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.

---

Try asking Galatea about yourself several times.

What makes Colossal Cave Adventure interesting to this day is its own limitations. It's a rickety little game, accepting few inputs as valid. It's often frustrating to convince the game to do what you want it to do. And in being a game entirely in text, the labyrinthine geometry of the caves can be incredibly difficult to envision.

But it is because of these limitations, not in spite of them, that the game is able to capture your imagination. The arcane black box of its outputs makes you constantly wonder just what is possible in the world of this game. The ever-perplexing caves seem fantastical and sometimes impossible, wandering blindly through a maze that seems to elude your understanding. The things that produce these feelings are limitations, and by modern standards would be considered failures. And I can't say I had a lot of fun playing Colossal Cave Adventure. But these feelings are palpable and memorable, and represent a potency in text adventures that makes me want to keep exploring.

Colossal Cave Adventure's own limitations create a vast negative space in which players can fill with imagination and mystery. That's a kind of magic that we should harness more in games.

A much more focused, solid and satisfying experience than the base game.

I've never been much of a Zero Dawn fan even after loving some of the key elements of the game and most of all praising the intent to define an original concept with fun and deep twists to both visual design and gameplay; having said that, the game extended too much, the balance between the two plots that are ocurring at the same time are unbalanced in quality and even worse the animation and care put on cutscenes and general dialogue is subpar and detracts so much from the whole that I ended up, except for a couple of moments, not feeling what at the beginning was an intriguing and potentially entertaining story.

Frozen Wilds solves this by being just an expansion, which means less content with more polish, less characters but better defined, and the necessary additions to an already fantastic core gameplay that rejuvenates the later arc of the game into a potential look into the future, one with a dna of its own that doesn't fight with it's own nature as a AAA title with massive scope.

I hope Forbidden West learns its lessons and this is just the beginning of Horizon defining itself as a saga as refreshing and fun as its own best concepts.