TAMING AMORPHALIA
You are about to play a text-based role-play game. It is a bit like other RPGs, but it is also a bit different from them. You can – and you probably will – get lost playing it.
BUT WHAT IS A TEXT-BASED RPG?
Throughout the game you are addressed in the second-person.4 For example
‘You find yourself backstage.’
You will find descriptions of places and things happening around you, such as
‘There is a small bar selling coffee, pretzels and champagne. In front of the counter, you see a few fake marble cocktail tables.’
These descriptions are based on dream materials and events that happened in reality, but that are distorted with a layer of fiction.
You will also notice underlined words or phrases in these descriptions. Like this:
‘It might be worth checking it out or escaping from it.’
If you click on these underlined words, you’ll find that they are links that will lead you to another description. This lets you decide the direction in which you wish to continue your journey. So, to sum it up, this game works rather like an old-style detective novel.
EXTRAS IN TAMING AMORPHALIA
During the game you will meet teleporting objects, indicated like this:
◎pebbles◎
They work similarly to the underlined words, but their function is a bit different. Taming Amorphalia takes place on two different planes: in Amorphalia, which is the ‘dream world’ and in the External World, which is the ‘outside world’. Clicking on the teleporting objects will lead you to a scene in the External World and then bring you back to Amorphalia with an underlined sentence so you can continue your exploration of the dream world.
In addition to the teleporting object scenes, there is some meta-gaming involved: these scenes will offer you secret passages to reality. The difference between the External World and reality is the layer of fiction: the first one has it, the second doesn’t. But I am already complicating things unnecessarily... Don’t worry about it; if you find these passages, you’ll see what happens.
However, it is no problem if you don’t come across teleporting objects while playing.
THE AIM OF THE GAME
You don’t have any particular task or aim in the game like freeing a princess, defeating monsters or solving a mystery as you would in Dungeons&Dragons or Final Fantasy.
There is no wrong way to play Taming Amorphalia. But if you wish to focus on the documentation aspect of the game, there will be an actual red line that you can follow. The red line manifests in the underlined words that are coloured red, like this:
‘On the top of the building, an inscription says that it’s the National Theatre of Regrets.’
If you follow this red line you will encounter the scenes that were essential to my research process.
ABOUT THE STRUCTURE
Since this game offers multiple choices in almost every scene, it doesn’t have a linear narrative.5 It may be confusing sometimes, and you might end up finding yourself at the same scene again and again, arriving from different places. That’s not a problem. In these cases, you can choose to make a different decision than the last time you were there.
In your dreams, you usually don’t have the option of just quitting a scene and doing something else. Now that I am inviting you to my world of dreams however, I want to make it as safe as possible for you. Whenever you are feeling confused or lost, or just want to try another path, feel free to click on the ‘CONTENTS’ menu in the upper left corner and open the ‘Map of Content’.
With that said, I encourage you to try to step out of your comfort zone and rely on your intuition and curiosity to experience the game in its full form.
You, as the player/dreamer, can decide where to go, what to examine, and what to do in order to gather information about the Realm of Amorphalia so that you’ll get a better understanding of it and therefore be able to ‘tame it’.
You might find yourself feeling lost during the game. But no matter whether you follow the red line or just wander around in the world, I promise you’ll end up at the closing scene anyway. Perhaphs you’re thinking ‘well then… this whole ‘choose your own adventure style’ is a farce…’
I cannot forbid you from thinking this but let me put it in other words: the important thing is not the destination, but how you undertake the journey.
Enough explaining. Now let’s see the game.