How often have you entered a conversation confident about what you want to say, the emotions you want to convey—only to watch it fall apart? For everything to be completely misunderstood, as if the two of you were, somehow, speaking different languages? All conversations are complex, a mixture of tone, inflection, language, and inferences. But in games, conversations are typically binary. Either the dialogue has been pre-written and recorded by the game developers, or you're picking from a series of choices that make clear both what and how you're saying something. Angry dialogue may, in fact, be colored red.
I didn’t like the implication that it was impossible to get along with multiple groups of people at the same time. I spend a month in a town a few miles away and when I get home my friends find me to be completely unintelligible and loathe me for the miscommunications.
Whatever their point was about people growing and changing and moving on is completely ruined by how quickly and how drastically it happens within the game. I stopped playing after the first time going back to the hometown.
Signs of the Sojourner was my absolute favourite game of 2020 (though haven’t played Umurangi’s DLC yet), so I’m glad to see it get some more publicity here.
I didn’t run into any of the problems Lavender had, and personally found it an interesting exploration of gradual code-switching. I’d highly recommend it!
