Arcane Intern (Unpaid) is a clickable Twine CYOA about a young woman (I think? Sex not definitely specified that I saw) who loves the magicky Rebecca Butler books and who gets an internship with Praecantatio Publishers, the publishers of those books. The internship is curiously boring... OR IS IT? (actually not boring.)
With its dues to Harry Potter and some commentary on young adults' possible relationship to Harry Potter books, the game is probably a must play for people who are, uh, interested in Harry Potter. It also has something to say to people who look at non-child people who like Harry Potter and think: 'What are they thinking?' It's got clean presentation, some suitable writing and sports lightly modelled adventure gaming in its middle stretch.
Having said all that, I didn't like it for a fair while, then suddenly I did. My full review of this game explicitly talks about an ending. My non-spoilery summary is: it's a fantasy narrative that folks who like young adult fantasy material will likely dig. There are a few swear words in there, otherwise it would merit a G rating.
Gosh I liked the ending of this game!
The reason I begin with the end is because I found some of Arcane frustrating, often didn't understand why various prose or design choices had been made, and had been wondering, as I furiously clicked my way through it, how the whole thing was going to resolve in any non-unsatisfying fashion. The end of the game dealt with most of these problems and turned them into plusses, and not in a scenery-destroying M Night Shyamalan way.
Trouble could be a-brewin' when a game wordlessly declares its intention to follow a Harry Potter-like trajectory, though in necessarily brief fashion. How can a short IFComp game not seem ultralight when trying to go the same initial route as Rowling's seven increasingly enormous books? The books obviously had acres of time and space to develop everything that they developed. Au contraire, the heroine of Arcane goes from The Full Muggle to magically aware in her new magical workplace in a few minutes. It's pretty hard to create the journey to wonder in that time, and so began my thoughts along the lines of: 'Ugh! How's this going to work?'
I also gritted my teeth whenever the heroine said 'shit' or 'fuck' in her brain, since this didn't gel with the otherwise kid-friendly magicking world and commensurate prose.
The game has its own Hogwarts-like staff, but with their short screen times and lack of extravagance, they're hard-pressed to match up to the real deal, they who loom so large in the memory when even fleetingly evoked.
The game also did something which has come to make me instantly rage at a Twine project. If a Twine game ever prints a message and an option, and I click the option, and the same message and option appear again, I become enraged. My thoughts at such time are: "Don't make me click the same thing twice in a row for the same result twice (or more) a row! This is Twine! I'm clicking enough already!"
The adventures-in-the-library section of Arcane is its most parser-y part. That is to say, I think it might have played better as a parser game. The player could make a map, gather objects, try the objects in different locations, move about at his/her leisure while thinking. This kind of non-linear modelling has been imitated pretty well here with Twine, but inevitably there are shortcomings: Repetition of scenes already played, confusing and frustratingly loopy (as in looping) navigation through the same rooms dozens of times. I did like the link names here, with phrases like 'Towards what feels like a trap' or 'Towards the smell of disrepair'. Even though this stretch of the game interested me more than others in the sense that it made my adventure gamer senses tingle, it wore on me with the repetition, looping, and the need to guess which text passages might change if I revisited them.
So while I was technically impressed with Arcane – and its story of the heroine's frustration at doing rote chores in a magical world had grown on me as I progressed – a lot of it I also just didn't get. And some of it I found tedious. I didn't know what it was saying or would say about its subject matter. I was therefore surprised at the effect of the ending in which the heroine loses her memory of the magic world then yearns for magic again without knowing that she's already had it. To me that seemed to say that the ideas of escapism and fiction per se may be more powerful than actual escapism or the desire to live out various fictional events for real. If there is some sadness in acknowledging the eternal dissatisfaction in human nature (though it's not only sadness) that feeling is lightly but well expressed through the gulf between the heroine's expectations of working in a magic world and what she experiences when she is there. It also now made sense to me why the I'd needed to be reminded of the PC's adultness with the swearing and such, and why her adventures weren't as spectacular as I'd hoped they might be early in the game.
I had an unusual experience with this game and I've described that experience.
(There are some cool book titles in the game as well. 'Rebecca Butler and the Pillars of Storge' made me laugh.)
That's an interesting take on that ending, hadn't thought of it that way. I got the "WiziLeaks" (heh) ending first, and I found it really satisfying in a very different way, kind of a political critique of the whole Harry Potter worldview. I also appreciated the affordances for playing to all three endings without having to replay too much of the game.
ReplyDelete