This was a very interesting little game, quite a cool concept and well implemented in my opinion. I don’t think I ever saw any other COG game utilize the settings of the game to change the story (even if a very minute way) or even expect the user to check the code, which was so damn interesting to see.
I’m missing three achievements though and would appreciate if anyone could help me out. I’m missing : Introspection, Friends Labor Lost and I Was Once a Painter.
How many times have you played so far?
Mmm, three or four times I think? But I only selected “retry” at the final option the one time.
So, this is an interesting game, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.
I kind of have a bad taste in my mouth and a mild annoyance each time I finish it.
It’s very cleverly done, and I’ve played it probably 6 times through now. I haven’t found the key - but I’m less and less inclined to the more I replay. I’ve saved people, not saved people, won, lost, had different attitudes, scenes, variations, and alternate realities and endings.
But I read in the interview with the author Natalia that they intended it be a game that can actually be played and has stakes that make winning or losing matter, and I’m having the opposite experience.
The more I replay, the less anything seems to matter. I cared a lot in my first time through the game, but the more I repeat, the less I care. I think you’re supposed to care about the characters, but the more I play the game, the less I care about them. They become background noise, and it doesn’t matter if they live or die. (My last game I even attempted to see if I could make them all die, and it seems it’s impossible to even really tank their relationship values with you - I’ve never managed to make one dip below 40% no matter how hateful I act towards them. Being mean just becomes “friendly honesty”.)
I should say at this point, that I don’t really like “meta” commentaries, so this game is probably already at an unfair disadvantage with me. I find them kind of tiresome—being clever for cleverness sake, like a companion that has to always snark at the situation at hand, and I feel it sucks real meaning and substance out of stories. (I like deep, heavy narrative Choicescript ‘games’, not stat-heavy Choicescript ‘game games’.)
For instance, I was really drawn in at first to the story of a young teenager feeling haunted with life in a small town way past its prime. (I grew up in a similar tiny town, with no traffic lights, only 4 or 5 stop signs to pass and you’d be through the entire center of town, and moldering buildings sitting half empty. All the buildings were old when my parents were young. An out-of-business coffin shop with a few still hanging from the ceiling sat empty my whole school life right next to the only bank and a tiny one room library. So, you know, I could relate.) But the repetition and “restores” and “retries” just sucked all the substance out of it for me.
I didn’t find the “games” in the game very engaging.
The first one acts like it has high stakes, but it’s just a little blood. It just seems like a way for the game determine who you like or don’t like, but no one can die. I couldn’t get them to pick me. The more I replayed, as I said, the less it all seemed to matter.
The second one, the war game, seems to be trying to say something poignant, but it didn’t land for me. I’m a military vet with medals I keep locked in a drawer so I don’t have to look at them, so there are poignant and meaningful things you can say about war (I feel like I, the Forgotten One, despite its fantasy setting really captured some of the real feelings on the subject.), but this just feels like a Call of Duty game with the settings cranked up to realism to make people disgusted at the gore.
The implication and clues that the “enemies” are other kids playing other versions of the game is creepy…but nothing is ever done with it. You can’t go total pacifist. You’ll always have at least one body count, and again, the repetition, checkpoints, etc. make the stakes feel non-existent. Your friends can die, but you can bring them back. Maybe the enemies you kill are other kids, but does that matter? Aren’t they resetting at some point? Re-doing their own checkpoints? If not, well, in another alternate reality or game loop they’re still alive. No harm, no foul.
The third game is just Pac-Man. I know it is supposed to feel horrifying or creepy (or maybe it isn’t?), but I just found it silly. Maybe I missed the point each time, but it’s basically eat the forbidden fruit and be haunted by chiptunes for the rest of your life (Oh, no!) or sacrifice a character whose fates I’ve grown to feel ambivalent about due to all the looping and retries.
The fourth game…isn’t a game? I’ve tried different things on the roller coaster, but it doesn’t seem to really matter. The time you are missing has varied for me, but I don’t see that it matters itself.
