This game purports itself to be Book 1 of a series called ANIMALIA (no relation to the previous IFComp game of two years ago called Animalia). I know some people in the past have noted that clearly titling an IFComp entry as part of a series is kinda presumptuous. I don’t really agree. I think people can always improve, and I hope authors do keep going no matter how their game fares, ideally taking into account their IFComp feedback and using it to improve.
So anyway, here we are with this debut game, and it definitely opens with the most positive first impression so far. I think this one definitely take’s this year’s slot for Stylish Game. It’s clear from the start that a lot of effort has been spent in making the game look and sound good.
The first interesting thing is that game has stats. Me? I love stats. Of interest here is the availability of “GOD MODE,” which gives you max everything and makes no branch, essentially, off-limits: the world is your oyster-human hybrid! I was actually pretty torn, but since IfComp limits judging to two hours and I wanted to explore as much as I could, I opted become GOD. In the back of my head, I was wondering about how stats work across the game, since the blurb seems to imply that you play as more than one character, and I did soon learn the answer–more on that later.
So, here we have a unique setting. Everyone (as far as I can tell) is a were-kin, an animal-human hybrid. (There’s brief mention of “Ancients,” which I think are implied to have been just normal humans, but I’m not sure). These animal-people live in the city of Mythicus, which sits uneasily in the shadow of a recent civil war. What’s particularly fascinating here is, despite the fabulist vibe in terms of lore, backstories, setting, etc, the animals appear to live in totally modern society. Our initial player character, Silver Bear, is driving a totally normal truck down a totally normal highway, and this trend continues throughout the game. It was surreal and off-putting and frankly, I’m here for it. I want to see a bear driving a goddamn pickup, and I never realized that til now.
Also, the game solves the classic awkward conundrum of having sentient people-animals coexisting with animal-animals with replacing the latter with “synth-” animals, though I’m not wholly sure what they are, in the end. I figured them to be machines, but they seem to feel pain and act like living things, and most importantly, are raised and slaughtered for meat.
So, this is a long one. I think it can easily extend past the hour-long estimate on the blurb. In terms of gameplay, most of the decisions you make are about closely examining the world around you, or deciding how a character should react or what they should think about. There are a few timed decisions–I know that’s a controversial mechanic in the IfComp-verse, but I liked it here. The countdown is clear, and in-game, it’s always used in a moment that made sense. For me, it actually added to the experience, putting me more in the character’s shoes, having to make a snap decision that could get someone killed. (And sometimes, did).
The UI, as mentioned, looks nice, though information appears in different places (I almost missed some of the extra attempts you can do, since they appear in blue text and I was pretty used to paying attention to the “main” orange-highlighted text by that point), and occasionally the sidebar disappears when you go into a sort of tangent in the story, resulting in the text being centered, which might be fine–I personally found it slightly distracting. These are minor issues though, and I thought the UI, the backgrounds, the menus, and the sounds and ambient music were all very fitting and well-chosen.
When it comes to the stats, these basically belong to the player overall, inherited from character to character. This is kind of odd, when you consider that this means the gruff old war vet and the young girl who lives on a farm with her aunt, for example, will share intellect, strength, etc. At times, though, the stats didn’t seem to even apply to the character, but rather to us as the player, performing as some kind of in-game invisible observer. For example, we can try to increase Pink Belly’s confidence, or probe his mind for information during a sequence in which he’s frozen in intimidation; I got a failure at this point that stated something like “Pink Belly is too scared to tell you more!”, which is interesting, because, again, it seems like I the player was using my skill to try to act on the in-game protagonists in an odd, surprisingly meta way. I don’t know that this was intended. However, I can certainly see why the creators chose to handle stats as a one-size-fits-all matter: it would be ridiculous to assign stats at the beginning of each chapter in which you control a new character.
The writing was okay. I thought that the main plot of the story–Pink Belly’s farm and the two foxes they’re hiding–was pretty engaging. I was also glad to see that the seemingly unrelated plot thread of Silver Bear comes full circle and meshes explosively with the story the game spends the most time tracing near the end. The protagonists were all interesting, from tired vet Silver Bear to Little Sidewinder, who escaped Fantasy-Mexico for undisclosed reasons with her aunt to Fantasy-Texas, where they found shelter with benevolent Pink Belly. The immediate antagonists of the story, Bobcat and his crew, are at times cartoonishly evil, but honestly, given what has come to pass in this last year alone, maybe that’s not terribly farfetched.
The world is, as I said, pretty interesting, though I also felt there’s a whole lot going on at once. There are spirits, and the wind on the prairie has been trapped. The bloodthirsty traitors who instigated the civil war are casually mentioned to have been literal vampires in a throw-away line. The animal-people are aware of their lineage (as former humans–well, not them, but their ancestors), and traces of human language remain. Since the entire cast are anthropomorphic animals, I feel the story could have been simplified by dropping the were-kin angle and just describing them as such–I think it gets much less confusing if you refer to the “bear” for example instead of “the hybrid”. Even though some of the cast are snakes, once the players read their physical descriptions, they’ll understand it. (And what are hybrid paws? Claw-tipped fingers? Freakishly dexterous bear claws? That phrase is used a lot, but it did nothing as a description for me).
I’m also [spoiler…
play it first]
not super sure why it was that Snapping Turtle really brought Silver Bear to that bluff. Was it to send him off? Had he preternaturally known that Kit Fox would be coming through, pursued by the evil Bobcat?–and if so, was it because he’d known that killing Bobcat would free the wind? Speaking of the wind, I was surprised by the ending I got in which the winds start blowing again after the demise of Bobcat and I guess whatever dark magic aura he maintained. Bobcat and the Javelinas are described by Pink Belly as “just three among many” of Longhorn’s enforcers. I figured Longhorn would be the final boss, and if anything the source of the evil.
This was a huge effort, though, and I think there’s much to praise. I was actually a bit saddened by Pink Belly’s death. That I felt for him impresses me more than anything. (It was also kinda nice to, as Kit Fox, just pick up a gun and start shooting).
I hope this is a series that the authors do in fact continue; I’d be interested in trying another one. As Bobcat would probably say, “Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?”
Last Pylon 