Sting

(Major spoilers. Seriously, don’t read this if you don’t want the ending spoiled.)

Last year Mike Russo submitted to IFComp a comedy featuring the shenanigans of upper-class males with too much time on their hands. P.G. Wodehouse, but in a setting Wodehouse never tried: ancient Greece. The game was also partly based on actual events. His entry this year, Sting, is quite different. It’s not a comedy but a memoir. About the only thing I can see that it shares with The Eleusinian Miseries is that basis on real events.

Sting consists of a series of six episodes in Russo’s life, apparently only lightly fictionalized and with some names changed. Over the game, we see the author grow from a preschooler to a teenager to a 30-ish young man to someone rapidly approaching middle age and expecting what appears to be his first child. Each major event is punctuated by a bee sting. The author’s twin sister Liz also features prominently in each episode: She’s physically present in the first three, plays a crucial off-stage role in the fourth, and hovers in the background in the fifth and sixth. As such, while the events are linked by the bee stings, the game is really about the author’s relationship to Liz over the course of his life.

And we can suspect how this is going to go, even for someone as close as a twin. Anyone who’s reached middle age has watched once-tight friendships and even sibling relationships grow more tenuous over time, especially in the United States of today where many of us follow careers wherever they take us across this sprawling country instead of remaining in the towns where we grew up. (I did this, too.) In Sting, we first watch Mike and Liz as four-year-olds, playing in their backyard. They’re each other’s best playmates. Next they’re in their early teens, teammates in a sailing race. They’re still together, but this time they’re standing side-by-side, facing the world. By their mid teens Liz has spent a year studying in France and Mike has a crush on another girl at school. Their physical separation is beginning, and Mike is no longer seeing Liz as his primary female companion. In the fourth episode Liz for the first time isn’t present (only appearing in a phone call), and Mike is moving across the country soon for college, but their parents’ recent divorce is also prominent. I can imagine the divorce drew them closer, but it’s a breaking of a once-intimate relationship and so serves as a harbinger of Mike and Liz’s later separation as well. In the fifth episode, ten years later, Mike is living with his girlfriend Kaylee, far from Liz, and it’s clear Liz is not nearly as much a part of his life as she once was. Mike’s still not settled, though; even though it has been many years since Liz was his most important female companion, Kaylee’s place doesn’t feel like home, either. The final episode, another ten years later, features Mike out for a walk with his pregnant wife. Finally Mike feels settled; he’s no longer a teen awkwardly navigating a first romance or even a young man still searching for a life partner. However, Liz is no longer with him. She’s recently died of cancer at age 39, and this being 2021 the memorial service was held over Zoom.

Yet the game is called “Sting,” not “Liz.” The bee stings Mike suffers in each episode serve to tie them together, yet only the third and fifth stings could really be said to have affected Mike’s life in any meaningful way. More noteworthy is that as Mike ages he gets better at bearing the pain of the stings. In the first episode he’s a four-year-old bawling at one of the worst pains he’s ever received, but by the fifth (objectively the worst sting, by far) he stands and takes it, later reflecting on it and using it to contemplate making a change to his life. And the last sting, in the sixth episode, doesn’t hurt much at all. By his late 30s he knows that the worst pains, the worst stings, are emotional, not physical. Like the immediate sting of the death of someone whom you were at one time closer to than anyone else in the world, as well as the long, drawn-out attenuation of that relationship.

In order for a memoir to work artistically it has to be universal. A memoir will certainly mean a great deal to its author, but for its events to resonate with readers they have to connect with those readers’ own experiences, experiences beyond the particulars of the author’s life. In the way that I’ve described Sting I’ve tried to emphasize its universality, but playing it myself that wasn’t entirely how I experienced it. The first episode I connected with emotionally, but as the story went through its middle chapters it felt more particular to the author’s life and less something I personally resonated with. (Although I do remember playing Might and Magic VI around the year the fourth episode is set!) But by the fifth episode, and definitely during the sixth, I was walking alongside the game emotionally once more. Death and loss are as universal as it gets; once we’re old enough we all know those two characters. I was also able to look back and understand better what the early episodes were doing in terms of establishing the arc of Mike and Liz’s relationship. One critique, then, is that the middle episodes could have done a more clear job of foreshadowing what was to come. Perhaps that’s hard to do in a memoir; real-life events don’t generally come with the nicely-intertwined narrative threads that we see in fiction.

Another critique is that I think Sting would have worked better as a choice-based game. The lack of puzzles does mean that it flows fairly smoothly, but I still found myself trying things that the parser didn’t understand and would thus respond with an error message of sorts. Every time that happened my sense of immersion in the game would be broken just a little. Still, for parser game that’s trying to maintain a mood Sting does succeed quite well.

Sting is an elegy for the author’s sister, but it doesn’t end solely in mourning. In the last episode Mike feels more settled, with a stronger sense of who he is, than he’s seemed since he was a young child. Moreover, Liz’s death is in counterpoint to new life: the birth of Mike’s first child. And so we see, despite the sadness and loss in Sting, a sense of hope as well. Maybe the best elegies do end in hope. That’s our existence, after all: Continual endings, of relationships and of life itself—yet also new beginnings.