finished Blue Lacuna, which i wasn't particularly enthused by but i feel impressed by the title regardless. the game's written by aaron reed who i was familiar with as the guy behind IF50. figured i should play one of his games, so i know where he's coming from as a writer and critic in the interactive fiction community.
also, it's considered one of the best games too.
contrary to the strange cover image that reminds me of some gay porno from the 90s, it's actually a text adventure styled after MYST and has a neat science fiction concept related to people wandering around between time and space. its themes are pretty HUMAN CONDITION too, though it's okay in my view. it's also one of the longest interactive fiction titles as well and for good reason: it's all that simulation, man.
while everyone more or less agrees the plot is kinda whatever and the companion is cute as hell, the main draw is the heavy simulation the game offers. its attention to detail commonly abstracted in other titles is what makes it feel so close to titles like MYST to me. you almost feel like you're walking on an island and you're tinkering with weird shit. your buddy wanders around and does whatever as if they're human/have some AI built into them. little critters like snails pop in and out of view. the tides can get low and high depending on the time. and there's even rainstorms too. you really do feel like you're a lone wanderer on this space and it's impressive how everything is done through text -- and text alone.
but at the same time, i feel quite overwhelmed by the poetic and elaborate descriptions of the game with each step of the game. this is not to say i'm against simulation-y text. i'm quite fond of it as seen in my own thoughts on A Mind Forever Voyaging and that title made me wish there were more text. however, it's very easy to get tired reading Blue Lacuna. part of it is how detailed everything is, the other is how there's so much goddamn text to read. imagine the amount of text there is when all the aforementioned simulating aspects have different variations. at the end of the game, the game tells you how much text you've read overall and i read around 3/11ths if memory serves me correctly.
and i just thought that was too much for me.
note the "for me". while i don't exactly jive with the descriptions (i already had difficulty imagining the Zork 3 puzzle that's comparable to MYST), i realize that may be a fault on how i explore fiction. my mind's eye isn't open. a skill issue, one might say.
for example, the top review on its IFDB page comes from a blind person who has this really interesting bit:
Interactive fiction games are wonderful for blind computer users, as they allow us to experience settings and scenes we might not otherwise, perhaps more so than for the sighted people in this world. That was a large attraction of Lacuna for me, the richness and vibrancy of its island setting are unparalleled in the annals of interactive fiction. Other games may have similar esthetics or similar talent for description, but none I know of simulate day and night and tide with such loving detail. The world and how the player perceives it changes radically with each passing hour, and it was a joy just to wander around the island, soaking in the ambiance of a place too beautiful to be real as it changed over the course of my playthrough. I was beyond pleased to look up at the night sky and notice that the moon was implemented, and that it had phases which changed from day to day, as irrelevant as that might be to the actual plot.
when i read how the extreme simulation approach the game takes is vibrant and colorful for hard of seeing people, it really opened up my mind. i think books and text in general have been quite terse for sighted folks like me because we care about pacing, but it can be too little for others. we have visual descriptors like images and text formatting, aspects that cannot be garnered through a screen reader. we think the overtly flowery prose is "too much", overwhelming, and slow.
but for people who are hard of seeing or even when i was younger and didn't really experience much of the world, this kind of text must've been incredible. it was an actual virtual world worth exploring. there's physics, day-night cycles, etc. it's a simulation that happened to have a story that you can also enjoy and there's something beautiful to be had there.
people like me have difficulty appreciating this because we're just there for the story and atmosphere. but perhaps, this game made me think simulation-y prose is actually quite nice. and it's made me rethink how i view purple prose, which i've grown to dislike when i used to be all into it. but now, i'm back to slowly thinking it's actually a chill way to simulate virtual worlds if done correctly.
i'm not fond of "good/bad" writing crap and i like to believe i've dropped the habit, but my experience playing this game and reading reviews by other people made me think i still haven't. sighted people like me still have weird understandings on what good and bad writing should be, just subconsciously: "If we can see it or at least picture it clearly, what's the point in describing that? It's wasted time for (the sighted) reader and author." in that regard, Blue Lacuna is very interesting and at least worth playing to see how much simulation is not in other fiction because many sighted people don't think it's that necessary when it may be for hard of seeing people.
and i'm sure this bias definitely affected how i played Blue Lacuna. i may have enjoyed the game more if i weren't so plot/character-brained and instead let the game immerse me in its textual world.
regardless, it's a damn cool game that's worth trying out a bit, though the game seriously needs a walkthrough. it took me two whole days to go through, with the help of the author's hints on the website. but i kinda wish there were more tips.
the game also broke on me many times and i'm not a fan of saving in IF games. please save a bunch lol.
bonus: you can be a woman and have your (past) love interest be a woman too, which is a nice touch.