Stay? by E. Jade Lomax
Jan. 29th, 2021 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsStay? by E. Jade Lomax
4/5. This isn't a book, but it is a piece of fiction. Interactive fiction, specifically. I've played a lot of IF in my life, and this is by far the most novel-like experience I've ever had in a game. It's about time loops in a fantasy city, and making connections and breaking them, and stopping a war and the end of the world. It's beautiful and sad and hopeful and sweet and romantic, and I loved it.
This also has a much lower barrier to entry than a lot of IF as you can simply play in-line on the website and don't need an emulator. That's because there are pre-set options to choose from rather than typing your own commands (and fighting with the game's syntax all the time). You'd think that would be limiting, but it's really not. The branching conversational choices are rich and interesting, and the decision-points of the game are as often about emotional resonance as plot development. There's one point where you are having a tense moment with someone and the game pauses to make you decide whether you forgive them for something that happened several time loops ago. It doesn't matter for the plot in that it doesn't change the turn the story takes there. But it does matter for you, the player-reader, to pause, and think about it, and remember, and really feel it. The whole thing is an emotional journey; the plot broke open for me right when I was losing a bit of patience, and the game knew that, and my character reflected that in increasing weariness and sadness, and I found my way into a oh fuck all this" choice and went off in an entirely new direction.
The structure of this thing is impressive as hell. You loop through various events over and over, and the options you have change, often with every iteration, as you accumulate more understanding of the story and what pieces need to go where. The storyboarding on this thing must have been murder.
You can't get through it if you don't have the right kind of complicated relationships with the right people at the right time, but who those people are changes too. I "won" in two brief evenings of play in the sense that I got to a satisfying ending and got to read the epilogue text, but I can tell there are other routes to get where I got, and there are definitely other romances I could have pursued. (Oh yeah, one of the main characters is nonbinary, and you can choose to play as NB as well).
Recommended.
4/5. This isn't a book, but it is a piece of fiction. Interactive fiction, specifically. I've played a lot of IF in my life, and this is by far the most novel-like experience I've ever had in a game. It's about time loops in a fantasy city, and making connections and breaking them, and stopping a war and the end of the world. It's beautiful and sad and hopeful and sweet and romantic, and I loved it.
This also has a much lower barrier to entry than a lot of IF as you can simply play in-line on the website and don't need an emulator. That's because there are pre-set options to choose from rather than typing your own commands (and fighting with the game's syntax all the time). You'd think that would be limiting, but it's really not. The branching conversational choices are rich and interesting, and the decision-points of the game are as often about emotional resonance as plot development. There's one point where you are having a tense moment with someone and the game pauses to make you decide whether you forgive them for something that happened several time loops ago. It doesn't matter for the plot in that it doesn't change the turn the story takes there. But it does matter for you, the player-reader, to pause, and think about it, and remember, and really feel it. The whole thing is an emotional journey; the plot broke open for me right when I was losing a bit of patience, and the game knew that, and my character reflected that in increasing weariness and sadness, and I found my way into a oh fuck all this" choice and went off in an entirely new direction.
The structure of this thing is impressive as hell. You loop through various events over and over, and the options you have change, often with every iteration, as you accumulate more understanding of the story and what pieces need to go where. The storyboarding on this thing must have been murder.
You can't get through it if you don't have the right kind of complicated relationships with the right people at the right time, but who those people are changes too. I "won" in two brief evenings of play in the sense that I got to a satisfying ending and got to read the epilogue text, but I can tell there are other routes to get where I got, and there are definitely other romances I could have pursued. (Oh yeah, one of the main characters is nonbinary, and you can choose to play as NB as well).
Recommended.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-30 04:30 pm (UTC)Thanks for the review! This sounds like something I'd be interested in checking out.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-02 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 12:45 am (UTC)Yeah, re fanfiction, story checks out.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-06 05:53 am (UTC)