You play Terry, in rehab for nicotine addiction, and the game switches back and forth between Terry's conscious mind in the rehab ward and--well, it's hard to say, really. You move through a series of five "fits" that deal with one aspect or another of Terry's mind or experiences, both discovering and setting right (in some cases) the neuroses and repressions of his life. This duality sometimes makes things rather complicated: when the fits delve into Terry's past, the game wants to present (in heavily symbolic terms) the events that have stunted or altered Terry's development, but also provide you, the player, a means of undoing those events (also in symbolic terms), leading to some fairly tortured plot sequences. One fit depicts your run-in with some "faeries," a reasonably obvious stand-in for your imaginative/creative side (at least, I thought so), and, in rapid succession, the maturation of that imaginative self, its disruption/negation by an outside force that threatens Terry's freedom, and the overcoming of that outside force and reliberation of the imagination. Whew. Bring a scorecard if you want to keep track of the plot, because there's lots of it and it happens on several levels.

As a game, Deeper Meanings aside, Losing Your Grip is reasonably successful--there are many challenging puzzles, and they make sense, for the most part, in terms of the plot. There are, however, many and varied ways to close off the game, including some "planning ahead" measures that require considerable foresight. Notably, the way you transport objects between fits, though clever and even logical on the game's terms, requires that the player anticipate what the game is trying to do--not at all likely within the first fit, when the structure of the game still hasn't become clear. On two occasions, choices you make send the game down one of two entirely separate paths (which rejoin later), which enhances the game's replayability --and at other times, there are multiple independent solutions to problems or reactions to stimuli that shape what you make of your character. Generally, these choices aren't between right and wrong as such, though some have certain moral dimensions; they don't decide whether the plot will continue, merely the nature of what ensues. There is one section that devolves into sheer mathematical puzzle-fest, not inconsistently with the plot but frustrating nonetheless.

Perhaps the most successful part of Grip is the first fit, in which Terry explores his own mind, thinly veiled as a majestic marble building. Terry confronts his memories, allegorized into a pile of spheres that a fellow named Frankie--Terry's powers of introspection, perhaps--is engaged in counting and categorizing; the parallel to the process that Terry is undergoing is clear and intriguing. Terry then reactivates, reopens for examination, various areas of his life that he had neglected, and deals with the resulting tide of guilt and anger (in a way that violates the allegory a bit, but let's not get picky)--and also manages to avert the complete breakdown (or death, perhaps?) that had been expected. But the author is not so concerned with hurling symbolism at us that he neglects to make sense of the ostensible action, fortunately, and the individual scenes in Grip are enjoyable simply for their playability and writing. But the depth of the insight that Terry achieves--in realizing how the negative emotions have tainted and darkened his memories, and how he needs to open up long-closed areas of his mind--give the first fit remarkable power. In that light, the limitedness of its effects on the remainder of the plot--whether you succeed or fail at a certain task, most importantly--feels analytically wrong; it seems like failing to get Terry's emotional house in order should preclude further introspection. (As in, the plot continues on the same course and you reach the same ending, which doesn't feel right.)

The ending of Grip, while logical enough, brings up a certain point, not confined to this particular game but certainly relevant: increasingly, rather than giving the player the magic McGuffin or letting him ride into the sunset, authors end games on an ambiguous note: there's a conclusion of sorts, but it's not an unmitigated triumph, and there's no satisfying "You have won." The Zarfian ending, for want of a better term, is a welcome innovation, certainly--it makes us think about what we've done--but please, all you Zarfians, signify somehow that the player's _finished_ the thing, done all he or she is supposed to do.(An "afterword" from the author, or an "amusing" section, or something like that.) Particularly in games like Grip, where it's not at all hard to finish the game without earning all the points, reading an ambiguous ending just convinced me that I'd missed something and sent me back to solve puzzles that weren't meant to be solve. Enhancing replay value is one thing, but confusing the player about when enough is enough is another. (I should note, of course, that Grip does have substantial replay value, in the separate paths and in the intrigue of figuring out what everything means. I just wanted to know when I was done.)

Where was I? Oh, right. One of the nicest things about Grip is simply that it hangs together well: the reappearances of the dark side that you struggle with, the veiled conflict with Terry's father, and the ways you drift back and forth between reality and memory/introspection make a remarkably coherent whole, or so I found it. Once the player picks up on the structure of the game (which takes a while) and the significance of the recurring parts, the seemingly unrelated sequences start to come together. Once I understood that the point of revisiting past periods of Terry's life was to overcome the negative associations he had attached to them, figuring out how to do it felt more rewarding, though it's certainly possible to finish the scene without thinking in those terms. Perhaps it was just that I appreciated and agreed with the underlying message (or at least the philosophy behind it), that Terry's anger at his father is misplaced and ultimately destructive, but I found that, certain blips aside, the plot both made sense and rewarded careful analysis--a rare combination. To that end, though, I was a bit puzzled that an apparent choice between giving up that anger and acting on it didn't affect the overall course of the game--again, you end up in the same place with the same text.

I certainly don't claim to understand everything that the author was driving at in Grip; there are many parts of the game whose significance isn't clear to me, and may well remain that way. But I enjoyed the parts of it that I thought I understood, and it kept me interested enough to play through and think about in order to make sense of the rest, no small feat for a full-length game. As both game and story by symbolism, Losing Your Grip deserves praise.