The story goes that whenever you access a memory, the act of remembering it rewrites those pathways in your brain. Every old thing is made new again; each line and detail reproduced in its grooves. That is the kind interpretation; after all, there is no way of knowing what is lost or destroyed within your own head. It doesn't account for the distortions of stress and trauma. The weight of emotion can pull at those lines; and none has quite as strong a gravity as guilt.
The Tell Tale Ticking is a tarot game for two written and designed by Louis McCorgi Lee for Possum Creek Games' Jam in Silence. One player plays the Guilty, who has three days to write a eulogy for the Perished, whose death they are convinced they are responsible for. The other plays the Perished, whose presence in waking hours is only felt by the ticking of a metronome, and who can only speak aloud at night, in the Guilty's dreams.
The Tell Tale Ticking is structured to generate a slow, steady build of complicity, complicated relationships, and a particular blend of guilt, dread, and doubt. It's played primarily through monologue and backed by the ticking of a metronome that slowly accelerates over the course of play. The eponymous ticking provides tension and rhythm to the Guilty's words, and the act of turning it off and ramping it up is a very tangible display of power the Perished has over the Guilty--they can try and tune it out, but only when the Perished grants the Guilty sleep can they find true reprieve.
The Tell Tale Ticking is thorough in the way it uses tarot: the deck is split into parts along various seams, the memory prompts are in line with their divinatory counterparts, and the game is played entirely within revealing a spread card by card.
I think the Tell Tale Ticking hits what it's aiming for. It's theatrical, tense, surreal, and cathartic. I have but one dispute, and that's with the section titled "vibes."
Structurally, the Tell Tale Ticking means to play with tension: the build and reprieve of stress. The Guilty is wrestling with memories that incriminate them, even if they can't be sure of their reality. Their worries pull the tension taut; the Perished releases that tension in dreams, twists it in a different direction, then ramps it up for the next day. There are plenty of genres that play with tension directly: horror does, yes, and so does comedy, and so does romance. But not every genre is focused on tension in the same way this game is, specifically. I think the palette provided by the text is conscious of that but, like many games, it's reticent to restrict the players from any vibe that might strike their fancy. I think that's a misstep.
Genre, setting, and tone agnosticism is pretty common in tarot games, especially those that lean on procedural generation--that is to say, a game which is randomly created through a series of predetermined steps. The scaffolding is static, but the colors within it are variable. If I can present a couple of lenses, we can look at games based on how much creative input they desire along a spectrum of scaffolding and color. In tarot games, I often divide scaffolding and color into spread and card, but there's nothing stopping that dichotomy from being flipped or erased altogether. Sometimes you can determine where a game lands on this spectrum by how leading its questions are. Look at the difference between Ben Robbins's Microscope and a given game of Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes's Dialect. Microscope is intentionally built purely as a scaffold for looking at a given subject over time and across different scopes of detail; everything else is provided by the players. Whereas Dialect has very particularly colored playsets and prompts within those playsets to create specific social dynamics and the language that comes out of and props up those dynamics.
The scaffolding of the Tell Tale Ticking is concerned with pace and rhythm: three memories and a turn (played thrice), a climactic declaration and the truth revealed at last, and a denouement. The card prompts want to ensure there is conflict and complication in the history between the two characters, and many prompts imply a larger society within which the two characters navigated that history. But filling in that color is where the play is in this game. Here, the choice of setting between a generation ship among the stars and a fantasy town above a dungeon is purely arbitrary. Compare that with Austin Ramsay's In The Air Tonight, whose setting is very much grounded in the time, place, and genre of an 80's crime thriller. Compare it also to Sam Leigh's Anamnesis, which the tell tale ticking cites as an inspiration, and which does not ask about setting at all, leaning on its established tone and letting the deck handle the rest.
There's a temptation with scaffolding games to boast that it can tell any story that you want it to--from a high fantasy adventure to a bizarre encounter at a bus stop. This ties into the larger temptation among indie game designers to claim the golden rule: if some part of the text doesn't serve your table, throw it out. It's a catch-all for covering your ass while also having your cake and eating it too. To be clear: I have been guilty of both of these moves. And, to clarify, I think there are merits to both full-scaffolding and full-color games; this is not a judgement of quality, just a lens to look through. But I do think the Tell Tale Ticking is not as agnostic as its "vibes" section implies it to be, and by enabling total player freedom in tone, it allows that delicious core tension to be potentially undermined or weakened. That is not to say that you can't play a setting that is oblique to a game's original tone; you could certainly choose to play In the Air Tonight as satire closer to Naked Gun than Miami Vice; but that is a conscious conversation you are having with a game's text, and is actually a stronger stance to take in contrast to that text than when you are enabled by the text to do so.
This, however, is not so much a fatal flaw in the Tell Tale Ticking, as it is a soapbox I am jumping onto. When you lean into the story that the Tell Tale Ticking wants to tell, you get much more than you bargained for, and it leaves you with the fantastical catharsis of getting to know the truth in the end.