Rameses is a tale of adolescence, which, for those who remember last year's A Moment of Hope, isn't necessarily a good sign; making the trials of adolescence compelling to those of us who are no longer in that stage is not easy. But Rameses manages to find the balance between turning the trials in question into melodrama (by exaggerating them) and making them too trivial to be compelling. Specifically, you're a teenager at a boarding school, enduring your two unpleasant roommates and your own homesickness, or something akin to it--and the roommates aren't monsters, they're just obnoxious. Nor is your character a misunderstood saint--he's flawed in many respects. The protagonist manages to elicit the player's sympathy despite (or perhaps because of) the game's refusal to demand such sympathy.
How? Several ways. First, much of Rameses consists of conversation (in a menu format)--and for long stretches of the conversation, your character's head is bursting with things to say (as evidenced by the menu), and yet he never says any of the things. There are always explanations, of course, some of them plausible--nasty insults are withdrawn with something akin to "You'd rather not start a fight right now"--but what emerges is a striking portrait of frustration, of a bottled-up character. It's not, exactly, that he's bottled up by circumstances, by the Awful Consequences Of His Oppressive Life; that would push it into melodrama, and this isn't melodramatic. It's more a picture of a highly inarticulate character whose fear of expressing himself borders on the neurotic, and drawing out that inarticulateness by trying a range of conversational options (from the polite to the highly antisocial), only to have the character reject all of them, is a nicely done depiction of the character. (It's not exactly inarticulateness--what's in your head is often quite well put--it's more a fear of expressing oneself, for which there's no concise term that I know. So I'm calling it inarticulateness.)
There's more to the character than unwillingness to talk, though--there's also a healthy dollop of insecurity. A date of sorts is imminent, and your character is terrified and would like nothing more than to get out of it--he simply doesn't feel ready for that particular aspect of adolescence. Most of that particular hangup is captured in a monologue, but the date itself brings it alive as well: you're with two girls, and you're at a loss, for turn after turn, for anything to say to them. The few things you do manage to come up with only highlight the general futility of the exercise. If there's a better way to make an IF player feel frustrated and inarticulate than giving him TALK TO as a conversation option and consistently giving him no menu options, I can't imagine what it would be. In those respects, then, preventing the player from interacting is one of the story's greatest accomplishments.
Equally effective for different reasons is the portrayal of the protagonist's relationship with a boyhood friend named Daniel, a relationship left behind in the trip to boarding school. The friendship seems to represent for the protagonist a more secure and less intimidating world. In particular, the protagonist appears to have been able to communicate with Daniel easily, naturally, and the interactions depicted (in the PC's memory) stand in contrast to the rest of his interactions, most of which amount to awkward mumbling. Naturally, however, one of the PC's main frustrations is that he's received a letter from Daniel, and he can't seem to put the words together to respond:
God, I tried so often to write that letter. Practically every night I would stare at a page that was blank except for the words "Dear Daniel" at the top. I just couldn't think of anything to say. "Just be yourself," I kept thinking, "And write down whatever comes into your head." But nothing came into my head. A few weeks passed, and I still hadn't written a reply. And then I couldn't think of any excuses for my lateness. The longer it went on, the more ashamed I became about the delay, and the harder it was to write. I must have read and re-read Daniel's letter fifty times, looking for inspiration. I still have that letter. I still haven't replied.The writing, here and elsewhere, is unspectacular but effective--too elegant or too creative turns of phrase would cast the PC's professed inability to express himself in a strange light. One particularly well done passage conveys the PC's sudden mood swing:
Quay Everything here is so peaceful, so beautiful - why have I never noticed it before? Raindrops dance on the river bay beneath my feet. Seagulls play in the air above me. Old fishing boats sway gently with the lapping of the water. And the air - I always thought the salt air was foul before, but now it seems so fresh, so clean, so pure! Quay The quay must be the most miserable place in the whole town, especially when the rain is pissing down like it is now. Beneath my feet, the rain-pelted river flows like sludge, which probably has something to do with all the raw effluent that's pumped into it. The smell, needless to say, is truly nauseating. A handful of rusty old boats lie abandoned against the quay wall, and seagulls scream overhead.The first passage might seem saccharine out of context, but it works as a contrast with the PC's generally gloomy outlook, and the second passage likewise works as a return to the status quo. The game is well-written enough that painful moments for the PC aren't painful to read, hardly a given.
To add to the feeling of impotence, there's a scene in which two of his three roommates are picking on the third, and the PC (despite the player's urgings, of course) fails to step in, lamely explaining (internally) that "it's no use." Here, there's a variant on the nonconversational theme--your character will speak up, but only to say things that make things even worse (joining in the mockery of the third roommate, in other words)--and after the scene is over the PC addresses the player directly, explaining that the roommate's gratitude would have been too great a burden to bear. The scene brings out the ramifications of the PC's repressed nature--by not saying anything he hurts others as well as himself--and prevents the player from feeling too much sympathy for the PC. Nor does the player feel particularly complicit in the PC's cowardice, since the player can try all he or she wants to help out the hapless third roommate; the game trades complicity for imprisonment in the PC's neuroses. Whether it's a good trade is, of course, a matter of taste.
Most of the action, such as it is, in Rameses is internal to the character, and even then very little of it actually constitutes action--in a sense, the player spends most of the game getting to know the PC, and the only significant thing that happens, as far as the PC is concerned, comes at the very end. Moreover, there's virtually no deviation possible in the course of the game; replays can provide more information, in the form of conversation (or non-conversation) options that weren't exercised before or people that weren't EXAMINEd, but not a tremendous amount, and the course of the story won't change at all. As mentioned, that usually indicates to me that the story would work better as static fiction--but the tension between player and PC sets up its own kind of interaction that makes this a surprisingly successful game.
Rameses is certainly not to everyone's tastes; there are no puzzles, and the experience of playing it is more frustrating than fulfilling. But it's a sufficiently clever experiment that I gave it a 9 in this year's competition.