YOU WERE MADE FOR LONELINESS
July 20, 2014 3:53 PM Subscribe
You Were Made for Loneliness is a Twine text adventure by Tsukareta that explores the idea of love in different situations. Since it's release back in June reviews have been overall positive.
It’s the future. The remnants of humanity, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known only as The Fall, have fled a dying homeworld to seek refuge among the colonies of the solar system.
Twenty years later in a small pawnshop on Callisto, an android is waking up from a deep slumber. Within her, long faded memories shine to life once more.
Trigger Warning: suicide, depression, and psychological abuse are themes explored in YWMFL
I agree that the game tends to go on slightly longer than necessary for Twine text adventures. IIRC, only one side story is directly connected to the main arc and you can more or less skip over the others.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 6:07 PM on July 20, 2014
posted by chrono_rabbit at 6:07 PM on July 20, 2014
I'm surprised that got such good reviews. It's not a game at all, as it's entirely on rails. There are some quirky stories (prose poems) linked, in classic hypertext narrative fashion, to a few of the words in the main line of the narrative. (The nerva_blood_radio and poisoner monologues are especially creepy.) They don't really add up to a consistent explanation, although there is one early on that gives you an idea of why the other stories are there in the robot's memory cells. Also there's a lot of annoying typos and wrong words that make me think it was written on a mobile device without proofreading. Nice allusions to Plundered Hearts, The Space Under The Window, and Sins Against Mimosas Mimesis, or maybe I was just hallucinating. The J. Geils Band was right about love.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:05 AM on July 21, 2014
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:05 AM on July 21, 2014
Well, I see the other end of that "reviews have been overall positive" link mentions Photopia as a comparison. I've always been of the opinion that that game's universal awesomeness is overrated -- it gets its power from the way it relies on & messes with the expectations an experienced text adventurer brings to it. If you'd never played a standard text adventure, Photopia would a poor place to start.
Similarly, You Were Made For Loneliness uses the Choose Your Own Adventure format without giving you any choices. (Shades of Rameses.) The frustration you feel at the non-interactivity is deliberate, and not something that could have been evoked in a more conventional short story format.
To be honest, the reviews on the other end of that link are overall negative. If there's someone who liked this "game" and really grokked it, I'd like to read their thoughts, because I think it had a lot of potential and good ideas floating around. But that's not enough.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:25 AM on July 21, 2014
Similarly, You Were Made For Loneliness uses the Choose Your Own Adventure format without giving you any choices. (Shades of Rameses.) The frustration you feel at the non-interactivity is deliberate, and not something that could have been evoked in a more conventional short story format.
To be honest, the reviews on the other end of that link are overall negative. If there's someone who liked this "game" and really grokked it, I'd like to read their thoughts, because I think it had a lot of potential and good ideas floating around. But that's not enough.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:25 AM on July 21, 2014
Harvey Kilobit: "To be honest, the reviews on the other end of that link are overall negative. If there's someone who liked this "game" and really grokked it, I'd like to read their thoughts, because I think it had a lot of potential and good ideas floating around. But that's not enough."
Eh, I thought it was a 6/10 myself. It could have benefitted from fewer side stories added into the plot. I did like the premise of a future society and The Fall (which was oddly never explained?). I missed the other references to other IF works during my playthrough.
Yes, I think it'd be more accurate to call it a story about relationships than a game because much to my disappointment I didn't have many choices until the end.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 9:26 AM on July 21, 2014
Eh, I thought it was a 6/10 myself. It could have benefitted from fewer side stories added into the plot. I did like the premise of a future society and The Fall (which was oddly never explained?). I missed the other references to other IF works during my playthrough.
Yes, I think it'd be more accurate to call it a story about relationships than a game because much to my disappointment I didn't have many choices until the end.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 9:26 AM on July 21, 2014
One of the comments on that JayIsGames link suggests that there are two mental voices, one in blue text and one in purple text, and one of them loves while the other one cannot or will not. I don't know if that really works, but it's true that many of the stories feature characters who love and characters who seem to have hearts of stone.
You're given only one real choice in the game near the end: love or righteousness. To be clear, the person asking for the love is completely undeserving and you'd be quite right to turn away. But if you choose love ("forgiveness") you are rewarded in the final scene with freedom, and if you choose not to love ("freedom") you are rewarded in the final scene with love, or the promise of it.
(There's some talk in the vignettes about love outlasting death, lovers finding each other again after reincarnation, and I'm pretty sure "Jessica" was a character's name from one of those stories, so that's how I read the scene.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:33 AM on July 21, 2014
You're given only one real choice in the game near the end: love or righteousness. To be clear, the person asking for the love is completely undeserving and you'd be quite right to turn away. But if you choose love ("forgiveness") you are rewarded in the final scene with freedom, and if you choose not to love ("freedom") you are rewarded in the final scene with love, or the promise of it.
(There's some talk in the vignettes about love outlasting death, lovers finding each other again after reincarnation, and I'm pretty sure "Jessica" was a character's name from one of those stories, so that's how I read the scene.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:33 AM on July 21, 2014
The Fall (which was oddly never explained?)
The back-stories aren't consistent. We do hear about humanity being calmly evacuated from a doomed Earth. But as to why it's doomed... the nerva_blood_radio story is about a zombie apocalypse, the (Plundered Hearts) pirate story is about a flooded planet, and in the wandering-the-virtual-desert story, Skynet destroys all of humanity (but only after many centuries).
I think the robot must have been programmed in the near future, because so many of the implanted memories were from the 1980s-2000s, but then it waited in that junk shop for a long, long time before being reactivated.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:46 AM on July 21, 2014
The back-stories aren't consistent. We do hear about humanity being calmly evacuated from a doomed Earth. But as to why it's doomed... the nerva_blood_radio story is about a zombie apocalypse, the (Plundered Hearts) pirate story is about a flooded planet, and in the wandering-the-virtual-desert story, Skynet destroys all of humanity (but only after many centuries).
I think the robot must have been programmed in the near future, because so many of the implanted memories were from the 1980s-2000s, but then it waited in that junk shop for a long, long time before being reactivated.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:46 AM on July 21, 2014
« Older There's a lagoon, and it's blue. Surely this will... | "And we're dancing with the dead / that are... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by empath at 5:03 PM on July 20, 2014