The Last Night of Alexisgrad: IFcomp 2021

The Last Night of Alexisgrad is a unique experience created by Milo van Mesdag for IFcomp 2021.

This entry is meant to be explored by two players who communicate with each other outside of the story. The strong characterization of each role (the Dictator and the General) sets a different tone for each perspective, offering vastly divergent interpretations from the same sequence of events.

It’s also a very lopsided experience. One player starts from a position of strength, and the other gets the rough end of the pineapple. If Last Night of Alexisgrad meant this to be an intentional message about different types of government and their relative strengths in a crisis, I ignored it.

I was fascinated by the unfolding meta-game in Last Night of Alexisgrad, which asks whether the player/reader wants to consider their own motives and the motives of their partner as something separate from their respective characters. It was tough to avoid sharing my reactions while the story unfolded. 

However, I felt much more distant from the story during the direct interactions between General and Dictator. As the players pass messages outside the game, their impassioned arguments and pleas for mercy get reduced to flat combinations of letters and numbers.

This entry was fun, and I can only imagine the work that was necessary to correctly implement different branches of the narrative while keeping them hidden from half the audience — the hard work paid off! 

I was entertained by the descriptive writing and the historical depth of The Last Night of Alexisgrad.