In the world of Dyscourse, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts which has taken my career no further than the coffee shop. And while I might be an internationally renowned barista, I don't have the skill set to ensure surviving a plane crash on a remote island. Just a couple months past my 25th birthday, I certainly don't have the life experiences needed to manage a group of mentally unraveling survivors. But that's where the no-longer-proverbial tailspin of life has jettisoned me. I hold not only my survival in my hands as I fend off starvation, dehydration, wild animals, and the basest human survival instincts; I've become responsible for five other lost souls, and I don't know if I can handle this responsibility.
It's raining, and we've been on this island for three days now. Teddy makes me uncomfortable. His paranoid delusions get worse every day. He's convinced that Garrett--the chubby, sad, and lonely gamer--conspired with the government to crash our plane. He insists that we build a signal to escape the island, but we have to take care of food and water first. We found water yesterday, but in his excitement, Garrett found himself covered in leeches, and he ran into a rock as he tore the bloodsuckers from his body. It will be a while before I forget the image of those parasites squirming on his body. But now, he won't stop babbling incoherently. He seems to think he's in a massively multiplayer game. I hope he isn't concussed.
Things don't stay this genial for long.
And Steve nearly died today. I think on some level he wanted to. His cigarette lit the jet fuel around the fuselage, and if he hadn't jumped at the last second, the rain would have put his fire out, but lightning struck the exact spot where he'd been standing. Steve looks like he needs a hug, though I wish he would stop pouting and do something productive. Not that Louise was any more helpful. I don't know where we'd be if it weren't for her husband, George. I think he's the only sane person left--besides me. Maybe I'll talk to him tonight before we go to bed. Well…we'll talk if our shelter at the beach holds up. This storm is getting bad.
That is just one of many stories that unfold in survival-adventure game Dyscourse. Imagine Lost as a cartoon in which Jack was a girl and all of the psychological issues of everyone else on the island were amplified to eleven, and you'll get a feel for the tone and style of Dyscourse. After crash landing on a remote island, you play as Rita--a girl whose personality and leadership style you're free to shape however you choose--and it's up to you to lead you and your fellow survivors to rescue…if you can avoid being eaten by jaguars or dying of hunger first.
A BFA is not the best skill set for a remote island plane crash.
Dyscourse is a game about choice and light environmental exploration. Although you're free to roam the island and engage in a handful of basic adventure-game staples--finding tools, solving simple puzzles--Dyscourse's best moments are of the "choose your own adventure" kind. For anyone frustrated by many of the false choices in Telltale's Walking Dead series, Dyscourse takes branching paths to nearly ludicrous lengths--though enough playthroughs will reveal the limitations of even this game's systems. You make difficult decisions at every turn. Do you search for water, or food? Do you rescue the flares that could signal rescue, or save a beloved survivor's life? Do you try to save a woman attacked by jaguars, or let her die to ensure your own survival? Dyscourse lets the consequences range from immediately apparent to long-term mercies and cruelties. The endings are limited to three major scenarios, but the details surrounding them feel nearly infinite.
Beyond offering consistently anxiety-riddled conundrums for how you live on this island, Dyscourse succeeds on the back of charming and clever writing. Although every Dyscourse playthrough invariably takes a turn towards darkness--particularly the one where I intentionally made the worst decisions I could--the game's style is lighter than most survival fare, and I lost track of the number of times when the game made me laugh out loud. Although all the characters but Rita and kindly farmer George seem irreparably broken, you grow to care about your troupe of island-dwellers through the sincerity of the game's writing. It's unfortunate that Dyscourse takes cheap shots at Teddy's clear schizophrenia and plays it for the wrong sorts of laughs.
Don't get your hopes up, Teddy.
The game's storybook visuals, where characters and environments feel like they were lifted from a felt-crafted stop-motion cartoon, may not initially appeal to you, but they work well within their context. In one playthrough, a character had his arm ripped off by a jaguar, and anything resembling realism would have destroyed the tone. The moment made me audibly gasp, and the severity of the game's situation hit home very quickly, but it wasn't unnecessarily and graphically violent.
Dyscourse's writing and sense of place is so strong that when the game ends as suddenly as it does, it's natural to want even more. Any individual playthrough shouldn't take more than an hour or so. And though the game offers you many options on how to play, there's little reason to return after having seen all three major endings because you'll learn how to game the system to your favor…though in Dyscourse's defense, I never had a successful playthrough in which every survivors was rescued. My best playthrough still experienced two casualties.
