Wither

(NOTE: I'm going to try very hard to discuss this game without spoilers. Give me strength.)

(Thanks to Dream Theater for the amazing song which shares a title with this game, and provides the title for this review.)

One of the best kinds of game, at least to me, is the story-mystery. By this rather clunky term, I refer to games in which figuring out the backstory is one of the overarching puzzles, and there's an "a-ha! So that's what this meant" feeling at the end, often with a complete overturning of the player's preconceived notions. Julian Barnes, the British writer, gave this feeling a name - "The Sense of an Ending" - in his outstanding novel of the same name. The key to achieving such a sense is to start with a seemingly simple - even banal - storyline, and to keep providing hints about something deeper beneath the surface. If this is done well, then there is an intellectual and emotional punch in the gut at the very end, the pieces fit, and the player is left to utter just one word: "Wow."* On the other hand, if this is done badly, then the player's reaction is likely to be "Huh? This weird stuff doesn't make sense. The author probably ran out out of ideas and pulled an arbitrary mind-screw on us".

In other words, to achieve the Sense of an Ending takes a good deal of planning, foreshadowing, and other essential tools of the writer's craft. It would be superfluous to discuss the RPG Maker work that epitomizes this "sense" (The Way), because it's already been analyzed to near-death in the years since its release.

Wither, unlike The Way, is deliberately small and economical in scope, like Barnes' novel. Barnes' story is the ordinary tale of an ordinary Joe who receives an unexpected legacy from a woman he once knew - Wither goes one step further by leaving the characters and locations themselves nameless, and by adopting a minimalistic graphical style and "all-caps" text reminiscent of an old Game Boy game. (In fact, there's a clear and obvious debt to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.) Unlike Barnes' world - where we move from ordinariness to tragedy - the aura of tragedy is never quite missing even at the beginning of Wither. It is clear from the outset that something terrible has happened, that the player is connected to it (or even responsible for it), but what that "something" is forms - so as to speak - the main quest or the point of the game.

It's difficult to describe Wither under the conventional headings of story, gameplay, music, graphics and so on, because it's not that kind of game. To subject it to that kind of analysis would be either to write out an avalanche of spoilers, or to be so vague that the reader of my review would be justly annoyed. But I will say one thing: gameplay is scrupulously fair, the sparse writing style is well chosen, and there is a deliberate ambiguity in what happens - which spares the player / reader from feeling "duh, this is silly" right at the end.

Wither belongs to a rare breed of works - Barnes' novel, Lun Calsari's opus, or the text game Photopia - where puzzle and story blend together, and the biggest puzzle is the story itself. For this, I rate it very highly indeed, even if the rather hackeneyed symbolism in the ending does prevent me from giving it the highest possible score.

Highly recommended, preferably as a double bill with "The Sense of an Ending".

* Trivia: St. John Chrysostom, the early Christian saint and preacher, is also the only saint recorded as having said "Wow" (or possibly "Wowee!") in one of his sermons. I wonder what he would think of Wither.