The Novelist - Full Review (PC game)

How do you balance the pressures of your struggling career with the responsibilities that come with family life? A marriage that's falling apart, a child who's failing at school, a writer who needs time to finish his book before it's too late and an artist who's trying to reignite her career. The Novelist puts you in the role of a guide as you try and steer a family that's fraying at the seams to make the right decisions but, ultimately, can you live with the consequences of your decisions? 

The Novelist is a dynamic indie title whose storyline develops around the decisions made by the player and which strongly encourages empathy, compromise and living with the consequences of your decisions. The game is confined to a holiday home in a scenic area of beaches and woodlands though the time of day and year changes as the storyline progresses. The story is centred on the family who is current staying in this holiday home; a father, Dan, mother, Linda, and their son, Tommy. Dan is a struggling novelist, Linda is trying to reignite her painting career and Tommy needs help with his reading and writing. But things are never that simple as, in the short week they have together, tough decisions will need to be made about who gets priority and what the consequences of neglecting the needs of others may be. Dan and Linda are not only having trouble with their careers; they’re having trouble with their marriage too, by focusing too much on his book Dan risks cutting off his family but, by ignoring it, can we count on Linda to bring money to the table? You play a spirit who has lived in this house for quite a long time and, watching the Kaplans, you have the power to read their minds, visit their memories and encourage them to act on their desires. If anything it’s a curious game that is slow paced, a little tedious but which manages to feel incredibly meaningful as you guide the family through this life changing excursion.  

Story

This game is so heavily focused on the story of the Kaplan’s family that I feel that I should write a separate category just for this. It’s a nice touch that though the title seems to indicate it’s talking about Dan it’s actually referring to you since it is you who will be writing this story and guiding what happens. Regardless, the game does seem extremely focused on Dan and his career as a writer, though it can just as easily be focused on Linda and, less so, Tommy who each have their own problems to deal with. I won’t go into the fact that it’s the father’s career the game focuses on and not the mother’s though I did notice the rather dramatic slant. Sadly, Dan’s pretty self-absorbed since all of his needs and desires are focused on his novel whereas Linda divides her interests equally between her career and her family. 

The message of this game appears to be that, in real life, it’s impossible to please everybody and that family life is all about compromise and working through difficulties together. In every chapter it’s your task to find clues around the house, 3 for each character, and then read their mind to see what it is they currently want. Tommy, for example, often feels lonely and neglected so would like to go play with his Dad at the beach whereas Dan is struggling to get any work done because people keep interrupting him. Dan would like to enforce a ‘do not open my office door when it is shut’ rule. On the other hand, Linda is considering how distant he’s already become and is thinking of enforcing her own rule where everybody must sit at the dinner table together for some quality family conversation. Who do you side with? It’s not easy if you can emphasize with everybody but, at the end of the day, somebody has to get their way and the other two are left out in the cold. Thankfully if you know what each of the three family members want you can pick one other person for a compromise option so, say, instead of going with Tommy to the beach you can stick him in front of a nature documentary whilst you get on with your damn work.

The characters of Dan and Linda are quite good, if a little stereotypical, and it’s really their relationship and their interactions that make the game substantial. Tommy’s character though is extremely under-developed and it’s as though he’s just there to be stuck in the middle of his parents problems. He only communicates through drawn pictures and what he wants is completely unimportant in the long run despite the natural inclination being to make sure he feels supported and loved. All in all, it’s turned out that Tommy’s just a third wheel in his parents’ drama story.

On a positive note the game is very dynamic and responsive to player decision. The story develops and changes around the choices you make and it is quite emotionally enriching since it makes you feel personally responsible for everything that happens. The choices are very genuine, realistic and honest so you do take care when deciding because, depending on who you sympathize with the most, you don’t want to upset anybody. It’s a powerful addition to artistic indie titles and though that may not be everybody’s bag it is mine since it puts games in a light of greater importance and meaning than shooting a thousand aliens dead in the fastest time possible. I particularly love how each chapter ends and details to you the consequences of your decisions and it’s saddening to view silent, black and white scenes of a neglected family member as the chapter’s conclusion is typed below in traditional, type writer text. Watching Linda sitting alone in the living room at night, drinking wine when she wanted to go out for dinner with her husband so she can see that he still loves her really did make me regret my decision to put Dan’s book first. It genuinely made me want to go back and try again, knowing I’d only be watching Dan pull his hair out and cry himself to sleep at night instead and the fact it can pull out that kind of commitment to the family is appreciable. 

It is admittedly unusual that over the course of three months the entire fate of the family is decided and, extensive as it may be, I’d have preferred decisions that carried on over a number of years and which shaped the family more organically. Unfortunately, the ending is awful as the final decision is extremely unfair and devastating to the individuals who don’t get ‘picked’ and that’s just not how life works. The ability to enforce a balance of interests isn’t really in the game and it’s very much one person gets what they want, someone gets a bit of what they want and the last person gets sod all whilst the ending makes all previous decisions totally irrelevant. This is a family that lives life dramatically it seems with very little conversation and no amount of actual compromise.

