SERAPH'S DESCENT

For this I wanted to work with some form of body horror and themes from the X-Files, both very big obsessions of mine. As a trans queer person who grew up in a very Catholic country, the frustrating experience of trying to come out is something hard to explain to others. First it’s a battle to get them to even believe you; they can be dismissive, insensitive, and down-right demonize your existence. Then, if you get them to believe you, they will put you through more suffering till you become what they want you to be. Now that I left the country and have been living my life as I am and not as what they made me out to be, they are mad that they didn’t “fix” me. The reason I turned to body horror is because it’s something I find comfort in - a fictionalized violence through which I can express my pain. The X-Files, on the other hand, comes in by offering monster of the week episodes where it’s nothing but something being misunderstood and demonized by a larger community - the resulting issues being a consequence of their own actions.

This game is meant to be uncomfortable, violent, and frustrating.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Even though it’s not a cycle, it is meant to be replayed; however, no matter what you do, you will always end up in the same place. It is meant to take agency away from the player. While the decisions you make affect how the man you encounter in the woods reacts, it will, ultimately, all become obsolete. Nothing will change the final outcome of the story. This is intentional. Costikyan offers decision making as a central concept to most games, and in the case of this work it is one of the central factors that I would use to define it as such. And in this definition I highlight the the term decision “making”, not decision impact. It’s reason for which I used Nat Mesnard’s structure of key-nodes with some aspects of the loop structure - similar to Queers in Love at the End of The World, which despite Mesnard defining it as a loop structure, I would argue also has elements of the key-node structure with its linear -yet repeatable - narration. It is narrative-focused, and while you can go through it many different ways trying to find the “right”combination, the real difference is the emotional impact that results from each play through. If you never make the man angry and it seems like he will set you free, the ending might come as a shock, if you do though, the ending might come as a dreaded inescapable moment. While these are the key elements used to achieve the desired impact of playing, there are other craft elements that are used to highlight the themes of the story. The change in visuals serves to depict the change in setting and feeling of the game, the use of uncontextualized bible verses mirror an action I’ve commonly seen from the people the man represents, the writing in verses and the final few lines which were made to resemble Dante’s Inferno to offer additional religious imagery beyond what is written and the delayed text for the final moments of torture to drag out the pain of the scene.

After having some people play through the game, there was one thing that came up amongst those that had no previous twine experience: the cycle link. The way it appeared made it seem that each time you clicked it, you were picking up an object. After talking to one of them a bit more and doing some additional playtesting with that passage, I found that what helped the best was to add a delay to the text that came right after, as it better highlighted the change that was happening. Another thing that came up was the ending. Initially I had added a restart link under the reveal text links, and that ended up getting some of the players lost as when they didn’t click in order yet still thought it would just reveal text from a previous click, it suddenly sent them to the beginning again. I had used the restart link to incentivize people to play again as that is what really builds the frustration, but as one of my players said: “I was already itching to press that restart link as soon as I finished reading.” This really came to show that the game did have the desired effect by itself and I didn’t need to guide the player in such a direct manner.