IFComp 2023
This is ~~a deeply personal~~ an exploration of grief. (EDIT: It's unclear whether the work is autobiographical in any way, I don't mean to assume.) Not to minimize the author's experience or efforts, but I find it difficult to write about these. I find myself wondering if the process of writing the work was more important than reading it, and it feels trite to ask questions like “do the mechanics of this succeed at conveying the feeling or experience” when the feeling itself seems to outweigh such considerations. So please don't take my comments as any commentary on whether the work “succeeds,” as I'm not sure my experience is relevant.
With that caveat out of the way, my experience:
After playing several Texture games in last year's comp, I'm not particularly a fan. It *does* work better on mobile and I was playing on my laptop this time - dragging a verb the full height of the screen on a touchpad is sometimes frustrating.
Right away this story is using Texture's interaction model for revealing text in a user-controlled order. I see *potential* for a neat roleplay here, if there were more clues about what would be revealed; as a player, or as a character, there might be things I don't want to examine too closely. As is, it turns out the revealed messages are roughly chronological and the ideal experience would probably be going through them top-to-bottom. Unfortunately, in the first scene I picked the last bit of text to reveal too soon, and I missed some of the story setup, which left me feeling a little lost through the rest of the piece.
Later when the story commented:
The truth is you don't even know what or who you're looking for.
…it was unintentionally meta, in a funny way.
It also doesn't help that this story is an apartment exploration. It's not a “my apartment” game which is well-trod territory in IF, but the very real haunting experience of exploring the home of a missing loved one. So fixating on little details makes sense in context. I just bounced off of them in practice. The prose never grabbed me, and the interactions are also appropriately mundane - go through the boxes - in a way that recreated the aimless feeling I might have if I was in that situation. So that's probably working as intended, but also didn't help to hold my attention.
Overall, this has the feeling of a unique personal expression, but I struggled to engage with it and internalize the experience it was trying to share. To the author, thank you for sharing your work!