This is a Work of Fiction

Link to game

Oh yes!  You can tell from the title and the title screen that we are dealing with an art game!  Its a puzzle art game, but its an art game nevertheless.  Hooray, yeah, jump for joy!  We have another pretentious art game!  A pretentious art game that has obscure, bullshit, puzzles too!

Ok, so, as the story goes, our friend Eli had a bunch of nonsense dumped on him in an email one day, being instructed to use as he wishes.  So he made this pretentious art game where said works of fiction fit in the game as well as a skinny dork in a bad suit and sneakers making banana daiquiris in pre-revolutionary France.

Or the line "When can the killer treasure a betting knight?" anywhere outside the Black Knight Review.

Now, I did think it was interesting that the first puzzle in the game was the title screen.  Really, to start the game you make that penguin head move click-wise.

Doesn't not look like a penguin head?

Ok, so once you've done that you get a text dump explaining the point of this game, and you go to the select your puzzle screen.

Yes I played ahead.  What kind of reviewer/critic/commentator would I be if I didn't?

So the puzzles are divided into five categories as you can see: route, river, riddle, rotary, and riot.  Each offers a corresponding puzzle, making think it's one of those games: someone's portfolio entry to show a potential employer what they can do with Adobe Flash and actionscript.

So, the puzzles in order.

Route is pretty straight forward: you draw a route out with the arrow keys to direct a ball to collect the coins on the map.  Sounds easy?  Well, the catch is that once you have all the coins, you have to direct the ball to a green spot that opens up... oh, and you can't cross where you have been before.

God dammit!

Now, fortunately, Eli was either feeling sorry for you for the horror that is Riot (more on that later) or the deadline to hand this into his teacher was looming very close because the Route puzzles actually get easier as the 'rounds' get cleared.  Or so I though, I've always had decent spacial awareness and could figure out maps.

River also has an interesting concept.  In River you have circles that produce coloured pixels and the tasks is to route them via little whirlwinds towards squares of the same colour.  The trick with this one is to align the finite amount of whirlwinds so that they fill the proper square.

Those whirlwinds are fucking bitches

This one is simple enough.  After dicking around with the whirlwinds you will be good for the next round and puzzle.

Riddle is a riddle.  I'm serious.

No shit!

Eli you lazy hack!  See what I meant earlier that this is a portfolio game or a class assignment?  "Oh look sir, I have figured out the art of parsing strings!  Give me a cookie!"  The sad thing is anyone with access to google (hint, anyone with a working internet connection, which is anyone playing this!) can cheat this if they have never heard of the overly vague riddle that was likely pulled from some riddle book somewhere.  Though looking up the answer to a well constructed riddle is like reading the walkthrough of a good point and click game: in that it invokes a "oh yeah, why didn't I think of that?" response.

Now, let me pull a River Song here (no I am not getting the picture, there have been enough references to Doctor Who for one post) and spoil the round one Riddle for you: its made of rope.

Rotary is quite an interesting concept.  You have shapes on a circle made of lines and the goal is to rotate the circle, switching out the lines as you do this, until all the shapes are the same colour.

I no lie

Now, I'd admit that I might play a puzzle game where this was it.  I mean, its enough of a brain buster that you will have to think about it, and its simple and intuitive enough that you could just pick it up.  Really, I got nothing more to say about Rotary.

Finally there's Riot.

It can go to hell!

Why?  Well, the premise of Riot is that you keep your cursor from touching the other shit flying on the screen while it turns puke green.

I get the sense that the point is to also imitate the balls as they come flying and falling, while you not touch the others, as if you do the green settles back down and you have to start over.  Believe me, its about has hard as it sounds, especially in later rounds... hard to the point of frustration.

With that aside, we get to the fiction part.  Yeah, you know, the part the game is advertising and shit?  I admit I was starting to forget about that, and you might have too from reading this.

Well, for completing a puzzle you 'unlock' a 'file' that was supposedly one of the files Eli got spammed in his inbox.  I mean, I'll start by saying that the actual 'files' are an interesting read.

Even if it gets into the realm of paranoia fuel from that silly old man in the blue box

Now, I have a question for Eli (assuming that he's reading this).  Of all the uses of these files, why did you think the best use of them was as an achievement system in a puzzle game collection?  No, I'm serious.  Now, personally if I had these files sent to me I would have likely made a point and click game using the files as cleverly constructed hints on how to proceed... but that's just me, and I'm assuming that someone actually spammed this guy with a bunch of files.  However, This is a Work of Fiction is showcasing a problem that a lot of games have, that the gameplay and story are mutally exclusive from one another.

I mean, to prove my point, if the game instead had an obnoxious achievement system like we were on XBLA or Kongragate would it make any difference to gameplay?  No, it wouldn't.  Instead we are forced to put up with gameplay to get to the story.  I might as well be reading a book or watching a video if I am doing that.

Course the music in this game is eerie, its atmosphere building, and its snuck in knocking and cracking to really make me jump out of my skin.  It also has a high turnover rate, changing itself enough that repeated loops don't go into the realm of annoying.  It also does not fit in at all in this game.

The music, by some guy named David, does fit with the writing of this files that go on about some thing called the "Influence" that has been playing with nature... seriously, how is this not good material for an adventure game?  Still, the soundtrack would have been better in a horror game, or something more fitting of the files.

Overall, this is an art game that drips with pretension.  By themselves, every element in the game is good: the puzzles are competently executed with a couple of exceptions, the music is amazing to listen to, and the files do tell an interesting story and give an air of mystery.  However, to compare it to an analogy that I used at the start of this, just picture the 'files' as pre-revolutionary France, the music as this weird skinny dork in a suit and sneakers that insists on being called the 'Doctor' and the puzzles in the game as steampunk robots.  Combined was The Man in the Fireplace, representing This is a Work of Fiction, and it sucked hard, even though it sounded awesome in principle.

Now I'm going to leave the comments to Whotards that are planning to explain to my how that didn't suck.