COMPLETE: This Won't Make You Happy
Oct. 17th, 2021 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoIFComp 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 thatswordianmaster 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.
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.