11:45 A Vivid Life
Do some surgery in 11: 45 A V ivid Life.
Ateenage girl steals an x-ray machine in order to perform gruesome experiments on her body. It’s a hell of a premise, but that’s par for the course for Deconstructeam, whose varied back catalogue includes a cyberpunk pottery game. The studio describes 11:45 A Vivid Life as a ‘narrative experiment’ paving the way for a bigger project, and I’d wager the experiment has to do with the game’s unusually subjective method of storytelling. Protagonist Laynie essentially decides her own story in this point-and-click. She feels that her skeleton isn’t her own, and the obvious solution is to x-ray parts of her body, and then to cut out any foreign matter she finds. You’re in charge of the scanning, via a cumbersome minigame that you have to repeat far too often, but Laynie (thankfully) handles the surgery, by yanking out her teeth, false eye, and other curious matter.
The animation is too bloodless for anyone to be that grossed-out by the mutilation, but it’s alarming how readily Laynie will harm herself. Presented with each bodily artifact, you then decide on their origin, be it supernatural or the result of abuse. Your answers subtly divert the story towards one extreme or the other, before a mysterious figure implores Laynie to come back home.
I feel it’s a narrative that only means something if the truth is grounded in real-world trauma, rather than in alien experimentation, but as none of the backstories is ever explicitly confirmed it’s possible that any, or all, or none of the story options are really true. I’m intrigued to see where the experiment will go from here, as this is a sturdy skeleton to build upon.