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I don't know! Maybe, maybe not! :O
In my humble opinion, the little girl that we play is pretty disturbed - who has no notion or actual idea about the concept of harm, neither she is very capable of empathizing with another. For some reason, she sees the reality mechanical, and she is good with contraptions and puzzles. She is stoic, maybe autistic, sociopathic even.
Her mother is aware that something's seriously wrong with her, yet tries to attend her in an automated manner anyway. I think her mother was a junkie at some point, so she blames herself about the uncanny nature of her child, and she cares for her as a manner of self-punishment. The "pride" she mentions at the beginning is a suggestion on her taking responsibility for this sickly child. She didn't want to have the child to begin with: "it" happened to her. The machine that we encounter at the end symbolically suggests that Autumn was conceived via rape. Thus, she is incapable of telling the girl that she loves her, because she actually doesn't. It pains her.
Autumn - the little girl - "tinkers" with a dog at some point, as she'd tinker any mechanical contraption. She harms the dog terribly, and the dog attacks her. On this given incident, Autumn loses one arm. This is why we do not have an inventory, and use each and every object with one arm only. She cannot use things with two hands.
At the beginning of our game, I think her mother tried to get rid of Autumn, thus locked her in the shed, knowing she'd wonder around to experiment anyway. She was hoping that "the hound" would complete what she left unfinished. This last part may also be interpreted as Autumn's dream - a nightmare created by a guilty conscious, but I'd doubt that. I believe the whole game was the mother's nightmare, reliving the echoes of events, and dreaming about a situation that she'd be free of Autumn.
From the way the mother's dialogue in the stories went, makes me think the dog could possibly be related to some kind of father figure. This is just conjecture, in order to be sure I'd have to read the dialogue and look for more clues.
The mother is acting uncomfortable around the girl, leading me to believe she is either guilty ... or afraid of her, or possibly just concerned. You'll notice that the girl is in a sleeping bag as opposed to a bed, let alone the fact she has a fascination with machinery, adding to her eccentricity.
Another key moment is that the girl said "I love you" without any meaning to it. This, alongside her very unempathetic feelings throughout the nightmare strongly suggest sociopathy of some kind. It's entirely possible, however, that she's simply autistic, but that lack of empathy is very deep, as is her lack of fear or emotion.
Obviously the story is very much up to interpretation, but I think we can all agree that the mother has problems, and the daughter has worse problems. It's their relationship that I am the most curious about.
What a fascinating game this is.
This isn't really the right place to ask this, but to answer your question anyways, it's between 30-60 minutes long. The youtube movie I watched wsa just under 30 minutes long, but he obviously knew what to do. Solving the puzzles may take some players a little longer.
It is an extremely short game, and there is no apparent replay value besides trying to better understand this game.
Rarely do I buy into the 'games as a work of art' argument, but this game is exactly that. You won't get exciting and compelling gameplay out of this game, but it will strike you deeply if you are at all a philisophical person, or simply a deeper thinker than the average steam bro.
This girl, Autumn, is special, like the teachers say to her mother. She likes to strip down machines, but to her, bodies are machines all the same, and so she tinkers with them too. Chipmunks parts in her room and dog cuts are testimonies to that. But this one time, the dog bites Autumn’s arm back.
The mother seems to have her fair share of problems too : game hints at addiction problems (syringes, “needles of poison”, “the need that surpasses all other needs”) and maybe some sort of social precarity as she says how she always feels judged by men in the street and how pride is all she has.
So this junkie homeless pleasuring herself with all and any of a mother must now take care of a child. Overtook by her own problems, she has trouble acknowledging Autumn’s existence, let alone her daughter’s psychological condition (“you’re not special, you’re just spoiled”). She has strong ambivalent feelings for her, which as a result must make Autumn feel like an unwanted child.
If it is all just a dream in Autumn’s head, like the game indicates in the end, then the progression of the game can be understood as the process in which a suppressed idea – the feeling of being an unwanted child hated by her mother – will make its way to consciousness in a metaphorical way. The wolf would be a way for Autumn to symbolize the hate that lies beneath her mother’s “loving costume” (similar to the metaphor in The Red Riding Hood).
A good example of that ambivalence is the mother’s voice from the device, which is at first warm and sweet, trying to keep her child away from danger, but then slowly turns into a fiendish, threatening one. To me, it translates the despair of a fragile and lonely woman that doesn’t know how to protect a dangerous child (to herself as well as to others) in any other way than physical restraint (“Do I have to kneecap you?”), and ending up wishing her child wasn’t born. You have to assume Autumn constantly experiences the passage from one extreme to the other.
What makes a dream become a nightmare is when the process of symbolizing a suppressed idea stops working, and instead leaves the person with no veil in front of a crude truth. Autumn should have woken up when the wolf rushed her, as it marked the moment when the metaphor was pushed to the brink of its function. But instead, she keeps dreaming, going deeper inside the basement.
There, she faces something crude, like literally raw : a piece of meat being stabbed again and again. Freud says that in the” bottom” of the subconscious, there are some questions that stay completely hidden and can only manifest themselves by fueling a need to find a more general meaning in things. One of those is “Where do I come from?”
