a few months ago, somewhere, i read about an IF game made by a woman that had either a striking cover art or an unforgettable name. last week i started thinking about this game and searching for it relentlessly on myabandonware.com, to no avail. all i could remember was it being very personal and cryptic.
a few days ago i made a post on r/tipofmytongue searching for the game with the most details i could think of, and the first reply was from a VERY helpful person (really, the dude showed up like 10 minutes after i made the post) who sent me a link to the IFDB and mentioned the most active IF writer in the time period i mentioned-- Emily Short.

i'm still not quite sure if Galatea was that game, because a few details don't add up. i tend to have a good memory, but i'm terrible with names. still, i went in and played it.

i don't think there's much i can say that hasn't already been said in those other reviews here. in fact, i'm exactly in between them. i find the game's limited and limiting reality to be quite compelling, but underwhelming at the same time. there's not a lot i managed to talk about with Galatea and the endings i got were rushed and came in faster than i wanted. i didn't have any meaningful conversations with her and the biggest reason is probably the protagonist.

the mere fact that we have a protagonist who's not the player, but actually a nameless critic, bothers me a lot. i hate him, he seems like a snubby guy with not a lot of real problems. he talks about his family but most of it is left to narration.

Galatea also doesn't seem to have a lot to talk about (or the more realistic option: skill issue), with most replies i got being about the artist, and i'm gonna be real, i don't care about the artist. i want to know about Galatea, her opinions on art, her favorite things, her sense of humour... and i know this probably couldn't have been done at the time by just one person, but doesn't change the fact that it's underwhelming.


overall i must say i really liked the concept of Galatea and the idea that it exists, but the game itself is more of a proof of concept than anything else.

AND NOW TO THE ACTION BUTTON STYLE BOTTOM LINE:

"Galatea is the grandparent of the Doki Doki Literature Club 'Monika After Story' mod".

To an extent I can appreciate Galatea for its search for an NPC with more presence than usual in videogames in general and in text adventures in particular. If there is one thing I’ll never get tired of is people experimenting with IAs, especially when it is more about trying new models than raw technological power.

And yeah, you never know exactly how Galatea is and the conversations are equally blurred enough to not be able to really move anything exactly in the direction you want. My main concern is in not being able to properly develop any of its themes. In a way I guess having multiple big thematic ideas as well as various dozens of endings going around was just the perfect match for the game, but in my playthroughs none of them got into anything interesting. Probably much of it has to do with a writing that doesn’t stand up enough by itself.

In one of the conversations the main character ended up talking with Galatea about their family, their sister, and crying with her reaching through a connection beyond the cold relation of a visitor and a museum piece. The problem? It got out in a few lines (which can be fine if done well) and honestly didn’t feel to me that neither the main character nor Galatea had any kind of confidence, trust or just feeling between them yet for the talk to end up that way. It makes me wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to reduce all the possible ramifications to have a more focused development, in particular when reaching near the personal areas, probably the most interesting aspects of the dialogues. I know that Emily Short herself has already reckoned that this is no perfect game by any means, especially as more games and years passed by. And in a similar way, I appreciate Galatea in some ways, but the words weren’t enough to make me want to visit again.

I want to come back to Galatea several times in the future, as it feels like there's enough meat here to last forever. I reached several endings, one of which I found some kind of satisfaction in, but I know there's many more. I looked into others talking about it and there was so much that it felt like they were talking about a different piece entirely. This game is entirely one conversation, and an incredibly deep and long one at that. That said, the parser has its limits. For the most part, all I can do are ask and tell about concepts, which feels reductive and adds a degree of artificiality that the brilliant writing can't seem to escape.

I live for conversations in games. My favorite kind of power fantasy is one of social competence, of using words and expressing emotions so effectively that I can learn about and help every decent person I meet. Normally the amount I can satisfy this fantasy comes down to technical competence and the interest a game has in deep conversation: either the conversations are sufficiently deep to give me that reward, or they aren't. There's no doubt that the conversation that makes up Galatea is deep...it's probably the most involved one I've ever encountered in games / IF, but it doesn't give me that satisfaction. Or rather, it does give me that satisfaction, but it also makes me examine what I'm actually feeling there.

I don't feel empowered by speaking to Galatea and I don't feel kind either. I feel invasive. I feel disrespectful. I feel like an emotional tourist. In the wake of Undertale, the last few years of games have been marked by much greater interest in the player and their pleasures and motivations. What's so compelling about this much earlier example of that interest is that it tries to tackle speech, a mechanic where the real-life counterpart is infinitely complicated and no model can capture the entirety of how it functions. Developers have largely given up, letting conversation be deep and branching and rewarding, but never natural.

Whereas Undertale emotionally punishes players for mindlessly and unfeelingly following the trail of content for the sake of completion, Galatea does the same with your own curiosity. Making conversational missteps feels awful and changes where that conversation can even go. When asking about mundane aspects of her life, you get the feeling that you're the gawker, you're just interacting with Galatea as a piece of art, as an exhibit in the gallery. When asking about something sensitive, you've got to balance your desire to know with the potential to hurt her, but also with the possibility for a therapeudic talk. These are the complexities that make real life conversation hard, the walls that keep us from fully understanding and hearing out the people around us. Conversation is risky, and I've never seen that mirrored in any interactive art other than this. This is a model for conversation that does not rely on exhausting every possible speech option, a revolutionary shift of focus on its own.

Shit, this is just begging for a feminist reading. The interactivity of games and especially interactive fiction goes far beyond the issues of, say, voyeurism in film. Yes, there is watching and all the complex politics that come along with that: Galatea is presented as a statue in a gallery. We're invited to look at and speak to her because she is an object of interest, a novelty. The politics of looking are ever-present. But interactivity adds layer upon layer upon layer to the complexity of where the player gets enjoyment. Teach someone to play parser games, and you'll quickly see the delight in invasion and free choice come out in obscene ways: TOUCH this character, KISS that character, FUCK another one. Parser-based IF has long been better than graphical games at showing consequences of these actions (or not allowing the player to do them and scolding them with their subconscious), but we are absolutely forced to engage with these questions in this piece.

The parser here is simple, with the HELP command explicitly stating that the vast majority of commands have been disabled, what's left being sensory commands, commands of physical touch, TELL, and ASK. What do I do if I want to give Galatea a hug and comfort her? ASKing doesn't produce a relevant result. Modifiers are rare. My choices are to HUG her or not to. To KISS (and where to kiss) or not to. The tools I'm given are limiting. The tools games give us are always limiting.

Point is, you feel gross. Looking feels gross. Prying feels gross. Touching feels gross. Comforting feels gross. Is there any way for me, as a player, to interact with this woman in a way that isn't broken on some level, that isn't generating pleasure through the power imbalance of me being a human being and her being a program with a particular sequence of commands which make her spill some feeling or fact about her life? I don't think there is. By being one of the purest conversation simulations in a game, Galatea justifies the relative simplicity and abstraction in typical game speech systems. No matter how much care is taken to be respectful and give a character agency, they are part of a computer program. No matter what we do, the player is extracting pleasure from their position of power over the NPCs around them. All we can do is make ourselves aware of this dynamic, and go back to our simplified Fallout conversations...and take a little more care not fall into the trap of exhausting a list of options.

I dunno, my thoughts are so scattered. There's SO much going on here. It's mind-boggling.

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Try asking Galatea about yourself several times.