Map

by Ade McT profile

Surreal
2015

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Number of Reviews: 7
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1-7 of 7


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful metaphors and emotions, frustrating as a game, September 12, 2022
by dvs

There is a great short story in this game. The author creatively captures the emptiness and cottony lack of motivation in depression. "The clock on the wall ticks the seconds away into the air." However, I'd much rather read this as a short story than play it as an interactive fiction game -- there are too many problems in the gameplay which distracts and confuses from the poignancy of the writing. I found myself doing the minimum to move the story along.

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Emotional; creepy house, August 8, 2018

Wow, I enjoyed this game. I became thoroughly invested in the ending (Spoiler - click to show)when I had to choose between saving Yvonne or letting her die. Not an easy choice to make, since I figured I'd be letting go of the other children, and I'd spent this whole game getting to know them! I saved her -- I would've felt pretty awful letting a baby die. I loved the changing and growing house, (Spoiler - click to show)as well as the changing and growing plant. What starts as a small, unassuming plant grows until it's literally going through the ceiling and taking up most of the room. Very House of Leaves.

One thing I feel really silly about is that I didn't realize I was carrying a map until, like, the end of the game (y'know, the title of the game). I'd actually drawn a tiny map on my iPad to keep track of where everything basically was. I forgot to check my inventory 'til the end... whoops. Won't do that again.

The only thing that frustrated me is having conversations. I found myself trying many words, getting brief responses, and giving up to do something else. I wish there'd been a short list of topics to ask about and maybe more responses built in (I understand how long and tiring this project must've been, though, lol). (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, there was a mention of my husband's boss grabbing my ass. I sure as hell didn't wanna let that one slide! I kept trying to get someone to bring it up or acknowledge it but couldn't.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Space as metaphor, April 1, 2018
by verityvirtue (London)
Related reviews: melancholic

[Time to completion: >1 hour]

[Content warnings for mentions of abortion, child death]

In Map, you play a fed-up housewife in a subtly mutating house. Space, here, is used to reveal memories. As the reader learns more about the PC, the more the house expands to accommodate that, and each new room offers a chance at atonement. Just as space moves non-linearly, time creeps strangely. If you know Pratchett’s metaphor of the Trousers of Time, or think of decision-making as creating forks in a timeline - it’s very much like that. Just as the PC can enter new rooms in the house,

The themes in this game reminded me of Sara Dee’s Tough Beans, or, a more recent example, Cat Manning’s Honeysuckle. All of these feature female protagonists who have been dutiful and responsible doing what was expected of them until they were all but forgotten, until some catalytic event drives them to change.

In Map, the protagonist is much less involved, on the micro level. The rooms you discover let the player relive key decision-making moments in the PC’s life, but once you enter a moment, you can simply wait for it to get to the only choice you have: a binary yes/no choice. Without this, though, the game might have swollen to an unmanageable size, so the limited agency is more strategy than anything else, and on a conceptual level, this does work - how many times have you wondered what would have happened if you’d made a different decision?

The scope of this game is narrow and deep, delving into the emotions underpinning life-changing moments and distilling these moments into a fork in a very personal timeline. Some bits went way over my head (the rubber plant, for instance), but overall it was an ambitious, thoughtful piece.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A mid-length puzzle-less parser game about choices with a cool map, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour, IF Comp 2015

This was my absolute favorite IFComp 2015 game. In Map, you play a woman with a troubled relationship with her family members. You spend most of the day alone in your house, and as you immediately learn, the house is slowly growing new rooms, which is reflected in a map you carry.

During the course of a week, you have the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)go back and make changes in your life, which affects your current life greatly. This allows for a lot of flexibility in gameplay, and many endings.

The feeling of the game is poignant and thoughtful, and mildly creepy, especially when strange things happen and noone, least of all YOU, seems to care.

Love this game.

Edit: Before I posted this review, I went through and played again. It was a slow start, but I teared up during the last few days of gameplay. This game really gets me in an emotional place. It had an emotional impact on me that rivals games like Photopia or the Warbler's Nest. It affected me a lot because many decisions revolved around family and relationships.

