COMPLETE: Abandon Them
Oct. 13th, 2019 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoIFComp continues.
Full disclosure: I slept very poorly due to absolutely gutting bad dreams last night, and have been groggy and sluggish all day. It's almost dinnertime and I feel like I haven't even woken up and started the day yet, let alone... like... done anything. Xyzzy seems to be a bit out of sorts too, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kind of general miasma going around my friend circle lately. Or maybe IFComp is just cursed with all-consuming depression this year, since this is my second downer game in a row.
I will try my best to set general feelings of blurf aside and judge this game on its actual merits, because I tend to just copy/paste these reviews into IFComp's actual score submission with minor edits as necessary, and "I'm a mess today so I'm going to dock points because I'm just not feeling this one" isn't exactly fair to the author.
Anyway. Next up we have Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf. Its copy:
"What exactly happened during the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel? How do we separate the fantasy of the folklore from the realities of starvation and abandonment?
"While often viewed as a fantasy story, my intention was to view this story from a psychological perspective.
"If you were a character in their story, what sorts of choices would you make?"
So what we have here is an artsy deconstruction of the Hansel and Gretel mythos. There's a semi-graphical environment built around the text, and a soothing if pensive and somewhat melancholy acoustic guitar riff plays throughout. This part was extremely well done; I know I shouldn't be saying this about an IF game, but I loved the graphics and sound.
The writing leans heavily on the fourth wall. Before we begin the tale, there's a "Do you accept the terms and conditions?" prompt where the "terms and conditions" are about storytelling itself. (The story comes to life at the moment that you, the reader, start reading it, and at the end you will abandon these characters once more. Do you accept this?) Then it asks you why you accepted (or declined.) Then it turns out that your answer is completely irrelevant as the game proceeds regardless.
This is kind of how it goes with this game, through four iterations (intro, then controlling the woodsman, the children, and the herbalist) of asking you a "Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?" question or two, then railroading you onto the next section no matter what you picked. It has all the presence and mood of a navel-gazing Indie Game About Death, but none of the choices actually matter unless you make them matter by internalizing them. By the time we get to the herbalist, the game ceases to be interactive at all, and instead muses about the nature of storytelling and time loops as these children are abandoned in the woods again and again (and apparently are aware of this) every time the reader restarts the story.
I want to give games like this a lot of benefit of the doubt. I played The Master, a Steam game that is actually about walking from point A to point B while trying to ignore all the lewd graffiti every other player left to completely trash the mountain along the way. Because it was presented as a game about making a short journey to beseech The Master's wisdom, I went in with my "this journey is a metaphor and that was the wisdom this whole time, wasn't it" senses heightened, and I left with some pensive thoughts about life and the kinds of people who would go through this game just to poop on it. I'm not hard to hit with the "This Is Deep And You Must Treat It As Such" flag, is what I'm saying here.
And honestly, there's a lot here that could have worked. The "terms of service," the characters doomed to repeat their tale, these are neat ideas! The author had a good concept here, and I am happy to give credit for that.
However, much like the last IFComp I just judged, I feel like this game hits me with a stolen flag that it hasn't actually earned. It's too short and too railroaded to feel like any of the advertised "what sorts of choices would you make?" moments mean anything, and even the fourth-wall "what do these choices say about you as a person?" moments don't really land for me. I don't know. In the end, you can make as many artsy-sounding promises as you want and I actually will buy into them, but you'd better have a good payoff or I will end up feeling deceived.
Full disclosure: I slept very poorly due to absolutely gutting bad dreams last night, and have been groggy and sluggish all day. It's almost dinnertime and I feel like I haven't even woken up and started the day yet, let alone... like... done anything. Xyzzy seems to be a bit out of sorts too, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kind of general miasma going around my friend circle lately. Or maybe IFComp is just cursed with all-consuming depression this year, since this is my second downer game in a row.
