[PYG]MALION*

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1-5 of 5

Going in circles, April 11, 2023

[Pyg]malion* stars a deity who has been murdered and temporarily reanimated in order to find their murderer. The suspects are all embodiments of various societal forces—politics, celebrity culture, Big Data, capitalism—and despite your divinity, it rapidly becomes clear that you are the underdog here. (Presumably the allegory is that one or more of these forces has supplanted religion in modern society.)

The game’s visual presentation is very slick; I was impressed by the graphics, and I deeply appreciated the ability to swap out the retro game font for a regular sans-serif. The descriptions of the strange dimension the game takes place in and its denizens are inventive and striking.

But, all right, let’s cut to the chase, here: you can’t solve the mystery. The crime scene has been cleaned up before you get there, so there’s no physical evidence to find, and the suspects give a handful of pat responses about where they were and what they were doing that are impossible to verify. And ultimately it doesn’t matter anyway, because all of the suspects are above the law.

You could debate the merits of subverting audience expectations versus the disappointment of breaking the implicit promises set up at the start of the story; you could discuss how much value there is in upending the expectations of the rather conservative mystery genre, specifically. You could argue about whether undermining player agency in an interactive medium is a good way to make a statement or whether it’s more likely to annoy players enough that they’re not inclined to listen to what you have to say.

But I think the most salient point is this: such a narrative just isn’t very interesting. Once the player realizes that the mystery is unsolvable, which happens fairly quickly, there’s nothing else to be gotten out of the game. There’s no other plot, the PC is a cipher, and the social commentary is not deep. The interactivity only exacerbates this issue. By the time the night is halfway over, the player has probably seen all the dialogue, and not much really changes, so the only thing to do is to wander from mostly-empty location to mostly-empty location, running down the clock.

In its unusual concept, memorable descriptive writing, and appealing retro visuals, the game shows a lot of promise, and I would be interested to see the writer’s future works. But it’s unfortunately too static and too repetitive to be satisfying as a game or as a story.

Statue seeks murderer, April 23, 2021

[PYG]MALION*'s intro sets up the scenes for a murder investigation among beings of the 4th and 5th dimension, gods if you will. They are the suspects and you, the murdered god/godess are the investigator, having been reanimated in a marble statue.

I found the setting refreshing. No cloudy mountains or temples from antiquity. Instead the gods have gathered in a stately mansion that would fit well in a Poirot-story. The characters too look and behave like upperclass humans (with a tad more power and influence) from that era.
You are to investigate the mansion, question the suspects and make an accusation at the end.

Unfortunately, there was not much interrogating or investigating to be done. Your efforts are mostly just dismissed by the higher beings you're trying to question, and I found no material evidence when searching the scene.
I really enjoyed the diverse scenes playing out (coins in the fountain), but I never came across something that looked like a clue or a false alibi or anything that one would expect in a fictional murder investigation.

The accusation at the end was therefore just a baseless guess. The author probably had a definite reason for making this choice, maybe something about being powerless against the whims of fate.

At any rate, I didn't get it.

Don't let this stop you from playing, it's an enjoyable read.

Immersively eerie whodunit, April 15, 2021

[PYG]MALION* is an immersive whodunit about a slain god trying to solve their murder in a luxurious inter-dimensional estate. Some of the world-building elements seem indebted to graphic novel and sci-fi influences like Moebius and The Fifth Element (down to the inter-dimensional diva star). Design elements also contribute to the otherworldly atmosphere, with a UI that includes cyberpunk fonts and stylized images in blacks and purples.

The god, temporarily revived in the form of a statue by a necromancer detective, confronts a cast of suspects representing different archetypes: a singing diva, a popular athlete, a titan of industry, a power-wielding president, etc. While there is a formulaic aspect to the story structure, the descriptions and conversations are just the right amount of nonsensical and inscrutable, giving the reader a tantalizing glimpse into this world. Character development for the god is folded nicely into the action as they wander around the estate, in the way they consider different objects or in how they react to their rapidly decaying tie to the corporeal world. I also ended up loving that (Spoiler - click to show)the story functions as an anti-mystery, with no real motives for the suspects and a static quality to the flow of the story, like observing a slowly dissipating diorama.

