Strange Gaming Diaries: Serre, by insertdisc5

truth be told, I haven't played very many visual novels! my experience with narrative-heavy games has historically erred more on the side of first-person walkarounds and rpg maker stuff. I've always admired the genre from a distance, though, so when I saw one that featured a cute human girl and an alien big enough to kill me instantly who's also a cute girl, I knew I just couldn't stay away any longer!

serre is a simple, short, and sweet little story. it only takes about half an hour at most to read through, and it's not exactly trying to revolutionize the medium here! but it manages to remain an enticing read from start to finish, and I think the tightness and brevity of its narrative flow is to the game's credit with how good it is at explaining a lot using a little.

arlette, for instance, is very quickly characterized as repressed, subdued, and generally being a tightly-packed ball of emotions with some sort of nasty trauma clouding her thoughts, flipping back and forth between strained attempts at decorum and bouts of unregulated emotion. with how much time she seems to spend in her greenhouse and how willing she is to escape the planet with oaxa at the end, there's even an implicit message that arlette is someone who's given up on life altogether. that's a lot to pack into this one character, and I'm impressed with how much is there!

honestly, what struck me the most about her dynamic with oaxa is that between the two of them, it's the human that ends up being the more mysterious and aloof one, while oaxa is basically a desperately attention-starved puppygirl in the form of an eight-foot tall arthropoid knockout.

in fact, I found myself remarking that it seemed a little bit curious how arlette's eyes are flat, greyish scribbles while oaxa gets much more expressive and lively looking eyes. maybe it was just to compensate for the lack of mouth with which to express, but it made the abovementioned dynamic even stronger in my mind. food for thought!

putting so much into such a small box does, of course, come with a lingering feeling of wishing there was more room for all of these character elements to shine through. this feels very much like the prologue to a bigger story, and it has the sense to keep its ending open-ended enough to gesture towards the long and surely very exciting life these two are going to share together...but along with that, there's a feeling that this is just the first of many troubles they're going to face together, both with the world around them and also between themselves. there's a lot of extremely interesting setup, but not much resolution, y'know?

still, the story made me giggle and grin like an idiot nearly the whole way through, so I can't say it isn't doing what it set out to do very well. in particular, I really enjoy the way the writing plays with using all-caps and removal of punctuation as signifiers of tone—seeing "WHAT???" as a line of dialogue has a very different mood from "WHAT", after all! at points, it's almost written in a way that takes more cues from text chats than traditional prose, which I think is very smart and something more authors should experiment with!

anyway, final thoughts: serre good game, I could fix arlette and I could make oaxa worse

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