Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
Co-written by: Martina Oyhenard
Played 2024-09-02, IFComp 2024

A prologue with prose issues, teetering on the border of captivating-surreal and tired-surreal.

I thought this contained some great raw material that unfortunately didn't hang together. Its framing as the introduction for a larger game leaves it light on both plot and interactions. And on its own terms, as a prologue, it didn't successfully place a hook. If I've understood it correctly, the plot so far is “Leben has hired Balding to find her lost inspiration.” We weren't left with a clue or a crisis making me want to return and see what happens next.

I think the surrealism itself is supposed to be the hook, and this *could* work if the world-building held together a bit better. There are some great details in here - phrases like “threatening ink,” a raven in a sort of trickster-god role, the traditional drink in a gourd - but it's not yet formed for me a larger sense of “what's the weird thing about this world?” that I'd want to see the author explore. Then other bits, like this one, seem to shift from “surreal with purpose” into a “lulz random” mode that feels like early internet humor:

Better to find something perfectly imperfect to focus on. Balding grabs a close-by pile-of-unshucked-corn.
It has the juice!

It doesn't help that we don't have a point-of-view character helping us react to the world. All of the characters take the surrealism in stride, so we're on our own interpreting it. And so I found myself objecting, unfairly, to all sorts of phrases and images here. A few more examples:

K had a nail gun; she didn't believe in guns.

Hold up - a nail gun, as a weapon, is also wildly dangerous. Someone opposed to gun violence but chooses to wield a nailgun as weapon is probably a very violent character.

Her task: write business documents using the approved fonts and margins, and stuff them in preaddressed envelopes.

As someone who writes documents for a living, this really misunderstands the nature of an administrative job.

RMG saves money by making up a new logo every time.

How does this work? Coming up with new logos is expensive!

I might have given all that the benefit of the doubt if the prose wasn't getting in the way with internal inconsistencies, noun soup and unwieldy sentences.

• Early on we're told a “job was sort of spur-of-the-moment,” and a few sentences later it's described as a “perfectly timed bank heist.”
• I'm not sure what effect this epic hyphenation is supposed to create:

Out on the Lighthouse Island Business Complex she works at, in her once-a-meeting-room-but-now-a-group-of-cubicals-surrounded-by-glass, The Artist Formerly Known as Leben writes her important business documents, with no flair, no artistic drama.

• At one point a character is writing with a pen, and then suddenly with software.
• There's tense confusion.
• “Manila folder” is misspelled.
• The detective examines his own hair in an office that doesn't obviously have any reflective surfaces, then “deduces the letter is by an antagonist from a different story prologue.” What? How did he deduce this?
• I'm not sure whether “Balding always loves cracking open a new case” is a clever misuse of “cracking the case” or simply misunderstands it.

All told there *are* mysteries here and I'm curious what a more polished and complete version of this would look like, but I found the prologue frustrating.