Lolarelai

"I wish I was a princess with armies at her hand"

Wish (Komm zu mir) Lola rennt soundtrack

 

You should not exist. Your life is a waste and your every failure, every failing, reaffirms that reality. But don't expect that analyzed here.

Playing The Cat Lady basically put me off adventure games for a while (not that it's my favorite genre to begin with) not because it was bad (though it had its flaws) but because its insightful grasp of its central theme of depression hit so hard that it became a tough act to follow. Still, The Wolf Among Us, Primordia, Strangeland and Gabriel Knight helped ease me back into old-timey story-based puzzle solving over the past couple of years, so I thought I might as well bite the bullet and try The Cat Lady's sequel, Lorelai.

In terms of game design, Lorelai does improve upon its two predecessors' amateurishness in many ways, from having a decent save system to improved graphic quality to scene transitions and slightly improved voice acting. The old women still sound painfully fake but I was surprised at not wanting to strangle the ever-chipper Maria. Even its pacing and jump scares are brilliant in some spots: "can't wait, coming through!"

 

On the other hand the music is weaker, and though The Cat Lady's puzzles were certainly lackluster, here they're so reduced in both scope and complexity as to be painfully obvious, and further spoiled by too many obvious hints and outright giveawaways like "you belong in the sea" leaving very little game to be played. And, unfortunately, the same shallow approach mars Lorelai's chief psychological storytelling selling point, with one of the more deliberately aggravating characters hitting upon the underlying problem:

Quickly rebuffed, quickly forgotten

Originally I'd assumed I'd be quoting Metric's Lost Kitten for Lorelai's epigraph, thinking it would delve into the psychological foibles of teenage runaways. But more and more while playing it I was instead reminded of watching Run Lola Run. A decent flick from a technical perspective, snappy and stylish and captivating enough within its unambitious premise, but at least Tom Tykwer didn't make the mistake of mandating moral entitlement for his protagonist: a spoiled little princess of no particular qualities screaming for attention until the universe itself bends to her demands.

 

At least Susan Ashworth had the decency to hate herself. It was never even clear how much of her ugliness was real, self-inflicted by neglect or outright imagined, as what we saw on screen was arguably her self-image warped by extended, gnawing depression. Her personal needs and desires were deliberately shown impacting her milieu negatively (e.g. playing the piano at night to summon the neighbourhood's pests) and constantly snapping at others, since yes, suffering, whether physical or psychological, externally or internally originated, real or imagined, does not make you a nice person. Lorelai in contrast lacks any such internal conflict or insight forced upon her by her trials. She never questions her evident prettiness, does the right thing by default and has "nice" options in every conversation for sheer doggoned niceness, and your adventure even starts with "I deserve a better life" a line so crass it could only be redeemed if by the end it turns out she doesn't.

It doesn't help that the storytelling has taken a severe nosedive into triteness, with moral lessons like be nice to animals and don't sass your elders, a tediously overextended sappy love story and a hero's mentor straight out of shoujo manga. From the very start when you're introduced to a household of three females and one male, you know with 100% certainty who the villain will be, and at no point does Michalski even try to surprise you or throw any nuance into their dynamic. To top it off it seems damn near impossible to get anything resembling a "bad" ending no matter how obnoxious, stupid or harmful you act, with Lorelai's final fate running a rosy gamut from safe cozy neutrality to "heroine saves day for everyone by not even her own efforts" sound the motherfucking trumpets.

Where The Cat Lady hit so hard for deconstructing self-destructive behavior and justifications, Lorelai just shallowly reinforces adolescent girl narcissism with the conviction that the prettiest heroine in the room deserves her happy ending. She deserves to have her beau sacrifice himself for her because he loves her. She deserves the help of random strangers taking her side. What's truly scary about it is how aptly yet naively it captures feminine sociopathy, and glorifies it, most evidently in killing Al by whispers in his ears "because I'm a survivor" with no repercussions because he's a loser, with not even a mention of guilt for this in the final monologue. We are left to assume that Lorelai deserves to drive a male recovering alcoholic to suicide by poisoning every aspect of his life, because she's young and pretty and especially female. Young men exist to serve her. Older men are either villains to be defeated or unworthy sacrifices on her altar.

I loved The Cat Lady (and have no intention of replaying it in the near future) and related to its protagonist but hated its forced happy ending. I-as-Susan wanted to be treated worse by the end because it would have been more fitting to my projected persona. Here, aside from some good, if brief characterization in the nursing home and alchololism chapters (where Michalski likely drew once again from past work experience) we're treated to that gratuitous happy ending stretched the length of the entire game, a constant primitive simian reassurance that pretty young females are just better and more deserving than everyone else. As if they need anyone to feed their endless overentitlement.

Didn't get your way? Just scream your head off until the universe rearranges in your favor.