Setup: iPhone XS Max (iOS 13), iPad Pro (iPad OS), MacBook Air, Xbox One Controller
Developer: Die Gute Fabrik
Publisher: Akupara Games, Die Gute Fabrik
Release Date: 9/19/2019
Platforms: Apple Arcade, PS4, PC
At the beginning of 2019, I made a resolution that this would be the year where I’d shut the fuck up and listen to others more. While this is on the surface a bad decision for someone who wants to make their living via writing, I think it’s been a good one for me to make, personally.
See, if you’re a writer, especially one in a journalism/journalism-adjacent field, you feel an onus to know everything, or at least be informed about everything. Even if that thing was so far outside your own experience as to be illegible, you still made an effort to understand it and write about it as though you were an expert, because your readers need to know.
Except this is bullshit.
Not only is this bullshit conceptually, it’s a heuristic I built up for myself because if I wasn’t writing to inform or incite or entertain, what was I doing it for? If I wasn’t Speaking Truth To Power, if I wasn’t creating my own personal town square with the first draft of history, what even was the point?
In Mutazione, you are a 15-year-old girl named Kai, and you’re traveling to the eponymously named island to visit your dying grandfather. You’re going at the behest of one of the island elders: Mori, a nice old woman who runs a cafe. Your mother sees you off, but you’re traveling alone. Graub, the captain of the ship you’re sailing on, dubs you “Sea Crumb” against your wishes.
When you get to Mutazione, everyone seems to be expecting you. You meet Tung, a big green boy who works for Graub offloading boxes; his mother, Claire, and grandmother, Mori, who sent you the letter. You’re taken to your grandfather, Nonno, immediately. He’s too sick to speak more than a few sentences to you before passing out, leaving you to your own devices. Before he does, he tells you to talk to his old associate Yoké, an archivist. Yoké gives you an encyclopedia of all the plant life on the island.
As you explore, you meet other residents of the island: Jell-A, a sentient and super-intelligent slime mold, for lack of a better description; Ailin, Graub’s conflicted partner and salon owner; Dennis, an engineer; Steve, the barkeep; Miu, a cat woman and resident punk rock fan; and many more.
I forgot to mention: nearly everyone on the island is a mutant, the survivors and descendants of people who survived a catastrophic meteor impact called the Moon Dragon. The only non-mutants in the community are Steve, Nonno and Graub, to my knowledge. At first, your reactions to the various people, animals and plant-life consist of varying degrees of surprise, but never derision, disgust or disdain.
If I had to nail Mutazione to one genre, I would call it a classic point-and-click adventure game. That’s how I played the bulk of it on my iPhone, though periodically I did switch over to my iPad for a larger screen and less-awkward controller usage. The gameplay is mightily simple: each day has multiple segments, like morning, midday, evening, etc. During each segment, Kai makes her rounds, chatting with any and all available residents. Sometimes you’ll get “quests” from these conversations. Some conversations are only available at certain times; for example, you can get lunch from Mori at midday and chat with Jell-A about a science experiment at night, but not at other times of day.
But I don’t know, I think “point-and-click adventure” kind of reduces it too much. It feels more like a podcast I’m reading the transcript of over text message, like StoryCorps by way of Broken Age. You learn about the lives of these residents and how the meteor affected them, not to mention how the subsequent visits from scientists affected them.
You learn that Nonno was one of those scientists. And that something terrible happened to all of them save him. And you learn how he coped with that loss.
He gardened.
While most of Mutazione is walking around and talking to people, you do have a mechanical loop. Each day, you have to grow a garden for someone. These gardens are associated with certain melodies you learn from the person in question. Growing the gardens successfully is incredibly easy, and you don’t really have to worry about upkeep – unless someone wants the literal fruits of your labor. After you’ve planted seeds that correspond with the melody you’re supposed to use, you play a drum Nonno gave you and the plants will grow exceptionally fast.
Growing these gardens has a noticeable effect on the island. After just a couple of days, you’ll notice life becoming a little more vibrant. Doing so also endears you to everyone even more, allowing more relaxed dialogue options.
The dialogue is probably the biggest shining light as well as the darkest point for me. I can speak to anyone, literally anyone in the town, and not feel like I’m being constrained in how I’d respond to them – except when I talk to Nonno. For whatever reason, the moment I get to him, I’m acting impetuous and impatient and mean and snarky – and those are my only options. It feels like the game is forcing me into its self-described “soap opera,” when this whole time I’ve been enthusiastically embracing the island and everyone else on it – including the magic plants bit!
By the time I get to the end and find out what Nonno has been hiding from me, I already know he’s hiding something, because, through dialogue choices, the game desperately wants me to know that Nonno’s been hiding something.
What is Nonno hiding, by the way?
Well.
When Moon Dragon destroyed everything aside from Mutazione, and as people began undergoing their mutations, a leader named Manii appeared and helped keep the survivors together. Nonno arrived with a group of scientists to study the survivors, and according to everyone, it felt colonialist as hell (their words, basically). In a sense, what the scientists were doing felt purely extractive. It got to the point where they took too much, resulting in their deaths – except for Nonno.
Nonno’s guilt with all of this – and his guilt later on – piled up to make him feel like the only person in the world who could solve the problem the island was raising. He learned the melodies from Manii and grew the gardens, and he told no one, until he almost died from illness and stress.
At this point, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this man’s hubris. Out of guilt, he was going to keep the complex post-Colour out of Space ecology of Mutazione in balance forever, or die trying to pass the secrets onto his estranged 15-year-old granddaughter. As the end of the game quickly rises in front of Kai, Mori tells her that Nonno’s guilt was “a dangerously righteous kind of guilt.”
I don’t think I’ve shut the fuck up for long enough to really have the message of this game, or what I’ve learned this year, sink all the way in. I’m still liable to pop off about something I’m misinformed or ignorant about. I try to do it less or in more-private spaces, but honestly, I should be aiming for a much more stringent policy. Total shutting-the-fuck-up.
But I don’t know. I don’t want to do it out of a sense of guilt for speaking for and over marginalized people. I’ve already done that damage, and self-flagellating over it isn’t going to make things better. Instead, I think I’m going to just take Kai’s approach. Don’t shut the fuck up entirely, maybe; instead, listen and ask questions. And learn when to play the tune to make the gardens grow.
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