Dialogue: A Writer's story

[got_quiet]

Name: Dialogue: A Writer's story
Status: Complete
Site: https://teapoweredgames.itch.io/dialogue
Rating: PG
Pairing: Gen
Description: A game more concerned about mechanics than playability



This feels like a tech demo for the mechanics in the game rather than a story that tells itself through mechanics. I'd call it more of a conversation sim than a visual novel. Game play consists of having chats with people and clicking on parts of the conversation to investigate that topic. The conversations themselves happen in a variety of different ways with their own particular mechanics.
 

One type is visualized as a sort of maze, with chambers representing each chunk of dialog, and you're expected to move around in paragraphs, clicking on topics. Sometimes there is a question in a chamber, and you have to answer it by going to another chamber that has the relevant part of the chat to answer that question.  For example, while talking to someone about his work in a lab, the MC wonders what he does with his leisure time, and you have to navigate to a part of the conversation where he says he likes trying new experiences and click on something to say that's the answer. If you get it wrong your only penalty is that you have to wait a few seconds to try again somewhere else, which kind of encourages one to just spam buttons and hope you get it right if things get too boring or the first one or two attempts doesn't go right. This format creates a "dialog" that is nonlinear, seeking out old parts of the conversation to try to open new passages of inquiry.

Another system is a more typical chat where you just are prompted with different color coded conversation choices and asked to pick the reply you want. The colors are based on the level of aggression or agreeableness in the reply. There's a timer similar to the one in the old Telltale games. If you don't pick fast enough the game seems to just select a random option for you. For some reason the game has also decided that an extra option will only sometimes appear at the last second. So in order to actually see all of your options you need to wait passively for the timer to tick down, and in the last second read the new option that suddenly comes up and decide if you want to pick it, but sometimes nothing shows up so you've wasted 10 seconds or whatever it is waiting for nothing. I can't conceive of what this mechanic is supposed to be for or why it's supposed to be engaging.

In the third system you get emails and have to reply to them. In order to do that you click on passages in the email to rotate through phrasing until you hit on something that you think is appropriate. Think of the annoyance of having to find the right pitch in a business email or something and then gamify it. That's basically concept three.

There are systems layered upon systems, so the above modes aren't all there is. There are questions that persist between conversation events where you have to find just the right chamber that's relevant to the thought in some distant conversation. There are "focuses" that act like talents and have some effect on how the other mechanics work. For example one focus is what gives you the option to click forward the dialog before the voice actor is done voicing it. In other words, if you don't activate this focus you can't forward through the dialog until the voice actor is done, which is ridiculous if you have the voices turned off. There's different ways of accessing new scenes, like a main plot and side plots, I guess. The only benefit of this is that you can skip a bunch of content to get to the end. In between each conversation scene there is a screen where you can play with options and go into your "organizer," which has all those focuses and some character bios, which include a very complicated description of how characters might respond to certain options in certain circumstances. For example, one character may not like it if you choose red options when responding to assertions that he makes.


 

This sort of approach to the mechanics feels like the exact opposite of how you want someone to play a game like this. Instead of trying to engage with whatever story is going on, you've got to organize and track a bunch of coded variables if you want to make the "right" decision. This is why masking those mechanics a little behind the narrative improves immersion, and outright saying "You better hit this button at this time" doesn't make for good narrative design.

So what do you do with all these mechanics? Pretty much nothing. The story, such as it is, is that the MC is writing a book and is in the planning stages, so she's doing some brainstorming, taking some early reader feedback, and chatting with a scientist friend about his job. And that's kind of it. There isn't really much of a story. It's mundane in most fundamental way, even though there is a portion where your fictional characters show up and talk to you. 90% of the time I felt like I was in a small talk simulator. About six or so scenes in I was just too bored to continue and decided to speed run it, aka not read anything and see how fast I could get to an ending. This turns out to be very easy to do, even though the mechanics are theoretically more complex (at least in the maze sections) than a typical VN, and I may have gotten a worse end. Because I basically stopped reading the game closely there's a chance that I missed something important, but the end doesn't seem to suggest as much. Nothing much has changed from the beginning. There's a first draft now, some ending has been decided for the book, and that's it. The game encourages you to replay scenes to see how different choices might have a different effect, and gives you feedback after certain conversations by telling you how many of what color options you picked, but I struggled to care about any of it. The story just could not compel me to engage with the mechanics.

In addition to the chats being uninteresting, the novel this character is writing is also boring. Most of the conversation centers around a single worldbuilding mechanic of the world called word-weaving, but things like main conflict or character arcs remain vague or unstated until quite late. The details are all inconsequential to that core elevator speech element that might hook someone into caring about all the minutia that the game thinks I want to hash out. Speculative fiction is my genre of choice, so you would expect that I would be able to read about a story in that genre and think, "this sounds interesting" but it absolutely doesn't in this game. It sounds like a very bad novel.

I don't have much to say about the sound or art because, like the writing, it seems to have been an afterthought.

Dialog tries to get creative with how interactive fiction can be modeled, but it seems to go for the worse idea every time, and the story (you know, the thing people play IF/VNs for) seems like a complete afterthought.