And then that’s kind of it. The endings would be poignant if they felt meaningful, but the looping nature robs them of that for me. I felt kind of invested in the first ending I got, but the ones after got a kind of shoulder-shrug from me.
Restore, Reflect, Retry actually reminds me of Doki, Doki, Literature Club, it has the same sort of meta-commentary on the player being the one to give anything meaning, and playing with the fact you are a person playing a game but mentally inhabiting another world pretending to be another person at the same time.
Maybe the key I’m still missing dramatically changes things, but I don’t see how it could, and I’m not motivated to keep searching much at this point. The game hints that the answer is to stop saying ‘yes’ to the game, which I take to mean ‘stop playing it’ - and I’ve done that now - so I win finally?
I don’t know. I think I would have really enjoyed this story set-up if it were the actually character looping and resetting and not YOU, the player, and the narrative dealt with that, because I feel like that would have preserved the stakes. My character would have cared—but as the player, everything was just shadows on a cave wall.
As it is, I guess it proved to me what an uncaring nihilist I’d be if I could skip between alternate universes or reset my life over and over again. I stopped engaging with any love scenes with the friends, because they all felt disposable to me. “Let’s avoid this song-and-dance, because you’re either going to die or get reset and none of this will have mattered.”
The writing is very good. I’m not sad I played it, but it does feel a little self-indulgent. Like a Choicescript game made for people who play too many Choicescript games, if that makes any sense.
Do I like it? I admire the cleverness of it, I admire the writing, and I appreciate and admire the mechanical artistry of making it work. But I don’t think, ultimately, that I like it.
The horror of the first game is the vote itself. What happens to the chosen victim is, by design, basically harmless and yet profoundly unpleasant. Everyone knows it has to be someone, and it’s not so awful a thing to do as to be completely unconscionable, so it’s really nothing personal, except that it feels like a betrayal - and you know you’ll have to live with the consequences of your choice, both individually and as a group.
I expect the war game is a lot more poignant if games like Call of Duty are as close as you’ve ever come to firsthand experience of war. For what it’s worth, the PC is a teen with no combat training, who doesn’t know whether the enemies they’re killing are real people and whether they’re going to reset. And the fact that you always have a body count of at least one means you can’t escape having to think about those consequences.
I thought it was very clear that it was the character looping and resetting. They don’t retain their memory of events, but the way they experience both the game and the “real” world is different in repeat playthroughs.
I think what it comes down to is that you were looking for a different sort of game than this actually was - you aren’t into “meta” stuff, and that’s fine, but this game is definitely about as “meta” as it gets.
I get that the first game is a betrayal or feels like one - but it doesn’t feel like a significant one to me. Everyone is willing to vote for themselves, but the rules won’t allow it. And the penalty of losing being just 3 drops of blood is so mild to me. It doesn’t feel significant. I think most of us spill that much blood on a regular basis from scrapes or paper cuts.
I think “who has to give 3 drops of blood” doesn’t even qualify as suffering IMHO. Diabetics who use test strips wave from the back. That’s a band-aid.
I mean, most military members are just teens when first exposed to war. I and some friends were younger than the characters in the game when we were first exposed. It’s terrible that it happens and it shouldn’t. But I think the gratuitous nature of the second game cheapens or dilutes any message it is trying to convey. It’s not just one enemy - it’s whole groups of them. It’s not just a body, it’s so many you have to wade through them or walk on them. It’s not just blood on the floor, it’s big oblong pools of blood dripping from beds.
There was never any choice to agonize over. The end is just “did you pick the right skills or select the right patch” and you’ll win or lose. Again, the message (if it was one about the brutality of war) could have been conveyed much better by something like in Full Metal Jacket - the friends get shot at, maybe wounded, maybe one is killed depending on your choices by a sniper as you try to approach the building, only to get inside and find the sniper is just a kid like you all, trying to “win the game”. Then give options that could make the player feel guilty depending on what they pick.