Gameplay

The gameplay has a fairly interesting concept as its stealth based but, since you’re a spirit, you possess lights to hide rather than duck behind counters and curtains. The game has two gameplay modes; Story and Stealth. Stealth is where you can be spotted and thus need to utilize the lights whereas Story mode adds no stealth element meaning you can waltz up to the Kaplans without any problems. Stealth mode ultimately results in lots of zipping about between lampshades and ceiling fittings so you can spy on what the Kaplan’s are doing and sneak up behind them to possess their memories. You can make the light flitter which encourages whomever is near to stop what they’re doing and walk over to the light and examine it whilst commenting on it being broken. This then gives you the opportunity to go into another light fitting and jump out into the room to slip up behind them or back out the door to go somewhere else. If they spot you walking about in broad daylight then they get spooked and you can’t pick their resolution at the end of the chapter but, despite having some very near misses, I was never spotted for long enough to spook them. The most I got was a sleepy and confused ‘huh?’ before I’d high-tailed it into the table lamp and they’d continued on their way to look out the window. Maybe I’m just incredibly fast or maybe the game just hasn’t made it hard enough but by the end of the game I was walking around quite brazenly through the corridors knowing that, even if one of them turned a corner, there was always a bulb close by. 

The character interaction of the game is awful and the entire atmosphere of the house is sterile and bland. It’s an unavoidable flaw in the game is a great shame since it ruins everything. As the family move around the house they’ll often make a soulless passing comment to one another which indicates where they currently are and I believe this is so you know that somebody’s on the way. What it results in instead is a house that feels lifeless and cold, maybe that’s the point if the family is at breaking point but when you watch one family sit in the living room only for the other one to get up and leave, you do start to feel as though the family members are far too robotic and less ‘family life’ than they should be. There’s an attempt at having the family talk to one another here and there but it’s so forced and vapid there’s not much point, though it does explain why communication is so bad between them all.

That said, the actual storyline is well written and it’s a really great concept at balancing professions with family life because it’s a problem so many people experience but that nobody ever really digs into, not in games at any rate. The fact that you can go into the memories of the family is interesting though still a little hollow feeling as, in each memory, you just have to find a frozen image of whomever memories it is and click them to get a spoken line of dialogue then to click whomever they are with to get another spoken line of dialogue. This is supposedly revealing hugely important plot details but it’s more like ‘…don’t you want to play with your rocket ship?...’ and ‘…I already played with it…’ that’s spoken in ghostly tones, showing that Tommy’s more obsessed with television nowadays than playing with his toys. It’s a creative spin on family life and family problems but it just lacks interactivity and life to make it feel real and to engage its audience.

I’m ashamed to admit it since it’s such a great concept but I found this game tedious. In order to put up with a lot of what the game had to offer I had to be a very specific mood; somewhere between self-motivating and extremely empathetic. There are a lot of in-game notes and letters to read and this is primarily the source of monotony found in ‘The Novelist’. Letters are fine when they’re a few sentences but when you bring up the fifth page long whinge it’s hard to not just skip past it and get back on with the action of deciding people’s fates. Of course, by skipping through all the pages and notes you miss out on the storyline and you’re then not entirely sure about what’s going on in the Kaplan household. This essentially makes playing the game entirely pointless because you’re supposed to care about what’s going on and each little additional bit of information that arises. Some of the notes are read aloud but the voice acting isn’t fantastic and it comes across as a slow drawl that runs the risk of sending you straight to sleep.  Now, I understand there are plenty of people who won’t mind reading so many things in game but I would have preferred a lot more talking and a lot more interactivity because, like Tommy, I’m a bit of a visual learner.

Graphics

The game has a sketchy, painted look that’s very simplistic and quite downplayed which keeps the focus on the storyline. There’s nothing particularly ugly about it but the family members don’t look realistic and have extremely undetailed faces but, truthfully, they do fit in great with their surroundings. I'm kind of of the opinion that by having extremely high definition people with lifelike features and expressions would have actually made this game less artistic than it originally came across as.

The colours are lovely and the memories put everything in muted, black and white tones to differentiate between the present and the past. Oddly, going into a light puts a muted tone on everything too so you’re often looking out at a great landscape but in a way that doesn’t give it enough credit. Of course you can bypass those restrictions by playing in story mode but it’s just a shame nipping out a light to possess somebody then being all, ‘wow this game is incredibly colourful and attractive, back into black and white I go.’ Overall, you won’t be disappointed by the graphics because they’re there to portray a nice, painting backdrop to a storyline and it’s all done very well with plenty of detail in an interesting but vibrant style. It's just a shame about all the muted tones that you're forced to view the world through because there are some lovely scenic moments in the game.

Conclusion

Sadly, I think The Novelist fell a little short of where it was aiming. There’s too much reading and not enough talking to make this game feel alive and the over simplified nature of communication in the family is exasperating and unrealistic. The ending of the game is extremely disappointing because you spend a lot of time juggling the family’s needs and wants throughout the chapters then, at the end, you’re forced to make an impossible decision between two options which renders all previous choices irrelevant. The stealth element of the game doesn’t really add any challenge as the Kaplans are very slow on the uptake even if you’re seen running about in front of them. The ability to enter their memories is, in theory, interesting but when you get there it’s just more sterile, lifeless scenes and a few soundbites of their opinions and problems. Overall, this game is worth your time because I did enjoy it and the difficult decisions that had to be made, graphically it looks pleasant and it all feels very modern and very slick. Unfortunately the game lacks what it needed to make it a fantastic title but it’s not a disaster and there are some lovely experiences to be had in The Novelist.

Score – 7/10