Sam Barlow's Aisle is without a doubt one of the most unusual works to hit the IF community in quite some time. In no sense is it a game; trying to "win" it is futile, and the suboptimal outcomes aren't bad choices to be avoided as such. Rather, the point is to explore the central character and take a look at the various possibilities available to him from one point in time. That said, however, it's not clear that Aisle is an entirely successful experiment.

The premise is simple: the game has one move, and it "ends" after that move and automatically sends you back to your original position. By interacting with what's around you--and by incorporating knowledge gained thereby into future moves--you learn about your own character and make sense of his various neuroses, fears, and hangups (to some degree, anyway). In the process, you get a sense--at least, I did--that your character, in this one move, is at a crossroads of sorts (or, at least, that the moment can mark a turning point, a change, if treated that way), and you take a look at where various paths might lead. In a sense, it's IF compressed--while most good IF lets the player decide how a story will come out, to some extent, but draws that input out over several dozen or hundred moves, Aisle limits the input to one turn and tells the rest of the story for you. This structure allows the author to greatly multiply the range of options available, of course.

In practice, however, Aisle can be thoroughly confusing--in part because the author both lets the player discover the PC's past and gives the PC multiple pasts to discover. The player might therefore initially assume that the key to understanding the player is piecing together his memories--but there are too many memories that are inconsistent, incapable of fitting together, to do that successfully. As a result, it's difficult to make sense of what the PC does in the present, given that he has multiple pasts which might or might not explain his actions, and the character splinters into several parts, Sybil-like. The command "think about" or "remember" gives the player access to the PC's past, which is handy--but the significance of the events recalled is largely a matter of interpretation.

Though this may be a product of the assumptions built into most IF (i.e., polite conversations are rare), it also seemed that most of the PC's options at this moment in time are profoundly antisocial; many involve violence, many of the other options are simply bizarre, and your character often treats apparently normal conversational gambits as an excuse to act psychotic. All this has its place, of course--the PC is supposed to be unhappy and under stress--but it does make Aisle a bit tedious after a while, when the options for civilized behavior run out.

On the other hand, many of Aisle's outcomes are quite effective on an emotional level, product of antisocial behavior or not; there is a strong sense in many of the scenarios that the PC doesn't really know why he does what he does. (Which, of course, puts him in the same boat as the player.) Whether intended this way or not, it's an intriguing take on the player-PC relationship in works of IF, since the player is free to tell the PC to do irrational, bizarre, or suicidal things--but here the consequences of those irrational actions, and their effect on the PC, are played out again and again. Thus, as unattractive as the PC occasionally seems, it's hard to entirely lose one's sympathies for him. Since most of the story revolves around the PC's emotions, the player's reaction to the PC determines her reaction to the story as a whole, however--and it should also be noted that the repetitive nature of the game, and the sameness of most of the outcomes, may tax the patience of the player and erode her sympathy for the hapless antisocial PC.

The writing, on the whole, is strong--memories come back to the PC in jumbled, scattered fragments that force the player to cobble together the story (or one of the stories), and the fragments--a pasta meal, a waiter, an accident--are vividly rendered, with striking images to carry them along. (It would spoil the game, however, to reveal what the images are.) The technical aspect, though obviously very simplified, is likewise well done; most actions, logical and illogical, are provided for, and those that aren't generally are omitted for a good reason.

It's difficult to say, in the final analysis, what Aisle is setting out to do. If the point was simply to experiment with the classical IF form, this was clearly a successful effort. But the introspective nature of the game leads one to believe that the point is to portray a character and paint his emotional portrait, and the effectiveness of that aim turns on the player's reaction. For those who don't care for the PC or for his behavior, Aisle gets old fast, and there isn't much flexibility for the player to try to send the PC in different directions or otherwise change his ways. The lack of any sort of cathartic finale also means that the story always feels incomplete: the player is likely to try a series of options, eventually conclude there is nothing more to see, and quit, with no particularly resonant ending to make the whole thing more emotionally satisfying.

Aisle is an interesting idea that has its moments, and it's worth a look for anyone interested in the theory of IF. Its effectiveness depends on whether it makes an emotional impact, however, and without such an impact, it's a dreary experience at best.