#kozelek

This is a surreal and disorienting bit of political fantasy that's harder than most to talk about without spoilers. But that's why I put the spoiler warning in the boilerplate text above, I guess.

There are three disconnected segments, each of which has the player piloting a different protagonist around. In the first of these, an Israeli man awakens to find the sky over Tel Aviv dark in the middle of the day. (The story's subtitle when it begins is "a triptych on anger," and this particular PC certainly seems angry enough about the life he's living after the end of a relationship.) There's some rather constrained exploration in which the player attempts to discover why the sky is dark — and starless — and why the electricity is out city-wide in the middle of the day. The PC arrives at Rabin Square to see a reassuring speech given by Benjamin Netanyahu, only to have the prime minister suddenly transform into an enormous, anthropomorphic teddy bear before being hustled off-stage.

The second segment, disturbingly, has the player playing as Donald Trump, awakening in his Mar-a-Lago mansion next to a young blonde woman whose name he cannot remember, only to discover that he, too, has been somehow transformed into a human-sized anthropomorphic teddy bear. The player navigates Trump through conversations with JD Vance and Melania Trump about his transformation before he learns that he is to be declared dead so Vance can ascend to the presidency, and Trump is grabbed and hustled off-stage by his staff. Trump, of course, is also angry throughout the piece, even before he notices his own transformation, again as promised in the story's subtitle.

The third segment takes place in a refugee camp in Rafah, one of the parts of the Gaza strip that has been more or less completely destroyed by Israeli aggression. A mother who has lost her husband and son is attempting to provide a sweet mutabbaq to her surviving daughter as a treat on her birthday. The player navigates her through the refugee camp with the mutabbaq, and comes back to her tent to find her daughter tormenting beetles by trapping them under a fruit bowl and playing with a pair of teddy bears. The story ends when the mother puts a candle stub on the sweet flatbread and lights it.

So of course the title makes sense; we know what the two wishes were, and how the two leaders came to transform into giant teddy bears. And we know who the angry person in the third segment is: not the mother but the daughter, whose revenge fantasy the story is. And of course we know why the story is shocking in its application of the basic rules of magical realism: because the magical effects are symbolic of a structural truth that holds in the real world and that ought to be shocking to all people of conscience, but which the west has had decades of practice turning its eyes away from. (To suddenly experience the unpleasant reality of discovering that you are playing a game which has just made Donald Trump into the player character is nothing compared to the unpleasant reality of being displaced in a refugee camp due to the expansionist policies of a nation whose largest-circulation-in-English newspaper has published editorials saying that the country's need for Lebensraum justifies its colonial push into lands occupied by people of a different religion and ethnicity.

This explains a great deal of the structure of the game, as well: the earlier mysteries are explained by Zulaija's birthday wishes; the game is "on rails," as it were, because of the lack of control that the central character has over her own fate. And who could blame the young girl for her revenge fantasy against the people who have deprived her of home and food and family members? It is a disturbing piece, but that is no bad thing when dealing with an evil and disturbing situation.

More to the side, the world-building is quite good for such a small game (17 rooms, by my count): the Tel Aviv section, in particular, gives the feeling of an ancient city that has been modernized by having non-reciprocal directions and making its eight or nine rooms feel quite a bit like a maze. Every bit of the game feels claustrophobic. The dialog is a little less well-developed, and I could wish the the narrative voices were better developed, just as I wish there were some more modern affordances for the player (more synonyms, doors that the PC opens automatically when trying to pass through them, etc.) but it's done well enough for the piece to be effective.

So this is quite an effective piece, all in all. I think it's going to be on my mind for quite a while.