#hyperfiction

This was an oddly engaging entry, mostly quite well-written, with an interesting premise and a really well-developed sense of urgency in its dramatic pacing. It has its problems, but I think it's going to be circling my head for a long time.

The premise is an unusual one—some women discover at the beginning of adolescence that they are "beat witches," who lose their voices but gain the ability to drain the life-force from people around them in a kind of vitalist magical vampirism. These women have a vulnerability to music, which can kill them. Predictably, the ability to drain the life-force from anyone around them makes them hated and feared, and their loss of voice leaves them unable to effectively advocate for themselves, so the official government policy is that they should be killed with music as soon as possible, by anyone who discovers them.

Shortly after the game begins, the PC is revealed to be one of these beat witches, but only after the player has made several moves and begun to orient themself within the game. Ostensibly, the player begins as part of a plague-investigation team trying to discover the cause of a large number of sudden deaths in the middle of a city, which quickly turn out not to be the result of a plague, but of a beat witch who is not the player character. The player character, we discover soon after, intends to find and kill the beat witch who is behind several thousand deaths.

It's not a bad setup, and Patten largely plays it quite well, creating a tense drama where the PC is struggling to succeed against all odds. He keeps the pressue on the player to move forward quite effectively; the game is essentially one action sequence after another. And the character gets a great deal of backstory throughout the game via flashbacks, which are handled well. (The villain gets pretty good character development via backstory, too.) And all in all, the writing is good, evoking sympathy and terror quite effectively. Too, the included music soundtrack is enjoyable and is tied directly into the action of the game in a satisfying way, and I really would love to see more music in parser IF, especially music that is directly related to the plot instead of just being mood-setting and atmospheric.

I think that there are two large-scale things that kept this from being as satisfying as it could be.

One relates to the premise itself: the idea of a "beat witch" is new and somewhat incongruous, and I want there to be some further development of what it means and how the mechanics work. Any fantasy-genre magic system, which is essentially what this is, needs to be sufficiently developed for it to be coherent in the first place, and this just doesn't quite rise to that level for me. What are we to make of the combination of elements: femininity, vampirism, muteness, magic, vulnerability to music? There are plausible explanations for many combinations of some of these elements, and I tried to read the game in several different ways by trying to understand it through various lenses as I played. It does not seem to be a misogynist combination of elements claiming that women are vampires, but neither is it explicitly a critique of ways in which women are silenced. Nor does it seem to take a position on how music can be a form of magic. None of the obvious combinations of elements seem to produce a coherent magical system, nor a statement about any of the elements.

If nothing else, I'd at least like some hypothesizing about what it is that causes all of these elements to co-occur in some women but not others. But no one, not even the PC, seems to have anything to say about this.

The other large-scale issue is that the game is kept so clearly on rails that it's hard to describe it as more than nominally interactive. At any point, there is really only one major way forward; there are occasional minor choices, but they don't really affect the outcome (provided that the play goes all the way through the plot instead of resulting in an early death, which is also quite possible in this game). There are places where any movement whatsoever moves the player on to the next encounter; and is one place where the parser itself is commandeered to force the player to write a particular command. The game is so strongly on rails that it's sometimes hard to see it as participating in the major conventions of parser IF, and I found myself occasionally grumbling occasionally to myself about how it would fit better into a choice-based IF authoring system. That's not exactly a complaint about the story, and it's not a complaint about choice-based IF; it's just a note that the tool chosen for the story's execution doesn't always seem to fit the story being told.

Perhaps another way to say this is to point out that there is very little freedom during most of the game to explore the game's literal geography; there's a literal geography that underlies the game's action, but the player is constantly being forced through it—by an NPC, by the need to flee threatening music, by an explosion—without getting more than a nominal chance to look around at what's happening. In most rooms, most of the time, backtracking to the previous room is impossible. It reminded me rather forcibly of something Graham Nelson said in (the eleventh item, it turns out, of) his Player's Bill of Rights, from The Craft of Adventure: "Being locked up in a long sequence of prisons, with only brief escapes between them, is not all that entertaining. After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him."

The comparison that sprang to mind for me toward the end of the game, uncharitably, was to Matt Barringer's Detective, which is unfair: the writing here is much better than in Detective. But Detective had a similar approach to geography in some ways, and the comment that Baf's Guide made about Barringer's game, that "the author ... would probably be more comfortable writing hyperfiction," sometimes seems more than a little appropriate.

But this is a much more enjoyable game on its own terms than Detective was, and the writing really is much more competent. It just feels like the concept and the execution need to be worked out in more detail for it to be a satisfying piece of parser IF.

My rating: 5/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)