She Remembered Caterpillars Review

She Remembered Caterpillars is a bit like what I imagine doing Chess problems is like. It requires you to think multiple steps ahead, read what spaces are available on the board, and work out how you can get each piece into the right position. Despite its cute facade, it becomes complex quickly. It starts with only a few pieces, then adds to it. And while each new piece might initially seem like a short solution to previous problems, there’s always a new wrinkle that keeps success just out of reach.

The puzzles themselves are focused around moving different color characters around a board, minding gates and bridges that prevent certain colors from passing. It quickly introduces the ability to combine, and then even remove colors. You’ll always have just few enough pieces that the ones in play will have to be combined cleverly to bypass every obstacle. Ultimately it’s a game about the order of operations. You’ll have to consider what pieces you have, where they need to end up, and work out how to get there from where you start. It also forces you to keep every piece in mind and their limitations–you might be able to get three of four characters to the goal, but it doesn’t mean anything if one remains stranded.

Alongside these puzzles are snippets of dialogue, tagging along and framing of your progress as you ascend a biological tower, puzzle by puzzle. These snippets appear before each challenge, decontextualized and more hinting at the overall situation than explaining it. There are suggestions of an almost post-human process that explains the purpose of each puzzle, but the dialogue for the most part is made up of memories and regrets. There’s a sense of estrangement, a feeling of longing to be able to have a conversation with a loved one beyond reach. While it remains vague, there’s a sense of grief present in all of it. If nothing else it lends a distinct mood to the bio-organic creep of the artwork.

It’s difficult for me to parse my feelings for She Remembered Caterpillars. I admire its tone and color, the artwork and dialogue resonated with me, and the slow creep up its bio-organic tower was a strong visual and narrative framework to house the puzzles. At the same time it constantly clashed with my sensibilities. A lot of my playtime in She Remembered Caterpillars was spent leaving the characters idle, attempting to work through the order of moves before making a move. Moving carelessly means doing several more steps to get where you need to be. It doesn’t lend itself to spatial exploration, or undirected experimentation. It clashed with my need to visually step through a problem in order to solve it, and there were a few puzzles that blocked my progress for long periods, only to find that the subsequent puzzles were easily solved. It was frustrating and upsetting, but less because of poor puzzle design but because it revealed a specific personal limitation.

I felt a similar distance towards the overarching narrative as well. As much as I appreciate the mood of it, the story and puzzles never gave me a sense of direct connection. There’s some effort to justify the meta-narrative of your actions, but it’s thin justification rather than a strong thematic tie. I did remain interested in finding out exactly what was going on during the story snippets, but it always felt like a story going on in background, which I was less progressing through or revealing, but eavesdropping on.

She Remembered Caterpillars is hard for me to parse. It’s a story that’s happening to someone else, with problems that I have no good solutions to. It’s something I’ll appreciate for the color and tone, whose individual details appeal but make it difficult for me to enjoy the overall picture. It reminded me of the story of a woman living in a big city, watching the life of a couple play out through her living room window. She becomes invested in their day to day story, but when tragedy occurs she realizes she’s a stranger, and the grief she feels is one that’s not hers. In the same way, I constantly thought about She Remembered Caterpillars, but for all the joy and melancholy I witnessed, it was something that was for someone else.

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