Summary
The English language can be a way of communicating, and it can be a way of subjugating. Patience is a Virtue protagonist Louis knows this intimately. In this “cozy-meets-creepy” conversation puzzle game from teaisfortoby!, some interactions require you to answer only using the words spoken by the other party. The first such chat in the demo is with Louis’s boss at the local grocery store. She wants him to lock up early. All Louis has to do is assent. But to assent, he must reassemble her phrasing into a coherent, five-word response, grappling not just with elementary grammar but phantom questions of tone. Being the first of these puzzles, it’s an easier one, but the constraint is rather suffocating nonetheless. Louis is chronically ill and neurodivergent, and his difficulty talking back reflects his lack of privilege. These words don’t belong to him. They are alien objects he must painstakingly bolt together on demand. Watch on YouTube In general, I find Louis to be a creature of mingled power and vulnerability. Just look at how he walks – filling the screen and throwing his massive arms out, fists loosely forming a thumbs-up, like he’s spinning the very Earth beneath his feet. He seems awash with curiosity about every aspect of his surroundings – how the food tastes, how busy the shops are. He is always looking for an interesting bug he can photograph to show his housemate Natalie. He is a dork about local history trivia, partly because his own memories of his childhood town appear slightly fogged, and the old place seems to have changed more than one might expect during his time in college. Louis’s inner voice is candid and cheerful. Within all that, you get a sense of somebody holding himself together with huge effort. Even when Louis is upbeat, there’s a bit of brittleness. Some of the conversations in the demo are very difficult, as you might guess from the Steam page’s content warnings, with optional scene-by-scene notifications in-game. One of the most dreadful comes during a hospital check-up, when a physician asks about part of Louis’s body in a way that casually overwrites his gender. It’s absent-minded cruelty, flatly delivered between glances at a clipboard. Louis just about contains his own reaction, for fear of irritating his doctor, but the hurt on his face is devastating. I wanted to reach into the screen, scoop him up and get him out of there. The conversation puzzle constraints reflect the unreal expectations commonly placed on disabled people asking an exhausted health system for help, expected to remain civil and grateful in the face of prevailing neglect, or even outright spite. One of the hints Louis gives you during this puzzle is that the doctor would prefer to be addressed in a manner befitting his station. I’m not sure whether it made much difference. There is, at least, some scope to start over – you can answer many ways, but the scenario doesn’t appear to branch when you ‘fail’. Still, I was thankful that I managed to ‘beat’ the encounter on my second try. Louis’s life is only going to get more complicated in the full game. Patience is a Virtue is built around a supernatural mystery. At the end of the demo, he’s stricken by a mysterious force while waiting at a traffic light. The rest of the game involves interviewing witnesses about a “supernatural conspiracy”. The “assault” appears linked to a cassette tape, which has become the home of a ghostly voice. Within these difficulties, there is still space for curiosity and joy. Menacing bosses and callous doctors aside, Louis can spend time helping a local guy polish off his poems – a recurring encounter with at least a couple such conversations in the demo. The poems are ghastly. You never heard rhymez so terribad. And I guess we should allow for the possibility that the poet is a party to the assault. Still, the act of shoring up the verse brings a feeling of amicability to puzzle mechanics that are elsewhere crushing. I’m glad that Patience is a Virtue’s architecture harbours these moments of relief. Look out for the full game… sometime.