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two VN reviews
Doki Doki Literature Club: I was told to go into this one without spoilers, so I did. With unwitting prescience, I whined to my friend: "Wait, Monika is clearly the hottest, where's the button that lets me flirt with her?"
Har har de har.
It was a cute creepypasta concept, but it got weighed down by spending too much time on the "dating sim" part of "subversive creepypasta dating sim," and not enough time on the "creepypasta subversive" bit. This would've been fine if the "dating sim" bit were fun, but honestly the characters were utterly generic and I just did not give a shit about them. (Compare to Hatoful Boyfriend, which worked because the dating sim bits were genuinely fun, and funny, and short enough to keep my attention, which turned out to be a perfect set-up for the actual-weird-kinda-subversive-stuff in the final act.)
A Night in the Woods: I think this works better if you think of this as more of a "wandering-around-in-a-decaying-rust-belt-town simulator" than a proper narrative-driven game. There is an overarching plot, ostensibly, but the plot's a bit thin, whereas the town is wonderfully tangible, and stuffed with fun little nooks and personalities to explore. (I especially liked talking with the preacher; I wish we'd seen more of him.)
It captured well some aspects of modern-underemployed-twentysomethingdom, e.g. the difficulty of proving your "adultness" to a community that's still measuring "adult" by car ownership or a house or a kid or whatever, and the curious puzzle of who manages to leave and who gets stuck in the old town, and the way the scenery changes between your teens and when you come back again, and so on.
Two factors dragged the game down a bit: the protagonist herself, and some shoehorned political commentary.
With respect to the protagonist: she's a jerk. If I'm being charitable, I could maybe see that she's got poor impulse control and is more thoughtless and oblivious than truly ill-intended. But honestly this requires a tremendous amount of charity on my part; I was forced to sit through a scene where the protagonist says some abominable things to her sweet mother (something to the effect of "you were a shitty example growing up, you and dad are failures"), just because her mother has the temerity to ask (in the most gentle possible way) why her daughter dropped out of college. You know, while the daughter's living at home rent-free, and when the parents were helping pay for college. I don't care how depressed or short-sighted you are, that is just shitty.
This is made more annoying because you are, ostensibly, playing as the protagonist. Though honestly calling this an "interactive" story is only very faintly true—you don't even have the option to not be shitty to mom, or not say the dumbest shit possible to your best friend; the game literally railroads your choices to force you to hit the button on "shitty vs shittier" options. Turns out, in this context, playing as a shitty character didn't make me empathize more; it just made me resent that I was being forced to play as them.
(Being forced to hang out with assholes just because they're the only fucking people around and your town isn't that big, that I totally get, and they could have pulled off something about that here. In that situation I'd find the protagonist far less irksome. Except, in my route, I was hanging out with Bea all the time, and Bea somehow tolerated me saying absolutely completely shitty stuff to her, multiple times, even though Bea was presented as having a few other close friends, and Bea's the one who gets invited to cool parties, and she generally tends more towards stoicism than neediness—she has options, so why is she hanging out with me, exactly?)
With respect to the "shoehorned politics" thing: I was generally irked by how very, idk, Tumblr/Twitter-flavored-leftist basically all your friends / nice people / etc in the town are. Bea casually mentions she's a member of the Young Socialists or something, you sit in on a poetry reading where someone trashes The Greedy Politicians for the town's woes or whatever, and so on, and I just can't sit through those scenes without thinking, "oh hello game, I see you pandering directly to me here," and okay, I am not an ideal candidate for pandering of this sort, but jfc, even if I were, the obliqueness alone would turn me off.
I get what they're going for. It's nice to see a decaying-rust-belt-town portrayed as something more than just gruff conservative aging miners, because these towns really are so much more. There are young, idealistic, and frustrated young people everywhere.
