by StamblerRambler (a.k.a. “Paige Morgan”)

First, a caveat: I don’t think I successfully engaged with the work as the author intended. I played through the first variation down the path where we meet PeeBee, occasionally skimming; I made it a few pages into the second before deciding I’d had enough. Then I jumped to the epilogue, against the game’s advice that I read all the variations first. I suspect I’ve seen less than half of the story, so this is my experience with it, and I’ve got no idea how far it is from the typical or intended experience.

The tone of this game caught me by surprise. I’d describe it as wink-at-the-audience juvenile horror. At times it’s crass and gross to a laughable extreme. I think these moments are designed to get an uncomfortable chuckle out of the audience, but they also manage to be consonant with (my interpretation of) the theme, which we’ll discuss later. It reminded me of This Is the End and a bit of The Cabin in the Woods. Both films that take a lowbrow concept and make it resonate by a) committing to the bit, and b) finding the beating heart of the idea. One Final Pitbull Song does this too.

One of the challenges of this genre is that it’s a little audience-hostile by design. Right out of the gate it shouts “Get in loser, we’re grossing people out” perhaps to filter the people who will not enjoy the ride. I’d say One Final Pitbull Song is not for everyone. Honestly, it’s not for me. I’m interested in the craft of it, but extended monster urine jokes are not my idea of fun. But it’s definitely a subgenre, and there’s definitely an audience for it, so I pushed through and tried to put myself in the headspace of the target audience, with mixed success.

There’s a manic energy to some of the scenes that I don’t usually associate with IF. I had a similar reaction to another comp game, Cannelé & Nomnom, and in both cases it’s at turns a welcome change and sort of exhausting. They also have the same surprising problem, that at times the prose seemed too verbose for the impressive pace of action; I would find my attention drifting and start skimming for the next page. In this story that often happened when the narrator drifted into a stream-of-consciousness mode, like so:

I can’t feel anything right now. My life is over.

They’re going to send me down into a giant hole in the ground. My dream was a prediction.

I know that’s not true, but I want to act like I was prepared for this. I thought I was safe — being new here.

But I’ll never be safe. Not with the decisions I’ve made. This is just a giant representation of those.

At least I’ll be going with Sam. Can people rekindle their relationships in a giant cave?

They did it in Avatar: The Last Airbender. And it’s probably one of the best episodes. Except for the one where the library sunk into the ground. I always liked that one a little more. But that’s because I liked how Toph acted a little bit like how I did. I always related to her and thought she was really cool…wonder why. There’s no need to go into the details, I just remember being really sad watching Avatar sometimes.

That fairly long excerpt was probably one-tenth of the text on its page, which has lots of other inner monologue, and I’d say that’s fairly typical of the style throughout my experience. It violates “show, don’t tell” a bit by telling too much in a story that’s also very good about evocative showing. TeeJay’s inner voice is also central to the experience, so I’m not sure what fix I’m suggesting here. I just had the sense that a better editor than me could tighten up the text to better match the intensity of the rest of the piece.

There’s some other notable experiments in here that I’m not sure I fully grasped. At one point there’s a funny bit of fourth-wall stretching where TeeJay doesn’t exactly acknowledge the reader but pokes some fun at how nobody can figure out how to pronounce names because the explanations themselves are appearing in text. There’s something like an apology to a redacted-name reviewer, and maybe another comment that seems like a direct response to a real player experience? Then there’s more fourth-wall breaking where Bal explicitly acknowledges our ability to go back and read different variations on events, and even lampshades the surprising importance of apparently meaningless choices (potatoes or beans?) which is drawing our attention to… something? The authorial will or the illusion of choice or the butterfly effect, I’m not sure. I did start fresh and explore a little and there is a legit time cave here with huge narrative changes down different paths, but also there’s a metanarrative pulling these branches together. It’s almost too much. Would the narrative have been better served by leaving some of these things out? Or is this just a real steak of a story with lots to chew on, that will reveal more every time we revisit it? I suspect the latter, but… I can’t escape that it’s not for me. I think there’s a world here that slowly reveals incredible depth, and tragically I don’t really want to spend enough time in it to get the best bits.

So what does it add up to? I suspected that my time with PeeBee was a visceral metaphor for a toxic relationship, and I think the epilogue supports that theory. For some players it might even recontextualize a lot of what comes before. That’s the beating heart I found in One Final Pitbull Song and, at least for me, it elevated the game from “extended bathroom humor” to a hard-to-swallow personal story with pathos. Caring for someone who’s tearing through your friends and putting you through hell is a real and relatable experience, and making that experience literal through PeeBee absolutely condemns TeeJay for not seeing it sooner and doing something about it. That we’re given a second chance in the epilogue puts a note of hope on the ending, but I wouldn’t call it a hopeful story overall. Instead I felt like it was the intense personal emotional experience of Nose Bleed or Glimmer writ large, with more to say and in a more genre-savvy way. So while moment-to-moment I kept running into things that made it tough to engage with the piece, it adds up to much more than I expected and I get the sense that it’s going to totally click with a certain audience. I maybe didn’t get the intended fun out of it, but it totally got me thinking. I’m super curious to see what Paige will write next.