Reviews of Fictional Games: April March

The first thing that I notice as I disembark from the train is that I am walking backwards. The reason for this quickly becomes apparent as I engage a local in conversation, which flows in reverse as well. Though jarring at first, it becomes easy enough to pick up the narrative thread. I am leaving, forever, on the soon-to-be-departing train. Towards the end of the conversation (or its chronological beginning), I am presented with a choice of dialog options, both of which make sense with the preceding conversation. Herein lies the chief conceit of April March: the future has already been decided; it is the past that the player chooses.

There is something monstrous in the mere passage of time. When one is young, one wishes impetuously to be older. When age arrives, mirrors are regarded with suspicion and a measure of disbelief. Skin sags, bones ache, crowns rust, and empires crumble. Time robs us of our friends, our family, and our selves. It is true that April March has received lukewarm reviews, but I attribute these to the relative youth of the critics. They are perhaps too young to see that time in April March is not some gimmick of mechanic or narrative contrivance. It is far more than that - it is the central enemy of the game.

The game takes place over three days, from last to first. The battle system is framed as a standard turn-based JRPG, but the reversal of time changes the genre from RPG to puzzle. The correct sequence of moves will take the enemy from death to full health, and the player must figure out the right order. A failure to do so results in a "time glitch" and a game over. As complicated as it sounds, the game does a good job training the player how to navigate the system. The protagonist starts off at an overpowered high level, making the first battles in the game elementary affairs. The main character is gradually leveled down as the game progresses and complications are introduced to the battles.

The player's choices over the last day lead to three different preceding days, and each of those days can lead to three different preceding days again. In all, the player can participate in nine separate story lines. Each story line gives the protagonist a different history and a different reason to ultimately board the train. If any given story is viewed in the correct chronological order, it has the traditional narrative structure of rising action, climax, and falling action. However, many of the story lines reflect the same structure when viewed in reverse as the game presents them. One memorable story line plays nearly the same backwards and forwards, presenting a delightful symmetry. Others are admittedly less clever. Simone de Beaufort, the game's sole developer, suffers from a love of astonishment and overuses twist endings (or, rather, twist beginnings) in too many of her stories. The effect leaves one weary.

Some reviewers have expressed disbelief that so many different backgrounds and histories could converge to a single point in time. This objection is scarce to be believed when compared to the narrative of other video games. The protagonist in other games starts from the same house or prison cell or cave and, through the player's choices, can become incredibly different people. The player chooses to become a paragon of virtue or the lowest of villains, yet both of those persona ends up in the same climatic fight against the same final boss. How much more elegant to allow those two persona different beginnings! The protagonist is more a person and less a blank slate to project against. Because of the backwards nature of time, the main character (in any of the nine story lines) possesses an internal consistency lacking in less ambitious games.

Simone de Beaufort is very clearly alluding to her great-grandfather Herbert Quain's novel of the same name. The novel April March uses the same backwards flow of time and nine-fold branching of plot, and some of the more contrived story lines in the game are clumsy imitations of those in the novel. That certain other reviewers have failed to mention the connection between the two works I will generously attribute to ignorance. Quain's unfortunate dalliance with fascism in the 1930s, although brief, has diminished his reputation and few people in the anglophone world are familiar with his oeuvre. That biographic detail, however, is fundamental to understanding the game April March. De Beaufort shares many things with her ancestor - a sympathy for formal complexity, a taste for juxtaposition - but the most important detail is their shared disdain for the past.

The critical discourse surrounding the game has mainly concerned itself with the lurid details of the plot, inevitable but meaningless comparisons to Braid, and the symbolism of the parallel elements that persist in all story lines. To this discussion I will humbly add my own interpretation of the game: the past destroys us just as much as the future does. By inverting the flow of time, by forcing the player to choose who they were instead of who they will be, de Beaufort throws the past and the future into a stark equality. However the past is constructed, the player's character is still forced to board the train and flee from their home. It is an escape attempt doomed to fail, for the past cannot be mitigated. The past is a tyrant, and memory the straitjacket that confines us as much as it defines us. The truly free, de Beaufort argues, are those that can forget the past more so than those that can decide their future. Through a medium where choice is fundamental, she reminds us that it is the past, not the future, that robs us of our choices.