The Novelist Review (PC)

The Novelist is the Orthogonal Games' debut title, a relaxed adventure going by the tagline “A game about life, family, and the choices we make.” The game sets to ask one important question: can you achieve your dreams without pushing away the people you love?

Orthogonal Games is an independent and self-funded San Francisco-based studio founded by mastermind Kent Hudson. Hudson has over twelve years of experience in the gaming business, having worked on titles such as Deus Ex: Invisible War, BioShock 2 and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

The game's focus is Dan Kaplan, a struggling novelist who strives to write the most important book of his diminishing career, while at the same time having to restore the deteriorating relationship with his wife and create a meaningful one with his son.

The action starts when The Kaplans arrive to a small coastal home for the summer. The family's entire hopes and dreams are staked on their three-month sojourn at the house. Unbeknownst to them, the house is also inhabited by a ghostly presence.

Players are invited to play the role of said otherworldly resident of the house, and to manifest their influence by altering the courses of the temporary inhabitants' lives.

You can interact with the family by reading its members' thoughts, exploring their significant memories, uncovering their desires and ultimately intervening in their lives by suggesting different decisions to the father, in his sleep.

The game's plot is the novel, the wife and the child vying for the writer's attention. Based on Dan's decisions, his career and family will evolve, but as players will soon find out, there are no easy answers and everything comes at a cost.

Most traditional stories usually offer a good or bad alternative, a scenario where you either win or lose. The most unique feature about this small-scale effort is the fact that you are never right or wrong. There are just different paths leading to differing outcomes, and they each have their pros and cons that are difficult to quantify in binary dimensions.

You can become a wildly successful novelist, divorced and with an estranged son or you can devote yourself to the family life and lose the writing contract. The small scale of this game and the fact that most of the action happens off-screen, with written descriptions to fill you in, offers it this marvelous freedom as far as endings are concerned.

The gameplay is overall very relaxed, with soothing, eerie music and a visual style that seems to want to emphasize the game's focus: words, thoughts and feelings. The artwork is clearly functional and only there to deliver the text. It is not unpleasant by any means, it serves its purpose just fine, it is only reminiscent of 3D modelling software.

Your main tasks are exploring the memories of each character and inspecting various artifacts, important to each of them in a different way. After you gather enough clues, the characters reveal their desires and you choose which one to fulfill by whispering to the father in his sleep.

If you explore enough, you get the option for a compromise with one of the characters you let down. Exploring can become a little boring, going around the house seeing where someone left another note lying around, but it fits into the game idea. Pleasing others does not always offer us immediate satisfaction, but it pays off in the long run.

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Each of the characters comes with his own troubles. Dan finds himself lacking inspiration and takes up drinking again, risking to become even more detached from his family. Linda considers returning to the art world and starting to work again, but she needs her husband's support in order to make it.

Tommy struggles with learning and grows more apathetic, resenting the solitude the family has condemned him to during the summer, and losing interest in playing and drawing because he doesn't receive the attention he craves for from his father.

The game's very mundane and relatable theme is a solid choice for this experiment, as a more exotic one wouldn't probably have functioned on the same level of empathy.

Pleasing the child doesn't get dad's novel published, but seeing him become alienated and finding his drawings of the times he wishes he had with his dad scattered around the house will strike a chord and make you think twice about your next choice.

The game plays in three chapters, each of which is seasoned with certain random events, like a visit from an old friend who also happens to be a writer, the parents-in-law dropping in, getting an inheritance or a death in the family.

These events usually involve different decisions for each character, will Dan go to the book signing to gain the public attention he so desperately needs or will he take Tommy to the science fair he's been talking about all week?

The prose and voice-acting are pretty well delivered, albeit the game could have benefitted from a bit more written content.

The intermissions between chapters feature some scattered journal entries from past inhabitants, and it would have been nice if they actually led somewhere and maybe explored the origins of the mystical inhabitant you play as.

A very good thing about the game's open-ended nature is the huge replay value it affords the title. Right after you are done with it (it is a fairly short endeavor after all), you want to play it again, make some completely different choices and see where that gets the family.

Overall, this is a game for people that enjoy taking their time and experiencing a journey. Its pace is slow and it's not a place for min-maxing stats and seeking the most efficient approach. Counting the choices and dividing them equally among family members would miss the whole point of the game. The journey is more important than the destination.

The game's mechanics revolve around your choices, but hurrying about the house only worrying about progression and not immersing yourself in its world will prove to be a disappointing experience. It's like slowly sipping a rich hot tea on a winter day, the more time you allow for its flavor to tickle your taste buds and gradually warm you, the more you will get out of it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it would have been much better if there were more written material available, a greater length and a bigger random event pool. But for a one-man game that focuses on trying to be an interactive short story with multiple progression threads and multiple endings, the end result is quite good.

This game deserves support, if only for ensuring more attempts to create a different, unique experience like this will be made.