There are few universal experiences shared across all of humankind. And as an adolescent, it feels like we share many more experiences with our developing peers. The excitement of the future, an engaged sense of wonder, and increased pressure of expectations. Fear of the ever-looming abyss that engulfs your previously safe room when your parents give their final “goodnight”. If you were one of the brave ones, unlike me, the night's void signaled a challenge to anything that dared to steal your precious sleep. Those clothes staring menacingly at you do not strike fear in your heart, but rather the opportunity to strike. Grabbing the nearest blunt weapon, likely full of feathers, you strike the layered clump of cotton only to be met with another monster: A sleep-deprived parent offering impalement through their cold gaze. This feeling is precisely what I experienced when playing TrulyDrew’s survival-focused interactive fiction “Divide”.
Daydreamer_jin
In Divide you play as a youngling who has been offered up by their tribe to some unseen beast in what appears to be a seasonal offering or sacrifice. The beast is located on the other side of some interdimensional wall that must be found and accessed directly. Your tribe ceremoniously abandoned you at the mysterious cross-dimensional enclave with a bag of tools, a sword, and a knife given to you by your lone sibling. With these tools in hand, you are given one directive, SURVIVE.
Being a newcomer to the genre of interactive fiction, I may have done myself a huge disservice by playing such an excellent piece of HTML as my introduction to the space. To be entirely transparent, I am not much of a “narrative” gamer. While I do love a good story, my dusty film degree and predisposition to exciting imagery have made me pretty skeptical of text games. Do all games not have text? Why would I want to read a book but slower? These were the childish thoughts of someone who would never have guessed a game like Divide would make my hands clam up more than holding my wife’s hand during a 2am horror movie.
The game is not particularly scary but there is a physically stifling tension brought about by its gameplay mechanics and atmosphere. “BuT hOw CaN a TeXt GaMe hAvE gAmePlay??,” I thought. SHUT UP UNCULTURED PAST VERSION OF ME. TrulyDrew used my ignorance of the genre to throw intensely riveting interactive puzzles at me in their game design. Challenging not just my rapidly declining ability to read quickly, but also my even more rapidly declining patience. One mechanic in particular had text slowly appear as the character’s eyes adjusted to entering a dark cave, revealing new routes and interactive elements. Another engaged my years of AimLabs training through a rock climbing segment which had text appear at random positions and timed intervals on the screen. Mechanics like these made me extraordinarily distrustful of my perceptions of text games. Where I previously thought any game where I had to read anything more than some dialogue or weapon descriptions was nothing more than a yap-induced snoozefest, here I am sweating, shaking, and crying trying to get my character as prepared as possible for his final fight with the beast.
"I will not be just a sacrifice"
I will not spoil this climactic engagement so as to not loosen any of that juicy tension on your playthrough. What I will say is, in the two endings I painstakingly earned, I felt fulfilled and fairly rewarded for my efforts in a way that none of my other dopamine fixations ever provided. Not only broadening my perspective of the genre but filling me with a newfound determination that I will not continue to be a sacrifice to the discriminatory, loot box-riddled, gacha fueled, beast that is the games-as-a-service machine. Instead, my last two brain cells and I will fight to survive through more critically engaging pieces of interactive fiction like TrulyDrew’s “Divide”.
