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A Trial

by B Minus Seven profile

2015

(based on 8 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

A funny thing happens on your way to the Center for Nominal Reassignment. "A Trial" is a chimera of prose, poetry and ???.


Game Details


Awards

Entrant, Main Festival - Spring Thing 2015

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Number of Reviews: 2
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
An absurd distress, May 6, 2015
by CMG (NYC)

This game will make many people wrinkle their noses. That's just a fact. It doesn't have a coherent story, doesn't have coherent characters, and its writing style shifts from passage to passage -- from unintelligible legalese to fairy-tale to script format, and more. Whether you're willing to play along is entirely dependent on your personality, and the game does warn you upfront that it will be "a trial."

With that said, this game made me laugh out loud more than almost any other interactive fiction I've played, and that counts for a lot. And even though the writing style shifts (which I don't perceive as negative, but which others might), it always flows, streaming along with words that simply sound good. Consider this example:

I come from the pen/feather that leaks ink. I come from the brush, that brief blush when we hold hands. I come from the bottle, the blotter the stopper. The well. I do not come well but I come as I am I suppose.

I feel this is a good representation of the game. Perhaps it sounds like nonsense at first, but it's not. We're in some government hellhole where the player-character's identity will be "approved" with a scrawl from a bureaucrat's pen, similarly to how the author's own pen granted this game its identity. The text quoted above is from an answer to a questionnaire's prompt: "Where did you come from?"

Not all the game's text is original. A Trial, in certain respects, is a collage. I'm interested in narratives cobbled together from disparate sources, so I enjoyed what was going on here, with the player-character being cobbled into some rough form as the game cobbles itself together from its influences. Whether this is a valid process to create something is what the game is (at least partially) about. How does one form an identity, anyway?

My favorite sequence was probably a walk down a hallway where the player is obstructed by three uncles, three fathers, three brothers, and three agents. A few lines recited to drive them away are great:

I know many tongues; I have grown many tongues and had many cut out. I know how to speak around you.

I will tie my hands into two thousand knots before I open the door to return to you.


Another sequence involves playing a game-within-a-game when the player loads a save file in a Pokemon parody, only to discover that an old friend corrupted the file with sinister intentions. This would've been right at home in the uncle who works for nintendo.

By now, anyone reading this has probably been able to decide if the game is something they'd be interested in experimenting with or not. It has thirteen endings by its own count, and its opening menu checks each ending off whenever you reach a new one, but I only found eight. In another game, I still probably wouldn't have found them all, just because I don't like replaying games over and over if that's what it takes to get a "perfect" score. In this case, I also feel like breaking away and refusing to satisfy the system is something the story would encourage.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A 'dissociative' exploration of gender identity through jumbles, February 7, 2016

This game claims to contain "dissociation, dysphoria and disassembled discourse", which is pretty accurate. You play as a character going to a bureau of some sorts to get a new name. You first get to pick how to travel there; once you get there, there are a few different methods of getting in; and once in, you are ambushed by a series of groups of three that you have to deal with, before confronting the narrator (in some endings).

This game is about gender identity (one speaker says they remember you as an active boy, and now you are a beautiful woman). So there are a lot of metaphors about social acceptance, feelings of loss or renewal, predatory friends or judgmental family members.

The level of detail in the purposely scattered writing and the variety of choices giving a feeling of agency really make this game effective at communicating the author's feelings.

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A Trial on IFDB

Recommended Lists

A Trial appears in the following Recommended Lists:

personal favorites from 2015 by Anya Johanna DeNiro
These are probably idiosyncratic, and I haven't hit nearly everything I probably ought to have. While I play catch up I'll hope to add to this list a bit as well. Also, there are a few IF works that are not yet in IFDB that deserve...

Polls

The following polls include votes for A Trial:

Games with the best writing by A. I. Wulf
Games are a new medium of art. It's still a maturing medium. But still some works May have succeeded in being truly classic in their writing. As an enthusiastic writer I need to know about the growth of IF in this field.

For Your Consideration - XYZZY-eligible writing of 2015 by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
This is for suggesting games released in 2015 which you think might be worth considering for Best Writing in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here...

For Your Consideration - XYZZY-eligible games of 2015 by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
This is for suggesting games released in 2015 which you think might be worth considering for Best Game in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here will...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 4 of this page, edited by B Minus Seven on 9 June 2015 at 11:06pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page