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Well-written game, frustrating interface, February 2, 2024In Three Things, the player character is translating a poem for a college class on Russian-English translation while ruminating on their disintegrating relationship with their boyfriend.
The poem is by Anna Akhmatova, whose work I find fascinating because it's often laconic and ambiguous--clearly freighted with emotion, but what that emotion is can be hard to identify. The poem central to Three Things is no exception; it describes a man who's hard to please and especially disdainful of "hysterical" women, and concludes with the speaker's statement that she was his wife. Should we read pride into this last statement? Bitterness? Weary resignation? It's hard to say.
The translation aspect of the game is very much grounded in reality. This isn't Emily Short's Endure, where the possible "translations" you can select from are more loose interpretations of the overall situations in the poem. All of your options are plausible translations; the differences come down to nuance, the way the emphasis and tone can shift depending on the minutiae of word choice. As a sometime translator, I deeply appreciated this more realistic take on the process, because I think it can be a fascinating experience in and of itself; when you jazz it up to provide an artificially wide array of interpretations, that might make it more appealing to the layperson in some ways, but to me the art of translation exists primarily in navigating those tiny shades of meaning, and I'd love for more people to get to see how that works.
And of course, each possible word comes with associations for the PC, a different lens into their own failing relationship. Before making your choice, you can click on each option to see the PC's musings as prompted by that word; through these fragmentary but evocative lines, Three Things conveys the character of the PC's partner and the problems in their relationship. The PC is more of a cipher--but then, so is the speaker in the Akhmatova poem, so that's fitting. The sense of finality given to submitting your translation at the end of the game does suggest that perhaps, through this exercise, the PC has come to some conclusions about their relationship as well.
But while I appreciated many aspects of Three Things, the actual act of playing it was an exercise in frustration for me. I honestly do not understand why the game has the options come up on mouseover, instead of on click as is the usual way of things. I'll admit that this might be a me problem; I do have fine motor control issues, so I handle a mouse more clumsily than the average person. But the experience of playing through the game for me was one of accidentally mousing over a word I'd already selected a translation for, having the dialogue with the choices pop up, having to move my mouse to close the dialogue, then trying to move my mouse over to the next untranslated word, whereupon I would accidentally mouse over a word I'd already translated, and then...
Having the words that don't bring up a list of options be translated on mouseover is fine; I did keep getting them out of order due to the aforementioned clumsy mouse handling, but most people would probably find it clunkier to have that be on click. But I would dearly love for there to at least be a selectable setting to have the translation dialogue choices come up on click instead, because the interface as it is now made my time with Three Things much more frustrating than it had to be and distracted me from appreciating its artistry, which I very much wanted to do.