Yes, Rita is missing an arm now.
Dyscourse has charm and personality to spare, and though you can peel back the layers of its systems if you spend enough time replaying it, few games make your choices feel as meaningful and impactful as this one does. Throw in an excellent musical score, and it's not difficult to mark it as one of the most aesthetically pleasing titles of 2015 thus far. It's rare that I would want to spend more time on a desert island, but Dyscourse left me craving slightly more of those agonizing days and nights.
I can barely hear my car's radio over the storm. It's just a low buzz and a series of rhythmic thumps. I'm alone on the highway, flanked by rows of Nebraskan corn, driving in the shadow of the wind turbines in the distance, steadily spinning along in the rain. Dozens of wind turbines… or hundreds of them. Thousands maybe? They seem to stretch forever--or for at least as long as this awkward conversation with my father does.
Three Fourths Home is a short piece of interactive fiction that captures the feeling of late-night driving and millennial uncertainty. You play as Kelly Meyers, a 20-something who recently moved back in with her folks and who can't see a path forward for her or her troubled family. As the player, you're more concerned with the family's past: Across a main story, an epilogue, and a collection of interesting bonus content, you piece together (and even decide) who these people are and what happened to them.
Like all stressful conversations, there's no walking away from this one. You have to push through it.
In the game's main story, you spend about an hour driving through an intense storm while talking with your family members on the phone. On a screen of stark (and occasionally overwhelming) black, white, and gray, you pass through rural Nebraska while choosing dialogue options and taking in the scenery. You hold down the D key to drive forward while selecting dialogue with the up and down arrows. With a press of the F key, the camera zooms in to the silhouette of your car, and your speed shakes the screen. You can mess with your tape deck or flick your headlights on and off, but these mostly serve to occupy your hands (and take up your nervous energy). If it all sounds simple, it's because it is. But it's also effective.
Three Fourths Home again proves that interactive fiction can feel urgent, and it's a reminder that game makers working in the genre have more tools at their disposal than just their words. The droning ambient sounds and the high-contrast zine aesthetic create a tense atmosphere, and the game's control scheme supports this. In order to progress through conversations you need to continue to drive forward. The second you let go of that D key, everything decelerates into slow motion--the rain, the windmills, the bird that flies overhead--and your dialogue options vanish. Like all stressful conversations, there's no walking away from this one. You have to push through it, and you must do so with care: It's all too easy to choose the default response during conversation when you mean only to forward a conversation, due to the game's measured reveal of possible replies.
The droning ambient sounds and the high-contrast zine aesthetic create a tense atmosphere.
Of course, writer Zach Sanford's words contribute to the tension, too. Though much of the dialogue is humorous, the conversations you have with Kelly's mother, father, and brother always work their way back around to some recent trauma--yours or theirs. Games have a history of mishandling the traumatic, but Sanford manages to explore these ideas with restraint and insight. His natural writing sets Three Fourths Home apart from many other games which render personal suffering cartoonish. The Meyers, like real people, are careful but flawed. They know that there are topics you can only really talk about when you can look someone in the eye. But they can't quite manage their desires to talk about the tough stuff. So they hint at their pasts, talk around their personal tragedies, and occasionally brush close to their painful memories.
The game's epilogue subverts this structure. Still playing as Kelly, you are taken back into her memory of a time months before the main game's story. But unlike a linear flashback, this is memory reflects the doubt and regret that often comes with hindsight. You can choose to make the same dialogue choices that Kelly made all those months ago, or you can linger on the "what ifs." What if she had told her mother about her problems? What if she'd worked harder in school? What if she'd taken a different bus that day? You're not actually seeing alternate outcomes--you're just obsessing over them the way we all do.
The conversations you have with Kelly's mother, father, and brother always work their way back around to some recent trauma--yours or theirs.
In total, that whole experience only took about two hours of my day. But it left me winded. There is a real velocity to Three Fourths Home. It sneaks up on you, quietly at first, before suddenly becoming overwhelming. Its closest analogs aren't other games, but works like John Darnielle's novel Wolf in White Van or the haunting music of lo-fi artist Mount Eerie--art that rumbles and groans and then springs into action.
More than anything, though, Three Fourths Home reminded me of one of those nights where you look down to see that you're going ten… twenty… thirty miles over the speed limit. But you just can't bring yourself to lift your foot off the gas pedal. You've got somewhere to be.
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