COMPLETE: This Won't Make You Happy

IFComp 2021 continues.

This Won't Make You Happy by Mike Gillis is a short Twine CYOA, representing IFComp's coveted "15 minutes or less" category that makes it so much easier for us to pad out our completion counter and get enough games down in time. You are sad, and on a quest to venture into the Caves of Despair to find the legendary Jewel of Happiness, in hopes that it will make you happy.

This game is heavily railroaded and its initial adventure through the caves is poorly written and handled, but both of those are. It gets meta after the relationship between the narrator and player breaks down, and credit where it's due; I so dearly wish I could have had "SHOUT: "WHAT? You made me kill him! That was the only option! This game is so annoying."" as a selectable option a couple years ago when we were playing The Milgram Parable.

All we can think of, though, is a screenshot from Jazztronauts that swordianmaster likes to use as a Telegram sticker, with one of its characters (The Pianist) angrily shouting, "MAKING JOKES ABOUT BEING THE PROBLEM DOESN'T MAKE YOU NOT THE PROBLEM." Furthermore, even giving us the option to choose the exact grievance over which to call out the narrator is only so satisfying when it's part of three "yell at the narrator about something" choices that all get railroaded into the next plot beat.

There is a tender moment near the end that encourages ways to find one's own happiness outside the game (breathe, call a friend...) before going back to the actual ending, which is... unsatisfying, but again, perhaps deliberately so. This game will not make you happy. Any happiness you get from it is fleeting like a Skinner box-like dopamine hit from the sound effect of a coin being collected before you finish playing, close the window, and go right back to where you were. The moment you have just before the ending does exactly what it promised it would do is nice, though, and is one of the more clever and positive-feeling ways a game can make us feel things in a meta way that lasts beyond its playtime; that maybe the thoughts we're thinking right now as we write this are still somehow part of the game experience. Look, after The Milgram Parable and Abandon Them in 2019, the bar for "kind of makes you think, doesn't it?" IntFic on our plate at this point is fairly low. This at least wasn't those. I don't regret playing this. We'll all just have to be happy with that, I suppose.

COMPLETE: The Dead Account

IFComp 2021 continues.

So hey, did you know that Telegram messenger has a non-removable dead man's switch that auto-deletes your account if you haven't logged on in X time, presumably to free up space on their servers? You can push back the length of time before it activates in your account settings (I believe the longest you can give it is one year) but you can't disable it entirely.

The Dead Account by Bez is a multiple choice Twine game set up to look like the interface of "Hivekind," a fictitious chat app. Plot beats are played out by reading user bios, reading and reviewing previous flagged messages, and confirming details with users in a group chat. You are a Hivekind employee and moderator, and they just put out a policy update that states deceased users are to have their accounts closed. Unlike Telegram, Hivekind believes in that human touch, so your job is to review messages flagged by the system indicating this user might be deceased, confirm this information with their contacts if so, and then pull the plug on the account yourself. Or you can try to resist with as much wiggle room as you're allowed (but no promises.)

Also, this game was written by a furry, and furries are heavily referenced within (account profile pictures, messages about suiting and attending cons, etc.) so the Telegram connection becomes that much stronger.

So this game hits like an absolute train. Granted, the subject matter is very close and personal to us, to the point that the Hivekind account pages and chatrooms feel authentic and incredibly well put together (the author uses Twine to absolute perfection and the framing greatly enhances the story) so maybe this wouldn't be as heavy if we weren't a part of the scene. Or maybe it would? Death and grief are universal feelings, I suppose, even if the details with which the game paints a picture of these people, not as names on a screen or characters in a story but as people, draw largely from our subculture. I guess that the question of how much this game affects non-furries will be up to the non-furry reviewers to decide; all we can say on our end is oof.

This game does such a good job humanizing (or badgerizing as the case may be) its deceased account that we're mourning him now. On one hand, that's a sign of a well-written story, and is to be commended. On the other, I'm sad now and I need to go sit in a corner and be sad for a while.

... Give your Telegram (or Discord or whatever) friends a hug and tell them you love them. And maybe download local copies of your chat history from time to time.