Could it be that Autumn went too deep as she did not wake up in time and sees a twisted “mise-en-scène” of her origins – depicting a conception via rape as Faudraline suggests, or that maybe, deep down, she thinks she is the child of a coitus between a needle and the body of her mom, as her mother’s only real way to find pleasure seems to be injecting drug in her flesh (an orgasm of some sort)?
The dream experience ends as you get waken up by an alarm, just after the basement becomes a loop with no exit. This to me is a very accurate rendering of a dream that loses its very function, aka symbolizing and dramatizing. This is exactly why nightmares often go along with a sensation of being endlessly stuck : the “dream machine” shuts down and the act of sleeping loses its purpose.
Anyway, just like in Tale of Tales’ The Path, a trip with a deep, subconscious logic that everyone can relate to is coupled with some singular elements specific to the protagonist’s history. You end up trying to connect things to understand how Autumn sees the world and what really happened to her : so, she needs to strip down bodies to understand how it works, saws and sharp tools can be seen everywhere, there is a machine that keeps piercing a piece of flesh, a chair covered in blood… Is she haunted by memories of a traumatic event? Did she cut someone real bad? Maybe cut her arm herself? The nightmare is hers as well as everyone’s.
Parts of David Szymanski’s other games are known to interact with one another (most notably between The Moon Sliver and The Music Machine) and at some point I started looking for connections to make with A Wolf in Autumn. Here’s a little list I made (More spoilers ahead):
- Autumn sees animals and bodies as machines. Isn’t it how the Spindle Men try to design life? As some kind of rational machinery? (The farm of pigs and smoke in The Music Machine). And, by extension, isn’t this nightmare a world this young Spindle Girl tries to create, but which ends in a loop bug?
- The piercing machine deep inside the basement ressembles the music machine, a device made by those ignorant and innocent beings,the Spindle Men. By piercing people, they thought the screams of pain were like a symphony that would allow them to have a deeper understanding of what humanity is instead of simply mimicking it. The piercing machine inside Autumn’s nightmare could be a metaphor of what it means for her to communicate with someone else. Lacking empathy like the Spindle Men, maybe she also interacts with others through the music they make when she cuts them to pieces.
- A basement, a parent willing to kill his child, it’s all very reminiscent of Fingerbones. In the latter, the only element you find that is directly linked to the daughter are… her fingerbones. And what part of her body Autumn is missing?
But all those connections are likely to make sense only at the level of Mr. Szymanski’s mind (or subconscious :) ), so I won’t dig any further and just hope for more of his games soon!
Awesome writeup Patrick! I don't want to confirm or deny anything regarding A Wolf in Autumn, since it's very Lynch-inspired and as such I will remain very Lynch-esque in my unwillingness to explain ;)
That said, you're very much on the right path.
Let’s take a look at the structure of the game. It opens with a text describing the inner thoughts of someone, followed by a distorted vision of a room with several tools on the floor, and after a short dark screen, it continues with what seems to be a memory of someone by the sea looking at the waves while a voice comments (“Look at the wave sweetie, isn’t it pretty?”). This is where the playable part starts, which is supposed to be a dream turning into a nightmare, then more text about that same person speaking in her head again, a short conversation between Autumn and her mother, and it finally ends with the waves scenery.
Stream of consciousness, perceptions, dreams, memories – those are all different manifestations of the mind’s reflexive nature. You can identify them as such in the game because everyone is familiar with their specific logic : the lack of punctuation and repetition of words when one thinks in his head, the rich symbolism of dreams, the confused perception of someone waking up, the emotional load linked to a memory. Putting them one after another tends to recreate the diverse yet natural continuity of the subjective conscience, this eerie, transitional, in-between-fantasy-and-reality kind of feeling one can experience during a calm or introspective moment. The game "mimics" the psychological experience of being.
That's why, in my opinion, the reason this game can be very intense for the player is because it echoes the subjectivity of this very player. The game synchronizes with the player’s consciousness ; this fragmented narration makes sense to the player because he experiences it rather than just plays it. Thus, whenever you try to identify these thoughts or those moments of the game as some external character’s experience, you split the player’s subjectivity and create a deeply confusing dissonance inside him.
So, in a way, it is very difficult to even say "this part is the daughter’s dream" or "that part is the mother’s thought" (even if the external narrator hints them as such) because I feel like they are first and foremost intended to superimpose the player’s experience, making him the only character of the game – not as a person, but as a subjectivity. At the extreme, you could even say that interpretations kill the game as they force some distance between the player and the game’s experience, when in fact the game’s strength lies in its power to intertwine those two elements.
@jefequeso That’s why I don’t mind you not giving any clues. What I really like about your games is that they put the player in this very state of altered consciousness. Reminds of me what Jodorowsky said about his films, that you don’t need to take drugs to watch them because he tries to make films that make you feel as if you are on drugs, that alter your sense of reality.
Another thing that intrigues me a lot in your games is that I also feel like you are building some kind of mythology around them – something along the lines of "the Spindle Men myth of semi-gods that started to build alternate worlds". So now, whenever a game of yours questions the player’s sense of reality, whenever chaos rises through fragmented narration, there will always be one possible explanation, one safe interpretation : what if this game takes place in a world made by Spindle Men? And just like that, by making me link metaphysical questions to mythological explanations, you turned me into a religious follower : )