There are aspects of the game that feel unfinished, like occasional error messages or missing images, as well as limited consequential choices and a denouement that feels somewhat incomplete. But overall, this game hits the mark as a holistically designed and satisfyingly eerie experience.

An empty plenum, April 15, 2021

After checking out its entry page, I was looking forward to this one: choosing the mythological counterpoint to Galatea as the title of your game is a move with appealing chutzpah, no matter how much extraneous punctuation you throw in there to muck things up, and Pygmalion’s blurb offers a pretty solid hook too:

"A story about You— The Murdered God— and the attempt to solve your death’s mystery in places beyond."

That enthusiasm carried me into the opening sequence, as the game’s got a neat CGA aesthetic and starts reeling off potentially-compelling plot elements: a murder-mystery where you’re the victim! Fourth-dimensional politics! Reformed necromancers! Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories! And there’s a fun little character-generation sequence here where you can define the genders of yourself and your sidekick.

Unfortunately, once I got to the game proper, my enthusiasm began eroding and I wound up not enjoying this one very much at all. On both the game and writing sides of things, my experience with Pygmalion was irritating and empty, despite the author’s clear intentionality and technical skills.

Before getting to the critique, a potted summary of how Pygmalion plays is needed, so here goes: you’re a god who’s been murdered by parties unknown, but a helpful necromancer has resurrected you by shoving your spirit into a marble statue. This second lease on life is on a severe timer, but it’s enough to allow you (with the necromancer in tow as a sidekick) to revisit the scene of the crime – a sort of cross-dimensional nexus – and interrogate the suspects and hopefully figure out whodunnit before you re-expire. The game is in Twine, but with a stylized presentation where you’re always looking at a retro, 4-color picture of a character or location, with navigation or dialogue choices listed below.

There are eight locations that play home to five suspects, with lots of incidental environmental details to investigate along the way. The places you can go are mundane – a garden, a foyer, a rec-room – but the contents are offbeat, including strange half-mechanical plants, ley-line tangles, and obelisk-fountains that resolutely refuse to grant any wishes. So too are the suspects, who are nameless representations of aspects of society: politics, capitalism, entertainment, big tech, and athletics (though I was confused on this last one since his picture makes him look like a motorcycle cop), each of whom occupies a different point on the spectrum between menacing and alluring – the cast reminded me of the characters you can make in the tabletop RPG Nobilis, if anyone remembers that. After time’s up (there is a real timer that ticks down as you explore), you accuse one and get an ending, though you appear to die again no matter what.

Even reading this summary, I think it sounds really great! But like I said, I got very little enjoyment out of this one. Partially this is due to how finicky the interface is, which adds friction to every interaction. Because of how much space the pictures take up on the screen, the text is spit out only one or two sentences at a time, and sometimes there’s quite a lot of it to get through before there’s a choice. Unfortunately, this requires either hitting the space bar – which I found often led to skipping over a line – or clicking a tiny > button that shifts slightly up and down in the window depending on how much text there is, which is a constant, low-level frustration. There are also sometimes options or explanatory text that shows up below the main display, meaning you frequently need to scroll up and down to see whether you’re missing anything.

I also didn’t really enjoy the game’s prose, though it’s technically well done – I noticed only a few scattered typos, and it’s got its own style. Unfortunately the style is one I don’t like. Sometimes it’s flat and dull, listing the furniture and stating how characters are standing and moving in terms more unimaginative than you’d think given the setting. It does occasionally liven up, typically when interacting with the suspects, but usually that means it starts sprinkling in references and adjectives that don’t quite fit, while remaining emotively flat, which winds up creating a kind of vague, hostile atmosphere. This alteration of styles I’m sure is intentional – it reminded me a bit of some of the literary fiction in vogue in the early 90’s, like David Foster Wallace circa Girl With Curious Hair – but it made my experience playing the game alienating and dull.

