Eliot M.B. Howard. 10th place, IFComp 2022.
Oh my goodness what an embarrassment of riches this comp is yielding! Here I am about a dozen games in and I’ve already collected three I deeply admire.
Prism is a beautiful work.
I’ll admit that right out of the gate I was worried it wouldn’t be my thing; there was something a little bit “anime” about the first few descriptions. A magic street-urchin-ninja with a sword-arm? It has a maximalist aesthetic that sometimes signals a type of melodrama that I don’t have much stomach for. So I had a little friction in the first half pushing through ardently unfamiliar language as the author builds and builds and builds the world. Some of my favorite science fiction does this, and here it pays off with a climax and stakes deeply tied to the unique world we’ve just met.
Something that I appreciate about this story (and it might just be the path I chose) is how hopeful it is. Despite the content warnings, I experienced prism as a noblebright, solarpunk-adjacent work. I encountered clear themes of found family, collective agency, and cooperation across ideological boundaries. It let me burn down the status quo, a painful and necessary change, and envisions this terrible transition made survivable by empathy and collectivism. If “Glimmer” captures how I feel about the world today, “Prism” is the type of story that will help us build tomorrow.
On a technical level, it benefits from Ink’s lovely interface and played perfectly on my phone. From the engine we get nicely readable text and a reliable save feature. I did have several moments where text popped in at the wrong scroll position and I had to back up, but this is a minor annoyance I’ve seen in many games.
Mechanically, I had time for one go, so did not test how far the story could diverge. My impression was of a mix of plot-diverting, performative, emotive and exploratory decisions, all given enough context for me to think meaningfully about them, and reflected by the text sometimes much later. The feeling of agency was present within the given choices, which is extra important since the story lampshades “affordance” as a theme!
I didn’t enjoy the prose quite as much as either “A Chinese Room” or “Elvish for Goodbye” but it’s still on the upper end of what I’ve read this comp and it does a fine job building its fantastic world. The dialogue in particular avoids being too corny, which helped break my early concern about melodrama. I thought the PC’s mixed feelings about the wonder and wealth of the city were especially well-played: Envy of the rich, admiration of fine craft, curiosity about the dealings of the academy. This middle ground set context and helped make room for decisions later where both options seemed plausible.
Amazing stuff. I’ll return to this again post-comp.