Let's get concrete here. I grew up in a town a bit comparable to what A Night in the Woods is after. So I sat down and thought about the friends I have from back home, and it occurred to me that, while most my friends wound up being kinda liberal, they exhibit so many different wonderful textures and tones of liberalness than this game imagines:
* I have the friend who is ferociously independent above all, which means she abhors the idea of e.g. banning gay marriage, but she also abhors the fact that the government's involved in that at all, and also abhors anyone trying to define the ~*~queer experience~*~ in a safe/anodyne/mainstream/preachy way (she's queer herself). Also she hates the idea of the government taking away her guns. Also she kinda dislikes cities and ideally would live in a house in the middle of nowhere. So, yeah, she's pretty lefty overall, but really values independence higher than any particular ideology.
* I have the friend who is pretty liberal but more in a deep-sympathy-for-the-poor than a must-overthrow-the-oppressors sort of way, and she works in a charitable/crisis sort of space.
* I have the friend who is lefty but in a kind of cynical/self-serving way, e.g. "shit, i'm poor, i'll take whatever extra money they'll give me."
* Hey, remember riot grrrl stuff? They still exist! I know one! They're great!
That's just going off the top of my head, and if you want to talk about young'uns in Appalachia, there's a fabulous place to start. But A Night in the Woods has exactly one tone when it touches on the political sphere, and just "Tumblr/Twitter-flavored leftist," nothing else at all, which explains why I'm suspicious that the author's using the characters as a bit of a mouthpiece. Which is a shame, because some of these characters are otherwise fabulously developed. (Bea is great, btw. Hang out with Bea every day.)
Har har de har.
It was a cute creepypasta concept, but it got weighed down by spending too much time on the "dating sim" part of "subversive creepypasta dating sim," and not enough time on the "creepypasta subversive" bit. This would've been fine if the "dating sim" bit were fun, but honestly the characters were utterly generic and I just did not give a shit about them. (Compare to Hatoful Boyfriend, which worked because the dating sim bits were genuinely fun, and funny, and short enough to keep my attention, which turned out to be a perfect set-up for the actual-weird-kinda-subversive-stuff in the final act.)
A Night in the Woods: I think this works better if you think of this as more of a "wandering-around-in-a-decaying-rust-belt-town simulator" than a proper narrative-driven game. There is an overarching plot, ostensibly, but the plot's a bit thin, whereas the town is wonderfully tangible, and stuffed with fun little nooks and personalities to explore. (I especially liked talking with the preacher; I wish we'd seen more of him.)
It captured well some aspects of modern-underemployed-twentysomethingdom, e.g. the difficulty of proving your "adultness" to a community that's still measuring "adult" by car ownership or a house or a kid or whatever, and the curious puzzle of who manages to leave and who gets stuck in the old town, and the way the scenery changes between your teens and when you come back again, and so on.
Two factors dragged the game down a bit: the protagonist herself, and some shoehorned political commentary.
With respect to the protagonist: she's a jerk. If I'm being charitable, I could maybe see that she's got poor impulse control and is more thoughtless and oblivious than truly ill-intended. But honestly this requires a tremendous amount of charity on my part; I was forced to sit through a scene where the protagonist says some abominable things to her sweet mother (something to the effect of "you were a shitty example growing up, you and dad are failures"), just because her mother has the temerity to ask (in the most gentle possible way) why her daughter dropped out of college. You know, while the daughter's living at home rent-free, and when the parents were helping pay for college. I don't care how depressed or short-sighted you are, that is just shitty.
This is made more annoying because you are, ostensibly, playing as the protagonist. Though honestly calling this an "interactive" story is only very faintly true—you don't even have the option to not be shitty to mom, or not say the dumbest shit possible to your best friend; the game literally railroads your choices to force you to hit the button on "shitty vs shittier" options. Turns out, in this context, playing as a shitty character didn't make me empathize more; it just made me resent that I was being forced to play as them.
(Being forced to hang out with assholes just because they're the only fucking people around and your town isn't that big, that I totally get, and they could have pulled off something about that here. In that situation I'd find the protagonist far less irksome. Except, in my route, I was hanging out with Bea all the time, and Bea somehow tolerated me saying absolutely completely shitty stuff to her, multiple times, even though Bea was presented as having a few other close friends, and Bea's the one who gets invited to cool parties, and she generally tends more towards stoicism than neediness—she has options, so why is she hanging out with me, exactly?)
