I have a vague memory of Phwog saying something like “I get you, Joe; no one understood my VN either T_T”, but can’t find it. Anyways, after that I went to go try to pick over Depiction of Pleasure to see what I could get from it, and… it was difficult to decipher. I put off going over it again, but as May approaches once more (and I have more time on my hands) I’ve gone over the endings again and written about what I think they mean. But first, bigger picture comments.
I played through the updated version and then the jam version. I appreciate all the sound that was added in the update. It was weird to see have the owl’s rod visuals without the accompanying sound. The sniffs are cute. I didn’t realise that there were so many sniffing sounds until I opened up the game’s code, but I didn’t notice them being different or similar sniffs as I was going through the game, so it was all very smooth.
The sounds as you click through the desert are also a nice touch. It helps show the passage of time in a sort of montage, and they still work even if you click really fast or slow.
The title screen has no sound, however. It’s a barren desert, yes, but I think it could use some wind or something just so I can tell that the program is open, the volume is on, and everything is functioning as it’s supposed to.
This story leverages phwog’s skills at visual art, and really takes advantage of the visual medium. There’s the staff graphics as it beams images into people’s heads, the prison gate closing on the owl, Cam turning into a mite, and my personal favourite joke: the huge MONTH! graphic. It appears with the “ta-da!” noise as this “I’ve got it!” from Cam, and then it’s a hard cut to the owl’s disapproving face. The jokes are well-timed, which is something of an odd thing to say in a medium where the player can click as fast or as slow as they want. It reminds me of how comic book panels are arranged.
Cam is a very fleshed-out character, and I really buy his feelings for Ptero. I’m thinking about the mite conversation and the text you get when you choose to think about him with the staff. I still feel like I’m missing things when it comes to the characters—especially the owl, who can’t talk, which is something of an obstacle to fully understanding her story—what’s going on in the plot exactly, and how the sand works, but Cam’s and Ptero’s relationship is emotionally moving.
I’m glad we get to see from Ptero’s perspective at the end because he’s a character who withholds so much from Cam.
Fooling around with the owl and going about Cam’s day-to-day worked out well enough balancing the serious parts and the jokey parts, but when the armpit wolf comes back at the end in a serious moment, I was a bit thrown off. I think it’s funny when he says “I’m cumming” and we get the little squirt sound, but it doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the scene. The armpit and sniffing sections are written with the kind of attention and passion towards niche subject matter I like to see in small productions, though.
Here’s what I’ve got interpreting the ending from the decision point:
Ending Spoilers
When you speak, the owl is found crying into a corpse after Cam said he was going to go gorge himself on sand (which causes you to die, as demonstrated by the peacock), implying that Cam has died. Ptero feels guilty about it, which allows him to channel his guilt at the wolf. Then Cam is alive, but we see words instead of proper images. This is Ptero’s imagination because he can’t imagine images, so he imagines text and the text is what we’re seeing here after Cam has died. So their dying together never happens in reality, huh... familiar :pWhat starts the imagination sequence is also the breaking of the wolf’s rod, which feels significant, but I’m not sure what it means exactly.
It’s sometimes unclear when I’m supposed to click to move the game forward and when not to. I guess I’m used to not having to click through to move to another screen if there’s no dialogue box, but in the second ending, the characters talk without needing any input from me for a while before it switches to the owl’s story about her parents and it hung there for a little before I realised I was supposed to click to advance. It does make the punching more impactful than just watching it happen without my input, however.
Speaking is going back to how things were before, and not saying things is a rejection of his previous conditioning as a monk. Going back to the way things were before is bad because things weren’t really that great before. Letting the past stay in the past is how Cam moves on to develop as a person, get with Ptero, and not die.
In the second ending, Ptero has a plan to deal with the wolf that we don’t see before the perspective shifts to the wolf. The wolf shows up and sees Cam and Ptero engaging in armpit-sniffing and biting. He gets put off and then leaves, seeing the owl doing something suspicious, probably to do with the rod. He sees a vision of a fox, then a peacock, then something else that we don’t see. Was he distracted by the owl’s illusions and then murdered, which is why the story ends? That would be a little anticlimactic.
I guess I have thoughts about the wolf’s involvement in the story. He causes problems for the main trio by causing people to defect from Ptero’s religion (which is also fake?). It could be that he’s a foil for Ptero because they’re both faking being religious figures. Ptero lies to the people because he thinks they need something to rally around to keep them together and the wolf does it to exploit people for sexual fulfillment? I’m not sure. But he’s a big antagonistic figure in the plot. The silence ending ends on his point of view and the speak ending has him be vanquished. I’m not really getting how he figures into everything. And then the title “Depiction of Pleasure” probably has to do with the wolf’s horniness and Cam’s self-flagellation/denial, but I’m not entirely sure what.