filling the gaps with darkness -- enforcing the idea that you are isolated, huddled around this terrible fire in the dark. The text, sometimes, moves quickly, events happening beyond your control; and then it stops, refusing to budge until you make a choice. For every cat, you are given the choice to stop the ritual (Spoiler - click to show)-- and to learn that whatever it was you were trying to achieve is now, forever, impossible. You can take a more active role, grabbing the next cat, turning it on the spit. Or you can force your cousin to do the heavy lifting while you stoke the fire. These are not small choices. They inform the world you occupy and your identity within it. They create the simulation.
And, if you let it -- if you don't cringe away but instead allow yourself to stay a while in these people's shoes -- they raise questions that are very worthwhile.
Come for the spy hijinks, stay for the death scenes, November 21, 2015Spy Intrigue is set in a future, somewhat dystopian world. You, the player character, have enrolled in spy school and arrive to discover that you are in fact the only spy left after an unfortunate tragedy involving spy mumps. Which means that you get to start going on adventures, assigned to you by the devilishly attractive Secretarybot, despite having no training, no qualifications, and no guidance whatsoever on what you're meant to be doing.
If this premise sounds like the fun setup to some wacky hijinks, it totally is. And the narrative is funny enough to sustain the absurdity without batting an eye. But even that is not what makes SPY INTRIGUE so awesome.
The custom interface includes an interesting mechanic by providing you with a map that will show you where you are in relation to other nearby nodes -- and how close you are to dying. This turns out to be a good thing, because this game is designed as a sort of deadly gauntlet. You can expect to die a lot.
But you want to die. You want to die as often as you can.
Because when you die, the screen changes, and you're taken into flashback sequences from your life and childhood. And these begin to paint a deeper picture of who you are, and the kind of trauma that you have experienced, and the way that's affected you. You realize rather quickly that you have -- or have had -- a drug habit, and suicidal impulses.
And that's where you start to realize the genius of the game's design. Because reading these nuggets of backstory is so rewarding, and you are so compelled to learn more about this character's background, that you begin to seek out death. You begin to purposely do things that will lead to a dead end, and in doing so, you as the player end up sharing in some small way the protagonist's suicidal ideation.
Of course, you don't have to play it this way. You can navigate around the deaths and play it through as a straight, wacky romp of adventure and still have a good time with it. But I think trying to play Spy Intrigue to "win" is missing the point and, certainly, missing some of the best content.
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