D
For whatever reason, the thing that stuck with me most from the early critical response to Gone Home was the occasional assertion that the game allowed you to interact with 'everything.' It might have something to do with genre assumptions; the FP(S), horror, and YA feel of the whole thing had me wall-humping, Doom style, and expecting to Scooby Doo a bookcase. Walls and identical books are things, and they certainly resisted my interactions.
I ended up thinking this in terms of the assertions – more common – that Katie, the playable character, was a vessel. Surely there was a way to read her willingness to pick up pencils and milk cartons with her unwillingness to disturb much of the contents of her father's study. At the very least it is a kind of characterization. Obviously there is a technical explanation, but – and then I would stop.
D is a 3DO (and later PSX) game by WARP, Kenji Eno's studio, in which the player controls Laura Harris, whose father has murdered a mass of people at the LA hospital in which he works. Laura enters the hospital during the ensuing hostage scenario and attempts to determine what is going on.
In the game's first room, Laura faces a table. Walking around it, she can be turned to view a dish full of water. If clicked, she leans over and watches it fill, from the rim to the center, with blood. Laura looks aghast; you then regain control, and are free to repeat the little cinematic. You can, presumably, sit there repeating that sequence for the full two hours before the game kicks you out and you fail.
Pass the table and a stairwell into a room with a wine cask and a wall of spikes and attempt to walk toward the wall, however, and a cinematic triggers where the spikes slam forward and stop millimeters from Laura's nose. The wall returns to the far side, but any further attempt to cross the room is fruitless. Laura will no longer walk in that direction, no matter what you input. At least, not until you solve the puzzle that makes the spikes retract, at which point you go along that way to progress.
These little things are ultimately lost in the game's punch-you-in-the-face story, its supreme evocation of mood through space, and the apocrypha. All of those things are cool as hell, of course, just as its puzzles (a weird slot machine, memorizing astrological symbols, semi-arbitrary item use) are kind of bullshit. There's something, though, to a potential genealogy of characterization by way of the elision of interaction. Not here, though.
If nothing else, the moment with the spikes underscores the way that Laura, caught up in a mass murder, learning a story of vampirism and cannibalism by slowly floating from one predetermined point in a room to another, represents more than a camera or a node in a systemic architecture. It offers the whole moody, goofy thing some weight.
None of which is to say, of course, that D needs anything other than what it is to be worth playing, because it is a seriously neat, atmospheric game.
Wolfgirls in Love
Wolfgirls in Love is an unrolling of verbs and nouns to a beat by Kitty Horrorshow. It's a story told through elision about two werewolves making out, running through a city, being pursued and harmed, and coming out the other end okay. The game was made for (or submitted to) Porpentine's Twiny Jam, which means it is less than 300 words and made in Twine.
The first game Short on Games covered was a Kitty Horrorshow title, in which a Twine game was packed. Those had to do with space, and that element remains in this, although as more of a facet of the background. The little game's crutch – a song plays while you play, the instructions suggest you attempt to keep the beat – does effectively shift the focus to the temporality.
Horrorshow doesn't quite make this shift sing in the way that Dust City did with its, but it is a meaningful and promising move. That there is something Caitlín R. Kiernan-esque about the tone of the prose doesn't hurt, either.
Which is all to say that, in addition to being a bit of an experiment and a confident, interesting piece of poetry, even as it is somewhat reliant on a gimmick, that I might recommend it most as a game to see what a tool can do, and where its maker can go.
Chocolate
Chocolate is a narrative pixel hunt by Talha Kaya.
I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable talking about the narrative of the game. It seems largely to be expressions of frustration, manifested as externalized and internalized loathing and violence. Sometimes through text, other times through images and action.
As a system, the interface is very interesting, though. Occasionally the keys will control an avatar like you might expect, but the larger part of the game is done through static screens using the mouse. Move the mouse, say, left, and the jumble of lines on the screen will slowly cohere toward the middle; keep moving it too far, though, and they will begin to dissipate again. You move up and down and however until the image, of text or of, say, a bar of chocolate, snaps into being. That bit stops for a second, and then the next mass of squiggles follows.
There's something about how the game incorporates "ordinary" input methods while relying mostly on this unique little mechanic that is, I think, worth stopping over, at least briefly.