![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlThere is a split between what this game Is and what this game is About.
What this game Is, is a walking simulator in a very literal sense. Your character, transformed by a talking wolf into a ragged skeleton hobo (please just go with this), spends his days walking the hills and plains and streets of the United States of America. You can hitchhike or whistle to move faster.
Scattered all over the country are your resources: Stories and People. You collect the stories in the form of mini text-adventure vignettes which are limitedly interactive. Often you can affect the tone of these via choices, shifting a horror story into a comedy by noticing some detail, or vice versa. Once you have the Stories, you take them to the People. "Tell me a hopeful one." they say, and you dig through your notes to try to remember which tale has an uplifting ending.
If you use the stories enough, they grow in the telling to become stronger. Hit the people with enough Strong Stories and they'll open up to you, showing their true selves. You win by making all the people open up to you with their full tales.
So that's what the game Is.
What the game is About is America. Not our actual America right now, but an America that's timeless and eternal. Where events from the 1880s co-exist with the hippies of the 1970s and everything between, and where you can walk the cities and towns and find every wonderful, horrible, tragic and beautiful thing the people of this country can do and have done to, with, and because of each other.
Every story you collect has some roots, and you can watch them grow and become twisted and strange and unfamiliar in the telling. Every person you meet has a kernel of truth at their center, and you can follow their joys and their losses. Also there's a fricking ton of ghost stories, but if you read some old folklore you will realize that America has always been haunted as fuck, so that doesn't really scan as unauthentic to me.
The amount you enjoy this game, thus, is equal to the amount you can stand to sit and play an experimental text-heavy game that sometimes feels like infotainment but often just stares directly at what America does to people and has always done to them. Sometimes it's uplifting. Sometimes it's crushing. Sometimes it's just how life works out there.
Also the frame rate gets really choppy sometimes when you're walking around. That's sort of irritating.
[EDIT]: Also, if you're the anal-about-achievements type, please note that this game has an unobtainable achievement. One of the achievements is for finding the ACTUAL place, in-game, where the water tastes like wine and people have no problems and life is good and sweet all the time.
I suspect the intent of that achievement is the slow dawning realization that that place doesn't actually exist.
I have chosen to read it as that place instead being in Canada or Mexico, where you're not allowed to walk because of map boundaries.
What this game Is, is a walking simulator in a very literal sense. Your character, transformed by a talking wolf into a ragged skeleton hobo (please just go with this), spends his days walking the hills and plains and streets of the United States of America. You can hitchhike or whistle to move faster.
Scattered all over the country are your resources: Stories and People. You collect the stories in the form of mini text-adventure vignettes which are limitedly interactive. Often you can affect the tone of these via choices, shifting a horror story into a comedy by noticing some detail, or vice versa. Once you have the Stories, you take them to the People. "Tell me a hopeful one." they say, and you dig through your notes to try to remember which tale has an uplifting ending.
If you use the stories enough, they grow in the telling to become stronger. Hit the people with enough Strong Stories and they'll open up to you, showing their true selves. You win by making all the people open up to you with their full tales.
So that's what the game Is.
What the game is About is America. Not our actual America right now, but an America that's timeless and eternal. Where events from the 1880s co-exist with the hippies of the 1970s and everything between, and where you can walk the cities and towns and find every wonderful, horrible, tragic and beautiful thing the people of this country can do and have done to, with, and because of each other.
Every story you collect has some roots, and you can watch them grow and become twisted and strange and unfamiliar in the telling. Every person you meet has a kernel of truth at their center, and you can follow their joys and their losses. Also there's a fricking ton of ghost stories, but if you read some old folklore you will realize that America has always been haunted as fuck, so that doesn't really scan as unauthentic to me.
The amount you enjoy this game, thus, is equal to the amount you can stand to sit and play an experimental text-heavy game that sometimes feels like infotainment but often just stares directly at what America does to people and has always done to them. Sometimes it's uplifting. Sometimes it's crushing. Sometimes it's just how life works out there.
Also the frame rate gets really choppy sometimes when you're walking around. That's sort of irritating.
[EDIT]: Also, if you're the anal-about-achievements type, please note that this game has an unobtainable achievement. One of the achievements is for finding the ACTUAL place, in-game, where the water tastes like wine and people have no problems and life is good and sweet all the time.
I suspect the intent of that achievement is the slow dawning realization that that place doesn't actually exist.
I have chosen to read it as that place instead being in Canada or Mexico, where you're not allowed to walk because of map boundaries.