I will try my best to set general feelings of blurf aside and judge this game on its actual merits, because I tend to just copy/paste these reviews into IFComp's actual score submission with minor edits as necessary, and "I'm a mess today so I'm going to dock points because I'm just not feeling this one" isn't exactly fair to the author.
Anyway. Next up we have Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf. Its copy:
"What exactly happened during the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel? How do we separate the fantasy of the folklore from the realities of starvation and abandonment?
"While often viewed as a fantasy story, my intention was to view this story from a psychological perspective.
"If you were a character in their story, what sorts of choices would you make?"
So what we have here is an artsy deconstruction of the Hansel and Gretel mythos. There's a semi-graphical environment built around the text, and a soothing if pensive and somewhat melancholy acoustic guitar riff plays throughout. This part was extremely well done; I know I shouldn't be saying this about an IF game, but I loved the graphics and sound.
The writing leans heavily on the fourth wall. Before we begin the tale, there's a "Do you accept the terms and conditions?" prompt where the "terms and conditions" are about storytelling itself. (The story comes to life at the moment that you, the reader, start reading it, and at the end you will abandon these characters once more. Do you accept this?) Then it asks you why you accepted (or declined.) Then it turns out that your answer is completely irrelevant as the game proceeds regardless.
This is kind of how it goes with this game, through four iterations (intro, then controlling the woodsman, the children, and the herbalist) of asking you a "Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?" question or two, then railroading you onto the next section no matter what you picked. It has all the presence and mood of a navel-gazing Indie Game About Death, but none of the choices actually matter unless you make them matter by internalizing them. By the time we get to the herbalist, the game ceases to be interactive at all, and instead muses about the nature of storytelling and time loops as these children are abandoned in the woods again and again (and apparently are aware of this) every time the reader restarts the story.
I want to give games like this a lot of benefit of the doubt. I played The Master, a Steam game that is actually about walking from point A to point B while trying to ignore all the lewd graffiti every other player left to completely trash the mountain along the way. Because it was presented as a game about making a short journey to beseech The Master's wisdom, I went in with my "this journey is a metaphor and that was the wisdom this whole time, wasn't it" senses heightened, and I left with some pensive thoughts about life and the kinds of people who would go through this game just to poop on it. I'm not hard to hit with the "This Is Deep And You Must Treat It As Such" flag, is what I'm saying here.
And honestly, there's a lot here that could have worked. The "terms of service," the characters doomed to repeat their tale, these are neat ideas! The author had a good concept here, and I am happy to give credit for that.
However, much like the last IFComp I just judged, I feel like this game hits me with a stolen flag that it hasn't actually earned. It's too short and too railroaded to feel like any of the advertised "what sorts of choices would you make?" moments mean anything, and even the fourth-wall "what do these choices say about you as a person?" moments don't really land for me. I don't know. In the end, you can make as many artsy-sounding promises as you want and I actually will buy into them, but you'd better have a good payoff or I will end up feeling deceived.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 04:43 am (UTC)It's always a lot harder to get that when you just completely forgo subtext from the very beginning and keep clubbing your audience over the head with your point. Don't talk down to your audience or they'll just decide you're an asshole and leave.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 05:25 am (UTC)The problem with the two IFComp games we've tried so far this year is... mmh. It reminds me of my complaints about The Flood, where these games either force you into an unearned "look how deep this is, amirite?" moment or cut any attempts to grow legitimate ones off at the knees just through the lack of support from the actual gameplay. Milgram Parable literally But Thou Musted me into doing a bad and then tried to compare that to the Milgram experiment (no, fuck you.) Abandon Them, by contrast, asks a whole buffet of thoughtful questions about what kind of person you are to have wanted to accept or refuse the "Terms of service," trust or not trust your dad when he comes to bring you dinner, etc. and then just tosses all of them out and railroads you directly into the next node no matter what you picked.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 11:03 am (UTC)… is this IFComp jammed with prototypical Indie Games About Death or something?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 02:21 pm (UTC)But man this was not a good time to be hit with this sort of thing. I'm really hoping the rest of IFComp goes better.