DISGUSTING INSECTS,
Beckett is the first visual novel i've ever read where the characters (intentionally) don't matter.
It's important to take a step back and realize just how momentous that statement is. The idea of characters not mattering might sound initially like a bad thing -- after all, wouldn't badly-written characters make for a badly written story? And you're right, most of the time, due to the typical focus of visual novels. The vast majority of visual novels, from Subahibi to Steins;Gate, Flowers to Fata Morgana, are character studies. The writing revolves around a group of characters, most if not all attention is dedicated towards the development and experiences of said characters, and progression of the visual novel is measured by the change in the characters, their lives, and their behaviors.
And to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. Linear, character-driven stories are great, especially if executed well. Indeed, three of those stories sit in my current top 5.
Yet, it is because of the prevalence of the character-driven, linear narrative in visual novels that something like Beckett stands out. Drawing inspirations from Kafka, Lynch, Burroughs, the Dadaist art movement, the Theatre of the Absurd, and...well, Samuel Beckett, you delve into the perspective of the eponymous main character, an investigator who has been forced to take on a case in search of a missing son. Except, you quickly learn the son is not the point of this game -- in fact, he barely gets mentioned at all. Nor is Beckett himself all that important, as he really only acts as a vessel, a pair of eyes to look at material, space, and time.
No, the true focus of this "visual novel", and where the majority of the writing goes, is to the world. And what an utterly unique, horrifying, bizarre, fascinating, and imaginative world it is! A giant fly covering half the computer screen, standing upon a grainy wooden table with one wing tucked under a copy of airport kiosk genre-fiction. A large, pearl-white toilet with the seat half open, interspersed with snippets of old New York Times front covers and a Polaroid picture of a medication bottle tipped over, and which on top rests a collection of seashells darkened and arranged to resemble spilt blood. The brobdingnagian Self, our fellow Beckett, staring at artifacts of its own ephermality sub specie aeternitatis, burning the ink away from the limestone. Old clips of public-domain movies, cut-up and directed to compose a cacophony of sounds and textures, where every word is a rhythm and Beckett, poor Beckett, the miserable and unwilling conductor. Beckett oozes with stylistic fleur-de-sel that seasons every single inch of the computer screen, and its Dada-inspired aesthetic vision is so striking that, in spite of the prevalence of an entire category of indie, 90's-inspired multimedia video games (as well as multimedia video games from the 90's themselves), Beckett never feels derivative. Playing Beckett feels like walking into a time capsule to 1920's Brooklyn or Berlin, where the modernist movement was in full swing at underground venues, coffee shops, artist collectives, and major museums. Even the music and sound design, something I rarely mention in my reviews (not least because I have terrible music taste), is wholly unique and atypical, like using Rite of Spring when everyone else uses Beethoven. Yeah, none of the characters might have any development at all, and the motivations and perspectives of said characters might be excessively vague, but when the world itself is this realized and well-developed, does it really matter?
It doesn't. It really doesn't. And it's a great thing that it doesn't, because the writing itself...is decidedly sophomoric. Most of the time, when I critique writing in visual novels, it is usually over purple prose that goes very much in-depth, and which ends up feeling awful to actually read and analyze despite being narratively and thematically interesting. Beckett has the opposite issue. The developers seemed to focus on tone and texture over actual depth and focus, resulting in very pretty and flowy sentences that in the end don't mean anything. And while it nails the literary style of its inspirations, even going so far as to be the only game in recent memory to use Burrough's "cut-up" technique as an integral part of the overall narrative, it fundamentally misses what makes its inspirations such enduring classics in the first place. The brilliance of Naked Lunch isn't in the cut-up technique -- the cut-up technique is unique, but it's not what makes Naked Lunch such a seminal work. The brilliance of Waiting for Godot isn't in the setpieces or the "anti-narrative" narrative style it employs, striking as they are. The brilliance of David Lynch films isn't in the surreal cinematography, although that's where the term Lynchian comes from. Beckett, however, thinks so. Beckett misinterprets the surface-level novelties of its inspirations as their literary heartbeats, resulting in paragraphs sometimes antithetical to the works they were derived from. Beckett has plenty of literary gimmicks and party tricks, yet beneath that shiny facade lies a narrative as shallow, superficial, and decaying as the world that Beckett is trying to critique.
