Homeward in the Roil
by Freyja Katra Erlingsdóttir
Two wars have left humanity licking its wounds. Earth is gone, its fleets becoming nomadic, searching the stars for somewhere to call home. In one of the scattered flotilla, a navy pilot meets a wanderer. Their culture and customs, still human, are foreign.
Perhaps a sign of things to come for another part of humanity.
Content Warning: gore
Credits:
written by Freyja Katra Erlingsdóttir
setting, editing, and design by Nic June
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Development log
- Homeward in the Browser!Feb 06, 2024
Comments
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Truly I hate bringing up the el classico Visual Novel debate if I'm leaving a comment/review on a visual novel. But here I think there is some warrant, because I was thinking about why this was a VN and not a short story while I was playing, not to argue it's own merit within my mind, but just out of curiosity.
Plenty of Interactive Fiction games, and VNs, lean into the strict confines of their narrative, in part in defiance of the perception they know the genre they chose to create in has.
Some try to fight it by leaning into the gamification of your choices, attributing moral score codes and the loosest or RPG systumes to the vague expanse of their looping narrative.
This game formats itself in the style of what you might expect of the latter, but still plays itself straight. The merit of making it interactive fiction comes from your choices being short, never longer than a paragraph and a stray thought. Sometimes you ask a question or remark on something that loops you back around to where you started, and sometimes the curiosity you pursue shoves you deeper into the narrative. It's conversational. It's a story between the POV charecter and the other, where it feels as if the other is always brushing your shoulder, always whispering in your ears. There a since of awe being curated when you pursue lines of thought they indulge you in, rather than moving you with them into a new scene. If this was a short story, the pacing would be short and empty, but as it is, it's captivating.
Gamer bullshit aside, this is just a damn good sci-fi short story. Is it a romance? Is it obsessed world building based on ideas of estranged natives cultures power to expand not through the recreation and rise of imperial means, but by their ability to bring other broken factions into their fold, not via meshing cultures, but through a philosophy of unity. Is it a comedy about a Voyeur star fleet captain? I don't know, it doesn't leave you enough time for certainty, but it's a VERY fun experience.
Gorgeous.
It's so gay y'all