I think my biggest problem with the games is they don’t feel significant or connected to either each other or to some larger meaning or narrative. They just seem random. “Standard Playground Dare” → “Call of Duty” → “Pac-Man” → “Rollercoaster Tycoon”.
I’d say that is true for checkpoint looping, but when the game resets or you retry, the fact you have to make a character again, with a new name, new pronouns, choose your skills, etc. means it is only the player looping at that point, not the character. Even if you pretend it is just an alternate reality version of the same character, the fact the game starts breaking the fourth wall to talk to the player means it’s not a story where a single character has the agency anymore.
That’s why I said the game was starting at an unfair disadvantage with me. But I saw it up for the award nominations, and I generally like looping narratives so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I said I don’t like it, but that seems too simplistic, because I truly don’t know how I feel about it as a whole. As I said, I admire a whole lot of the individual elements that make it up, but they ultimately don’t come together in a way that is satisfying for me. And I think that may be the best answer - it is a dish made of ingredients I enjoy, but the cooking was off, so the final meal simply wasn’t satisfying for me.
The main areas I felt that went wrong were the meta focus on the player in a fourth wall destroying way, and the design of the games themselves.
Like I said before, I feel the narrative would have been far, far, stronger if you had a looping character who remembered the previous loops themselves, every time, with just as much knowledge as the player. Then you have a character who feels haunted by life in their small town which they feel they can’t escape…and then they literally discover they can’t escape, because the malevolent rules of some mysterious game won’t let them, and they have to learn how to break or beat those rules to escape the cycle and free themselves. It’s not a big change, but it’s an important one IMHO to making the stakes actually matter in a way they just do not when it is the player themselves experiencing the loop as a meta mechanic.
The fourth wall breaking really did me in on the second loop of the game, when the author explicitly says something like, “But your friends aren’t real. I can’t make you like them—you have to do the work of buying-into the characters to feel something for them.” and I’m like, “Well, that just took me right out of the headspace of these being living people, and sure, I have to do some buy-in as the reader, but as the author you’ve got to sell them to me! And you just told me they have no value beyond what I give them.”
It’s true in a “Yes, look at what we are actually doing when playing a Choicescript game!” way, but something about that passage severed any character connections I’d had from the first playthrough of the game and I never reconnected to any of them again. It made me start seeing them as disposable tokens in the games, which I guess is a meta indictment on me as the player.
It didn’t help that the game kept insisting that everything mattered and “your life matters”, “this is real”, and then it resets. To my knowledge, nothing you do in one playthrough affects the next (choice-wise), beyond stuff just naturally opening with successive loops, and the knowledge the player carries over. So the emotional effect, to me, was identical to Super Mario being told his life matters and to make every action count, because you only get one life—and then falling down a hole and respawning at the start of the level minus a 1-up…and you have infinite 1-ups.
Lastly, the games themselves were a real let down, as I’ve mentioned. With more profound and well thought out games, Restore, Reflect, Retry would have been much more impactful and powerful to me. I loved the concept of seemingly mundane doors and entrances leading to backrooms-style liminal spaces. That is genuinely unsettling and creepy.
But then the games…why? I literally laughed when the Pac-Man maze one came up. I don’t think I was supposed to laugh, but maybe I was. I was so intrigued at the start of the game, the first door. “Ooh, what backstory explains all this? What’s the meaning of this? What are the kids being manipulated into doing? What is the incentive for these kids to participate? Why are they playing?” Then it all just got more random and crazy as I went along and none of my questions were ever answered. That game over screen really did have me asking, as the player, “What was the point of any of that?”
Again, a cohesive narrative mystery with linked games that revealed a little more each time you played them would have really elevated the whole experience.
I think we will see the mechanics of Restore, Reflect, Retry spawn a new sub-genre in Choicescript games in the next few years. Some author or authors are going to use the persistent information between game loops to make a hell of a narrative, maybe with time travel or alternate realities or who knows what, without the meta 4th wall breaking and it is going to be amazing.