You Were Made For Loneliness
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux, Javascript
You Were Made For Loneliness (check out the official site!), a Twine narrative adventure by the Tsukareta writing collective, starts with an old lady purchasing a robotic maid from a pawn shop on Callisto, and from there weaves a tale of memory, the post-apocalypse, regret, murder, psychosis, and in its own skewed way, love. It's a work that heavy in subject, heavy on experimentation and it's very well done indeed. Players should be warned that the narrative deals with everything from suicide to depression and psychological abuse, making this a less-than-lighthearted tale, but one that will stay with you for a long time.
You Were Made For Loneliness is functionally similar to most Twine games: you read passages and click on highlighted words or phrases to make a choice (or lack thereof) or explore something in more detail. But like Depression Quest (from which it steals a few narrative tricks) its mature prose strives to do those topics justice. It is not a light read: its jigsaw puzzle plot jumps around in time, place and perspective, with disjointed elements only coming together deep in its impressive length. It may not quite be Photopia, but things bode well for the future of hypertext. Just like they boded well in 1994... Just play it, okay?
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It's an interesting game, but there is a LOT of reading.
I'm playing it in browser, but haven't closed the window just in case I have to go through everything again.
From what I've read so far,
There are two characters in the memories, one recalling memories in blue text, the other in purple. At least, that's what I hope since otherwise it is even more confusing. Occasionally they interact.
There's a lot of talk about love, dating, sex and betrayal. Blue (I'm not good with remembering names) might be who the title is talking about, since they (he?) seems to be incapable of loving people properly.
I'm imagining a twist where
the character you're playing is actually a human rather than an android, but lives like a robot because the circumstances and the memories have made them into this thing unable to feel or interact with their husband/wife, the new 'owner'.
OR
At least one of the characters in the memories - Blue or Purple - was actually an android, which is why the 'love' thing was so tricky.
In terms of how far I am through the story, Naomi has been to town and returned with the dress, finished setting everything up for this party, but I don't quite remember if the party has started or not.
This 'game'/IF would be easier to play if the game box (whatever you call the active area in the window you play the browser game in) were slightly shorter, so I didn't have to juggle in-game and web scrolling to read through long memories.
As I suspected, there is no save/continue if you play in-browser.
I recommend perhaps playing it a little in the browser to see if you're interested, before downloading the game and hopefully getting access to some kind of save point/continue-from-where-I-left system.
I liked the majority of this story and the side stories were interesting. The ending without spoiling anything had me a little sad in a way that didn't have to do so much with the plot as it did with the character. I was so sure there was going to be more to what was going on, and it felt like the end just sorta breezed past. I went back and made slightly different choices and didn't feel emotionally connected to either one. I didn't feel the closure that I wanted and even reading all the backstory didn't give me the feeling that the story was truly over.
The main story was okay, somewhat interesting.
I got tired of reading the side stories and ended up not even clicking on them after a while.
Some were interesting but all were disconnected and seemingly random.
I have no idea what they contributed to the overall narrative. Perhaps I skimmed over that part or it was explained after I had stopped clicking them.
I got to make 5 choices. The end.
Starts promising, but ends disappointing. Unlike what chapel204 writes, you only get to make 1 choice. (The other "choices" don't actually change anything.) That's hardly a game as such, it's more a series of links to similar unhappy love stories or stream of consciousness rants.
If you want to follow the other "choices", without having to play through the whole "game" for each one, you can use the back button in your browser and return to earlier states. But only one choice actually makes any difference.
There is something pretty important in the side stories
There was a duo that were working on a project that involved dumping the memories of soldiers into androids. This didn't go well, and so rather than having the two reseachers have their work sealed forever, dumped it into an old maid robot. One that 'the company' wouldn't miss.
I have no idea of who the blue/purple text are, they could be that very duo, but they ARE a result of having their memories dumped into the robot. The 'screechers' that they keep referring to? The many, many other people dumped into the robot, not aware of anything. Still 'asleep'. Blue/Purple somehow sleep for a bit, and eventually wake up after all the 'screechers' are awake. You only get the perspective of one, though. I forget which one. They vow to find the other, though.
That's the gist I got, some of the side stories were just so long, I skimmed through some of them. Mostly the later ones since it was just too much.
One that I didn't figure out the point of was
that one about remembering poetry. The one that going through made more and more text appear under various options. And let you leave at (almost) any time. Mostly because you have no idea what actually triggers more text to appear, and the text that does suddenly appear was the same.
And it was obvious more things were going to appear on a specific set of choices, but no idea where to go, because everything changes everywhere, simply because I had viewed different things.
I'm sorry, the writing is just not compelling enough for an adventure that is 100 percent text-based. Developers need to respect the writing as much as the gameplay mechanism.
I feel the same asCarny Asada and George011
The side stories especially the one about the lady on the internet became more interesting than the main plot and even that interest did not last. That one felt the most disconnected and even with the plot that is laid out by Kgummy I don't feel like I saw the same thing. I read every single story I could and didn't see that. It was all about the title theme, some of them sad and some of them interesting-all about humanities flaws and love.
I felt like the story petered out and that they didn't put as much effort into the ending. The very short story wasn't really up to par and the themes involved down't come to fruition. The story is really bare even if you read every single side story and some of them don't seem to connect.
Even reading every single side story I couldn't puzzle out why the ending was happening. I looked at both sides and didn't particularly enjoy them. Even reading others interpretations I feel like I'm not getting the same themes throughout, like the central plot and motivation changes at the end.
I feel like the choice at the end when the character berates the woman into telling her the story is sort of horrible. The choice to forgive or run away from a woman who is baring her soul about something she's felt guilt for, for years is sort of heartwrenching. It felt like the story was saying the woman didn't deserve to have these feelings of loss and helplessness because she was rich. Leaving felt wrong, and so did staying because neither felt like they had weight to them. They introduced concepts that I didn't really know what to do with.
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