Speaking of things that are alienating and dull, the murder mystery here underwhelmed me. When you sketch the outline, again, it should be great! The problem is that there’s no actual investigation to undertake. There are no physical clues (crime scene’s been tidied up); you can only ask the suspects the same three questions, with none of them having anything substantive to say in response; and at the end, you can accuse anyone you want but regardless of your choice, you appear to only get a sly hint that sure, maybe they did it, without any resolution. Your actions wind up being completely unimportant as far as I can tell, with the player character unable to even attempt to solve the mystery. I suspect, as with the prose, this is the point, but for reasons I won’t rehash here since this is already running long, I really don’t get on with 99% of postmodern detective stories.

(I should say that I found one small bit of interactivity in the scenery, where options changed depending on what order I did things – if you check out the fountain and bum all your sidekick’s coins to throw into the water, you can then go back to the car and get a much larger haul of change to dump in. This leads to a little reflection that I kind of liked, with that act being a sort of commemoration of your soon-to-end existence, a kind of riff on writing your name in water. But this little narrative cul-de-sac, as always, doesn’t appear to have any impact on anything else that happens).

The last redoubt here would be the thematic level – if I found the story was ultimately one that had an impact on me and illuminated some aspect of the human condition, certainly all the above would be forgivable. Alas, I found things uninspiring on this front too. The narrative doesn’t have much in the way of specificity – like, who the god you’re playing is, or how they’re related to the characters you meet and why anyone would want to kill you. This is a problem not just for the murder-mystery side of things because no one has a motive, but also on the literary side of things because there’s not really any conflict. Sure, you can impose your own reading on this empty vessel – the best I can do is to imagine that the murdered god is a representation of religion, so Pygmalion is about allowing you to level a finger at the force that’s displaced you from pride of place in contemporary American society. But the game doesn’t give you enough interesting building-blocks to really support that interpretation.

As I’ve said throughout, this is a well-considered game that doesn’t do things accidentally, and shows quite a lot of skill and craft (though I did notice two bugs – a broken link to an image when examining the portraits in the stateroom, and a missing macro closing tag error in the Chanteuse ending). And I can see it resonating really strongly with certain players. But sad to say on this one, I’m on the outside looking in.

A murder mystery in a fantasy dimension, April 12, 2021

This game seems to have been completed as part of a university program, possibly at University of Central Florida. The game list mentors but not beta testers, which would make sense.

If this game was made for a university program, it would probably be at the senior project or thesis/part-of-thesis level. It is a large game, with custom art and a UI designed from the ground up.

There is a lengthy, mostly-linear opening sequence that allows you to customize yourself. This part is an interesting story about how you, a deceased god, have been temporarily reanimated as a statue (a nod to Galatea, which is referenced in both the credits and in the name of the game itself). You go to a house occupied by the president of the 4th dimension in order to investigate your murder.

There is then a much longer segment where you can explore several different locations, some of which have worldbuilding and some have suspects. Some state is tracked in interesting ways.

The game ends with an accusation. You can accuse anyone; the game calls these 'fake endings' but doesn't list any 'true' ending. That, with some other comments in code, leads me to believe that this game doesn't have the full scope the author intended, and it may possibly be expanded in the future.

Overall, I had a very positive experiment. There were only a few flies in the ointment. Perhaps the most obtrusive one was the the '>' symbol used as a 'next' prompt. While keyboard presses can be used to move the game forward, you can also click that symbol, which is pretty small and hard to hit. Then, when you have choices, that symbol appears in front of each choice, but it is no longer clickable; instead, you must click the choice next to it. This led to me 'misclicking' a lot, and could probably be solved by just adding the word 'next' after the clickable '>' symbols and then making that the thing you click instead of the '>'.

The other issues were a missing image (studying the portraits led to a missing link) and maybe some scattered typos (I had the impression, but would have to go back again to check). I think this is a good game, the author seems talented, and whatever program is assisting the production of games like these seems to be doing great.

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