I would be remiss if I didn't briefly talk about the voice acting before closing this review, consisting mainly of two characters: air-polluted throat-threat-cough Beckett, and the silent entropy of the world. Both enact stellar performances: Bronchitis Beckett's unique voice and sound -- and yes, cough -- perfectly matches the tone and vision of the story and the world, while the world itself and its unending, unnatural silence aside from the occasional flip of a page or splatter of a crawling beetle revels in the artificiality and mundanity of it all.
WE ARE NOT HERE ON OUR OWN VOLITION
Beckett, at its heart, is an artistic experiment, of the sort that we rarely see in modern gaming. It's unconventional, ambitious, earnest, and fiercely creative. Of course, artistic experiments don't always work out, and while the amazing moments in Beckett shine. there are many glaring mistakes -- particularly in its writing -- that makes it extremely hard to recommend as an actual game, especially to anyone not deeply concerned with games as a work of art. Yet, it is in these uneven, rough, and sometimes failed artistic experiments, from [domestic] to _______ to Gravity Bone to A God Who Lives In Your Head to Beckett, that gaming as an artform can progress.
I would never envision myself playing Beckett more than once, but frankly, I don't need to. Like the taste of Marmite, Beckett is a radically unique and different experience to anything out there, and whether you love it or you hate it, it's unforgettable.
Beckett is you. Beckett is I. Beckett is cut-up nightmare, massacre of emotion, the individual against society, entropy of life, inevitability of death, the mundane as art, a readymade Duchamp-esque sense of stillness juxtaposed against the distorted English on the paper machine. Beckett is humanity at its most surreal, its most miserable, its most Kafkaesque, its most orderly, and its most nightmarish.
Beckett is us.
We are Beckett, and lest we forget, we repeat.
GOODBYE
Beckett is the first visual novel i've ever read where the characters (intentionally) don't matter.
It's important to take a step back and realize just how momentous that statement is. The idea of characters not mattering might sound initially like a bad thing -- after all, wouldn't badly-written characters make for a badly written story? And you're right, most of the time, due to the typical focus of visual novels. The vast majority of visual novels, from Subahibi to Steins;Gate, Flowers to Fata Morgana, are character studies. The writing revolves around a group of characters, most if not all attention is dedicated towards the development and experiences of said characters, and progression of the visual novel is measured by the change in the characters, their lives, and their behaviors.
And to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. Linear, character-driven stories are great, especially if executed well. Indeed, three of those stories sit in my current top 5.
Yet, it is because of the prevalence of the character-driven, linear narrative in visual novels that something like Beckett stands out. Drawing inspirations from Kafka, Lynch, Burroughs, the Dadaist art movement, the Theatre of the Absurd, and...well, Samuel Beckett, you delve into the perspective of the eponymous main character, an investigator who has been forced to take on a case in search of a missing son. Except, you quickly learn the son is not the point of this game -- in fact, he barely gets mentioned at all. Nor is Beckett himself all that important, as he really only acts as a vessel, a pair of eyes to look at material, space, and time.