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1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Didn't understand, January 24, 2016
by Oreolek (Kemerovo, Russia)
Related reviews: ifcomp2015

Did not understand one bit. You walk around, you type in "tomorrow", you walk around some more, maybe something happens. What's the point? It's very depressing.

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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Ultimate white middle class pity party, January 21, 2016

This game definitely isn't for everybody. The overall feeling of melancholy and wasted potential never lifts. There is no choice that will not make you feel trapped and resentful. The disorienting lack of clear direction was likely intentional, but holy cow did I ever get tired of playing "guess the direction!" while the NPC I was trying to talk to ran to another room.

In the end, I was too overwhelmed by frustration with the ineffectual main character's lack of meaningful decision-making (stay in hospital slightly longer? agree with someone's else's decision? file invoices??) to do anything more than sleep the last few days. For crying out loud, MC, this is why we have feminism! Dump the husband! Move out on your own! Ride a motorcycle! For once in your pathetic life, TAKE A REAL RISK!

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Remapping life, November 30, 2015
by CMG (NYC)

In Map you play as a dowdy housewife who finds that her house is expanding. Rooms take longer to cross. Ceilings feel higher. Suddenly, one day, there is an extra doorway that wasn't there before. When the protagonist enters this doorway, it takes her into her own past, where she is given the opportunity to remake certain major life decisions.

The game does not have puzzles in the normal sense, but as more and more doorways appear and you're given more decisions to reshape the protagonist's life, the entire story becomes a sort of master challenge. Once you change an individual moment in the past, you cannot redo it; you have to enter the command "tomorrow" and advance the current timeline to the next day to see how the present has altered. And while at first it may seem like you want to change everything you can in the past, you soon realize that these changes are impacting each other. You're gaining one thing only to lose another.

Once you've come to this point, no decision in the game is easy, and none is right. There isn't a "good" ending you're trying to reach. Every outcome involves compromise.

Photopia is the nearest relative to Map that I know about in the text adventure world. There's a stereotype about the "my shitty apartment" genre that many games fall into, and I'd say that Photopia and Map both fall into the "my shitty middle-class life" genre. They deal with realistic problems, sure. They deal with tragedies. And they're uplifting in the end, even though they don't iron out life's complexities. You're meant to relate to them. But personally, this is not my style whatsoever. It is everywhere in modern literature -- in fact, it's what the term "literary fiction" often means as a genre label (poor literary fiction, being saddled with that). I can appreciate Photopia for what new tricks it did with the parser, but if I came across its story as a novel, I would pass right by that novel without looking back.

Well, for me, Map was better than Photopia, even though Map suffers from what I call the Moll Flanders Effect. If you don't know about Moll Flanders, here is the book's full title:

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.

All the novel's major events are summed up in this title, and even though the events themselves are very serious, when they're compiled into a laundry list they become silly. Moll Flanders is doing this on purpose. Most stories that suffer from the Moll Flanders Effect are not. Map does not mean to be silly, but when it hits you with major event after major event, the story strains beneath such a dramatic load. You've got everything from teenage pregnancy to extramarital affairs to Aunt May being shipped off to the nursing home, and more.

Again, these are realistic issues. They happen to people. They sometimes even happen all together as they do in Map. It's not the issues themselves that I'm talking about, but rather how they're being handled by the narrative.

But whereas Photopia remained mired in its "my shitty middle-class life" muck for me, Map broke free. That's partly because the interaction is integrated really well into the story. You are seriously making these choices, and you seriously feel their weight every time you make them. By the end, it's as though you're performing a high-wire act, aware at every step that the wrong decision might send you plummeting -- and as I said before, there are no "right" decisions. You will make sacrifices, and you will feel it.

The other thing that Map does really well is ramp up the tension. As you approach closer and closer to the ending, one horrible past event slowly unveils itself, and you know where you're going, you know you have to face it. It almost becomes a horror game, with the supernatural house bending around you, driving you toward this confrontation.

One thing that Map does need, objectively, is a copy-edit. It has lots of text, and there are lots of typos. I also felt that the text could've been trimmed back at certain places. It will always go for more explanation rather than less when it has the chance, even once something has already been established clearly.

Those quibbles aside, this is a game that everyone should play. It shows what you can do when you put the story first and use the parser to full advantage to tell that story.

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