Each-uisge (Jac Colvin, Choicescript) is a story about horse-monsters from Gaelic folklore. The protagonist is a ten-year-old child who is drawn to a kelpie kept captive by a neighbouring farmer, and has to decide whether this is a malign and dangerous monster that deserves captivity, or an abused animal that should be freed.
The writing is very bogged down in over-specification: too many adjectives, a lot of saying the same thing two different ways, so many details that none of them have room to be telling details. Nobody ever just speaks if their voice can echo sharply. With a heavy cut – maybe reducing the word count of the average paragraph by about a third – this would flow much more naturally, be more enjoyable to read, and impart more drama. There are some elements in here which, in their conception, are pretty good horror – the mental influence of the creature, those teeth. But horror relies a lot on delivery, and this ends up feeling a lot more like your D&D party having a protracted argument about what to do with a mystery monster. The mental influence ends up feeling more like ‘ah, yeah, looks like this can cast Charm Person, we’d better watch out for that’ rather than the horror of not being able to trust your own mind.
You’re basically given one choice over the course of the game, delivered in different ways and reframed as you learn more context: are you sympathetic to the captive kelpie, or do you regard it as an irredeemable monster that needs to be controlled? Until the end, most of these choices seem to have relatively little impact on the course of the story: you will still be drawn to the creature, still strongly consider releasing it, no matter what you do. The game only tracks one stat, State of Mind, which reflects how much magical influence the kelpie has over you. (There are some other choices which alter small details.) My sense was very much that this mostly only wanted to be one story, where the child feels sympathy for the beast and releases it, plus some Bad Endings. If you harden your heart against the beast right from the outset, you still get pretty much the same ‘but the poor thing is suffering!’ plotline; you can choose to leave it in captivity, but that’s really not what the story wants you to do.
There’s the potential here for a kind of The Warbler’s Nest tension – what kind of story am I in? – but if that’s the idea, it doesn’t do enough to keep things uncertain. It seems clear, at every point, that the Good Choice is for you to free the monster. There’s a bit where the PC’s mother explains how her sister was killed by a kelpie – and this could have been an effective moment of doubt, except that the immediate next choice includes an option where the PC cleverly points out that the horse in the mother’s story seems different. The uncertainty doesn’t have space to set in.
All of this sits a bit weirdly alongside the Choicescript idiom, which typically involves a focus on player-directed character development and choices which have long-term effects on how the story turns out. I’m obviously not opposed to using Choicescript in ways that go outside the house style, but Each-uisge has got some features derived from that style that don’t really fit with what it wants to do. You get the expected choice of name and gender, here, but that’s the last player-directed character-development note you get – and given how little it matters to the story, it doesn’t really seem necessary. It would have made more sense, here, to go with a more author-defined protagonist. The protagonist comes across as very earnest, a bit resentful of their parents but otherwise bland, and I feel like they could have been sketched in more sympathetically if the game had given up the idea of them being player-defined.
(Again, it seems very likely that the aim here was never to lean very hard into horror, and that it’s mainly intended as a YA Horse/Girl Story – in which case, again, still good material, but I am less-equipped to say what’d be good design under that idiom. But I think that it would be better-advised to focus less on the if of freeing the horse and more on the how of the relationship.)
Similarly, it tends to give you a lot of options in every menu (the house style frowns on choices with only two options) – but often a lot of those options are pretty similar, and a two-option choice would have been tighter. There are a lot of elements which signal a game designed around broad player choice, when that’s not really the game that the author wants to be making.
I think there are a lot of things dragging down a pretty decent story concept. For me, the prose was the toughest thing to get past. Score-wise, it’s in the 3-4 range.
These Heterogenous Tasks 