IFDB page: On Optimism
Final placement: 24th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
Readers of these reviews know that brevity is… not my strong suit. However, I could review this game in one word, and that word would be: “Painful.” Because I am who I am, though, you get multiple paragraphs about how this game is painful in multiple ways.
First, it’s painful because it clearly comes from pain. This game’s world, its images, its themes — they all seem to be torn from an extravagantly suffering heart, attached to another deeply wounded person. There’s drug abuse, self-harm, buckets of tears, and I suspect it’s rooted in at least a few real events. As such, it’s a tough game to review, because I hardly want to be stomping on somebody’s feelings, even 19 years later. I hope that writing this game gave the author a bit of relief.
That said, its subject matter isn’t the only thing that makes this game painful, and here I just have to say, if you have tender feelings on behalf of the topic and the possible real-life connections, you may want to stop reading. Because this game was absolutely painful to read due to its absurdly overwrought, faux-poetic, and hyperdramatic language. Over and over again, the game reaches for profundity or eloquence, and lands comically short.
Here, have a sample picked at random:
Room of Your Joy
My eyes scanned this room of your joy for minutes. They were searching for something that could not be found; for what this room must surely contain. But this is what they found: emptiness. A horribly large, vacant room was spread out before my eyes. A room that showed the depth of your sorrow, though it was called your joy. But as my eyes perused the room longer they found that there was but one small relic left in this room: a frame about the size of a sheet of a paper plastered on the far wall. Otherwise, vacancy could have been this room's name.
Oh man. I don’t think I need to take this apart piece by piece in order to show the ridiculousness of it, so let’s just focus on one thing: the weird personification of the PC’s eyes. They seemingly act on their own, leaving absolutely no agency for the actual character. The eyes scan the room. The eyes are searching for something. They don’t find it. The room is spread out before them. They peruse it longer. It’s all eyes, no “I”.
This mannerism repeats throughout the entire game, most often to ludicrous effect. We get lines like, “To the surprise of my eyes, the statue moved”, and, “My eyes once again received the strange privelege [sic] of sight”, and “In front of my eyes lay an opening begging to be traveled.” It’s not limited to the PC either, as the game pops out gems like, “Those great faucets you call eyes,” and “the pumps we call eyes.”
Nor are the eyes singled out for this bizarre treatment. This game never says, “I pressed the button” when it could instead say, “I moved forward and applied the weight of my body upon the remote’s only button.” And oh, the heart references! Most of the game takes place inside a metaphorical (and sometimes a bit oddly literal) heart, and the poetry (oh yeah, there’s poetry) refers to hearts relentlessly. At one point, when it was waxing tragic about a heart that will “forget to pump blood through my core,” I couldn’t help but flash on Andrew Plotkin’s classic review opener for Symetry:
This is terribly, terribly unfair. I’m really sorry. But I just started laughing hysterically, and it’s not what the author intended. In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line:
‘My blood pumper is wronged!’
I just lost it. It’s a very ‘Eye of Argon’ sort of line.
That’s pretty much the story with this game’s prose. You’re not supposed to laugh, but it honestly can’t be avoided.
There’s another level of pain in this game, and that is its painful design. Several times in my playthrough, I had to turn to the hints (which were clear and thorough, and for whose inclusion I’m grateful), only to find that the command necessary to resolve my conundrum felt like a truly random thing I would never have thought to do. It’s not surprising, I guess, that a game living entirely in an allegorical, metaphorical, and dreamlike landscape would have logical non sequiturs in it, but no fair trying to make other people guess at them.
That’s enough. I appreciated those hints, as I said, and there’s a moment where the game ends but you’re given the chance to go back to a crucial decision point. I thought that was a cool innovation, one I’d enjoy seeing in other games. Overall, though, my memories of this game will always be full of pain. And just a little hilarity.
Rating: 3.7