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I may have played this game too late..., November 14, 2019Over the next couple of days I intend to write on IFDB reviews of some IF games I have fond memories of. I am hopeful that recentness of play is not mandated on this site, since I will be reviewing from memory games I played years or decades ago.
Photopia, even when I played it back around 2000 or thereabouts, was already incredibly lionized as a masterpiece. Thus even back then I was given reason to be somewhat sceptical of it. I never had the immediacy of response to this game that I did to, say, So Far by Plotkin, or even Cadre's own Varicella. In effect, the ultimate "spoiler" was merely this game's reputation. Besides, by the time I decided to give Photopia a try I was already familiar with the fact that IF could be literary and immersive. I was somewhat beyond being surprised.
Photopia is entirely literary; it is effectively IF as pure literature. Therefore it stands and falls simply on its literary merit. Now, most negative reviewers of Photopia seem to accuse it of being written in the style of a teenage geek of the era. Without knowing anything of Mr Cadre's background, I agree that there is an aspect of immaturity of vision in the writing. This I noticed even though I was a teenager myself when I played it. I am still not sure the extent to which this damages the tale from a literary standpoint. It could be argued that the main character (Spoiler - click to show) is dead throughout the entire game and is merely reflecting back on her short life; since she died as a teenager, some teenage narcissism, immaturity and morbidity is perhaps to be expected.
I never particularly admired that aspect of the game - Ally herself, I mean. However, I was always intrigued by the final scene of the game. Most reviews on this game seem to complain that there is no ending. But there is an ending; and it still intrigues me thinking back on it later; the dreadful and haunting image of the(Spoiler - click to show) infant Ally being introduced to the photopia in the first place. There is something so creepy about this ending that I sometimes reflect on it even now. Clearly the photopia (Spoiler - click to show) has affected the child Ally deeply, to a degree that she presumably has no conscious memory of when she grows up. Yet those coloured lights contaminate every aspect of the story; showing that in some way Ally is changed by something that is beyond her conscious memory. This aspect alone - the idea that our soul may be built on long-forgotten foundations in early childhood, is fascinating enough. But I would go further.
Indeed, similarly to the bizarre ending of Shade by Andrew Plotkin, I always interpreted the ending of Photopia as follows. (Spoiler - click to show)The parents, in providing the photopia to the infant Ally, have unwittingly created a kind of Tibetan Book Of The Dead for the girl. That is, through the entire story Ally is already dead and waiting to be reincarnated. She is reflecting back on her own life through the prism of the photopia as best she can. This requires seeing everything that has happened in the multiple coloured lights of the device.
For example, I interpret the famous "crystal maze" as(Spoiler - click to show) the dead Ally reflecting on the windscreen shattering across her face. Indeed, the infant Ally is a dead soul dreaming of her short life and awaiting rebirth.
This one aspect of the story is enough, in my opinion, to forgive all manner of shortcomings in characterisation and possible immaturity of tone. I think that many people have fundamentally misunderstood the point of the story, to which there are enough clues in the cryptic ending.
Despite the above, I honestly couldn't say that I loved this game as much as other IF. As I say, I was probably less impressed than I might have been had I played this game first.