No, the true focus of this "visual novel", and where the majority of the writing goes, is to the world. And what an utterly unique, horrifying, bizarre, fascinating, and imaginative world it is! A giant fly covering half the computer screen, standing upon a grainy wooden table with one wing tucked under a copy of airport kiosk genre-fiction. A large, pearl-white toilet with the seat half open, interspersed with snippets of old New York Times front covers and a Polaroid picture of a medication bottle tipped over, and which on top rests a collection of seashells darkened and arranged to resemble spilt blood. The brobdingnagian Self, our fellow Beckett, staring at artifacts of its own ephermality sub specie aeternitatis, burning the ink away from the limestone. Old clips of public-domain movies, cut-up and directed to compose a cacophony of sounds and textures, where every word is a rhythm and Beckett, poor Beckett, the miserable and unwilling conductor. Beckett oozes with stylistic fleur-de-sel that seasons every single inch of the computer screen, and its Dada-inspired aesthetic vision is so striking that, in spite of the prevalence of an entire category of indie, 90's-inspired multimedia video games (as well as multimedia video games from the 90's themselves), Beckett never feels derivative. Playing Beckett feels like walking into a time capsule to 1920's Brooklyn or Berlin, where the modernist movement was in full swing at underground venues, coffee shops, artist collectives, and major museums. Even the music and sound design, something I rarely mention in my reviews (not least because I have terrible music taste), is wholly unique and atypical, like using Rite of Spring when everyone else uses Beethoven. Yeah, none of the characters might have any development at all, and the motivations and perspectives of said characters might be excessively vague, but when the world itself is this realized and well-developed, does it really matter?
It doesn't. It really doesn't. And it's a great thing that it doesn't, because the writing itself...is decidedly sophomoric. Most of the time, when I critique writing in visual novels, it is usually over purple prose that goes very much in-depth, and which ends up feeling awful to actually read and analyze despite being narratively and thematically interesting. Beckett has the opposite issue. The developers seemed to focus on tone and texture over actual depth and focus, resulting in very pretty and flowy sentences that in the end don't mean anything. And while it nails the literary style of its inspirations, even going so far as to be the only game in recent memory to use Burrough's "cut-up" technique as an integral part of the overall narrative, it fundamentally misses what makes its inspirations such enduring classics in the first place. The brilliance of Naked Lunch isn't in the cut-up technique -- the cut-up technique is unique, but it's not what makes Naked Lunch such a seminal work. The brilliance of Waiting for Godot isn't in the setpieces or the "anti-narrative" narrative style it employs, striking as they are. The brilliance of David Lynch films isn't in the surreal cinematography, although that's where the term Lynchian comes from. Beckett, however, thinks so. Beckett misinterprets the surface-level novelties of its inspirations as their literary heartbeats, resulting in paragraphs sometimes antithetical to the works they were derived from. Beckett has plenty of literary gimmicks and party tricks, yet beneath that shiny facade lies a narrative as shallow, superficial, and decaying as the world that Beckett is trying to critique.
I would be remiss if I didn't briefly talk about the voice acting before closing this review, consisting mainly of two characters: air-polluted throat-threat-cough Beckett, and the silent entropy of the world. Both enact stellar performances: Bronchitis Beckett's unique voice and sound -- and yes, cough -- perfectly matches the tone and vision of the story and the world, while the world itself and its unending, unnatural silence aside from the occasional flip of a page or splatter of a crawling beetle revels in the artificiality and mundanity of it all.
WE ARE NOT HERE ON OUR OWN VOLITION
Beckett, at its heart, is an artistic experiment, of the sort that we rarely see in modern gaming. It's unconventional, ambitious, earnest, and fiercely creative. Of course, artistic experiments don't always work out, and while the amazing moments in Beckett shine. there are many glaring mistakes -- particularly in its writing -- that makes it extremely hard to recommend as an actual game, especially to anyone not deeply concerned with games as a work of art. Yet, it is in these uneven, rough, and sometimes failed artistic experiments, from [domestic] to _______ to Gravity Bone to A God Who Lives In Your Head to Beckett, that gaming as an artform can progress.
I would never envision myself playing Beckett more than once, but frankly, I don't need to. Like the taste of Marmite, Beckett is a radically unique and different experience to anything out there, and whether you love it or you hate it, it's unforgettable.
Beckett is you. Beckett is I. Beckett is cut-up nightmare, massacre of emotion, the individual against society, entropy of life, inevitability of death, the mundane as art, a readymade Duchamp-esque sense of stillness juxtaposed against the distorted English on the paper machine. Beckett is humanity at its most surreal, its most miserable, its most Kafkaesque, its most orderly, and its most nightmarish.
Beckett is us.
We are Beckett, and lest we forget, we repeat.
GOODBYE