With respect to the "shoehorned politics" thing: I was generally irked by how very, idk, Tumblr/Twitter-flavored-leftist basically all your friends / nice people / etc in the town are. Bea casually mentions she's a member of the Young Socialists or something, you sit in on a poetry reading where someone trashes The Greedy Politicians for the town's woes or whatever, and so on, and I just can't sit through those scenes without thinking, "oh hello game, I see you pandering directly to me here," and okay, I am not an ideal candidate for pandering of this sort, but jfc, even if I were, the obliqueness alone would turn me off.
I get what they're going for. It's nice to see a decaying-rust-belt-town portrayed as something more than just gruff conservative aging miners, because these towns really are so much more. There are young, idealistic, and frustrated young people everywhere.
Let's get concrete here. I grew up in a town a bit comparable to what A Night in the Woods is after. So I sat down and thought about the friends I have from back home, and it occurred to me that, while most my friends wound up being kinda liberal, they exhibit so many different wonderful textures and tones of liberalness than this game imagines:
* I have the friend who is ferociously independent above all, which means she abhors the idea of e.g. banning gay marriage, but she also abhors the fact that the government's involved in that at all, and also abhors anyone trying to define the ~*~queer experience~*~ in a safe/anodyne/mainstream/preachy way (she's queer herself). Also she hates the idea of the government taking away her guns. Also she kinda dislikes cities and ideally would live in a house in the middle of nowhere. So, yeah, she's pretty lefty overall, but really values independence higher than any particular ideology.
* I have the friend who is pretty liberal but more in a deep-sympathy-for-the-poor than a must-overthrow-the-oppressors sort of way, and she works in a charitable/crisis sort of space.
* I have the friend who is lefty but in a kind of cynical/self-serving way, e.g. "shit, i'm poor, i'll take whatever extra money they'll give me."
* Hey, remember riot grrrl stuff? They still exist! I know one! They're great!
That's just going off the top of my head, and if you want to talk about young'uns in Appalachia, there's a fabulous place to start. But A Night in the Woods has exactly one tone when it touches on the political sphere, and just "Tumblr/Twitter-flavored leftist," nothing else at all, which explains why I'm suspicious that the author's using the characters as a bit of a mouthpiece. Which is a shame, because some of these characters are otherwise fabulously developed. (Bea is great, btw. Hang out with Bea every day.)
no subject
Anyway, I know the one-note ideology you mean and it annoys me too, will avoid the latter game then lol.
Btw did you ever play Analogue: A Hate Story? Do you know if it's like that? I've been kind of apprehensive that it might be.
no subject
re: analogue a hate story: actually i have played it! it's been a long time but i remember actually really liking it, and it didn't have that vibe at all. probably one of the cooler/richer implementations of the epistolary format i've seen. its main conceit is "unreliable librarian" rather than "unreliable narrator"; there's two main routes and, based on which AI is guiding you through the records, you see different sets of letters, and while you can read between the lines in both routes, each one is attempting (successfully or no!) to steer you toward their PoV, which is super-interesting. i'd very much recommend it.
no subject
I'll give Analogue a try then!
Btw I spoiled myself on Doki Doki just now out of curiosity and it sounds pretty cool actually (although not something I should play at this particular time in my life) also I lol'd that game reviewers had the exact "this poetry shit is dull and inane" reaction you did.
no subject
Relevant to both these things, as well as the aside you almost deleted: did u kno that when I first read Catcher in the Rye for class at 15, I felt sympathy for Holden for about .5 seconds on my own before someone was like "wtf is this emo kid complaining about" and then I did this 180 and was like YeAH ACTUALLY HE'S OBNOXIOUS AND THE FAKEST
no one lambasted emo kids more consistently than me in my mid-teens, until I was about 19 I think and was like "you know what actually fuck popular opinion life sucking is a legitimate worldview and furthermore I'm coming out of the closet, it's mine."