The Shivah

Heart of Stone
The Shivah Is a Miracle
by Dr. J.

Cast a Walter Mattheau sound-alike as a world-weary rabbi in Manhattan. Surround him with the chain-smoking detective that sounds like he has a tumor in his lung, a guttural street criminal, the quintessential yiddish-speaking rabbi, and the shikse Indian widow of a former synagogue member. Then, wrap it all up in a mystery mixed with theological crisis. Animate it in the style of one of the classic LucasArts (nee Lucasfilm) games from the glory days of adventuredom (e.g. Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, and, later, Grim Fandango). Think of The Shivah as a miniature (because of its duration) edition of one of those classic games.

Reminiscent of early LucasArts adventures, The Shivah is a well-written short-story compared to those earlier “novels.”

Although my classmates in seminary called me, “The Rabbi,” I am not Jewish. I have read from the Torah for a Reformed congregation, but I preceded my reading with the request that my hearers, “Pardon my Southern Baptist accent.” So, you can well imagine that I was excited about The Shivah. From the first melancholic strains of the violin solo to the careful and honest homily at the conclusion, I was hooked. In between, there were moments when it seemed like I was playing The Secret of Monkey Island except that the story was more serious than comical.

The Story So Far…

Rabbi Stone serves a congregation that appears to have dwindled to one somnambulant widow and an idealistic cantor. In the midst of the opening lines of a sermon built off Rabbi Harold Kushner’s work, he finds that he can no longer speak in any terms of authentic faith. It doesn’t take long to find out the source of Rabbi Kushner’s problem. It is the kind of depression that comes when one believes that God should have intervened and yet, all one has is failure beyond the most pessimistic expectation and obligations one is expected to meet beyond the most optimistic hopes. Then, as so often happens during a crisis of faith, circumstances get worse. After all, it wouldn’t really be faith if you could see all the answers and all the reasons behind the answers.

So, this honest rabbi finds himself to be a suspect in a murder case. The game doesn’t make him quite as hopeless as a character in a Hard Case Crime Novel where things start out desperate and get worse, but he does seem to be in a bad situation where only his own resources can help. The story suspends disbelief when the protagonist has no mechanism to go to the police for help once he has unraveled some of the clues or when the suspect gains access to the crime scene (and more importantly, its computer) after merely reading about the murder. Further, hacking into computers is ridiculously easy in the game. However, that probably isn’t any less probable that the way Interplay’s design team handled the whole hacking issue in Neuromancer. If the hacking mechanism was too difficult, it would no longer be a game. It would be an exercise.

Players will have to decode passwords for three different PC accounts in the course of gaining enough clues to solve the mystery in The Shivah.

At first, I was annoyed that the cantor didn’t merely give the new password to Rabbi Stone. Later, I discovered that solving the initial password was a key to solving the two later passwords necessary to gain access to various clues in emails and other directories. Use the search function, virtual rabbis! It will empower you.

As you converse with the characters that you meet (using the “select from multiple possible responses” method) or read emails, this will unlock additional locations to explore. As with many graphic adventures, there is a strategic map to use in moving from place to place and only those locations relevant to where you are in the story will be displayed. In fact, I went to one location so often that it disappeared so I would know that I had gleaned all the clues possible from that venue.

As in The Secret of Monkey Island, characters in The Shivah use a dynamic, strategic map to teleport from one locale to another.

Speaking (or in this case, typing) of conversations, one of the things I really like about The Shivah is that it offers emotive hints as to how to respond rather than the actual line that the rabbi would say if you picked a response. Naturally, you know from the outside that you will get a question whenever you choose “Rabbinical Response,” but the others are not quite so predictable. There are some places in the game where the response you choose affects the way the scene plays. At other times, the response will loop right back into the same spot in the conversation or story (of course, you have to replay the game to know just what I’m talking about, so it isn’t a huge problem).

Atmosphere

Though some may disagree with me, I think the dialogue is crafted extremely well. It seems like each character is consistent (with the possible exception of the shikse widow changing her demeanor with Rabbi Stone rather too quickly. There are a few typographical errors to be found if one reads all of the emails in every relevant account, but those might be considered verisimilitude—considering the state of email and text-messaging in our current culture. The voice-actors, however, are quite uneven. The gutter snipe comes across as harsh-sounding rather than hard-bitten. The Indian widow has a little too much energy for the role (to my taste), but the rival rabbi has just the right stereotypical demeanor for me to believe that he and Rabbi Stone come from very different traditions.

Some may not care for the musical score. The music is tied to the venue. As a result, the melancholic violin strains are tied to the dilapidated synagogue. In Manhattan proper, one gets a minimalist bongo beat out of a more vintage Greenwich Village. At the pub, one hears the violinist transform into an Irish fiddler. It’s simple. At times, it may seem more journeyman musicianship than virtuoso performance, but it works.

em>The Shivah begins with a question to answer a question. In most conversations and particularly in the final confrontation, be rabbinical!The Shivah begins with a question to answer a question.

As for the graphics, let’s be honest. These take you back to EGA and Commodore 64 graphics. The characters are pixilated and minimalist in their basic forms (more care is taken with their dialogue portraits). That nostalgic feeling about the LOOM and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade era is partially based upon the graphics.

Fortunately, the story works. There was a reason for Rabbi Stone to be uneasy about his past relationship with the murder victim. There was a logical reason why Rabbi Stone didn’t know that, before the victim died, the deceased had changed his mind about his former rabbi. There is a credible reason for the deceased to have changed his mind about Rabbi Stone. It’s an honest story, even if the plot was somewhat predictable.

Death

One matter that stood out with regard to many of the nostalgic Lucasfilm Games of which we have written was the philosophy that characters didn’t actually die. In The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert and Tim Schaefer used a wonderful series of deus ex machina to keep Guybrush Threepwood from dying. The Shivah doesn’t have that inclination. It will let Rabbi Stone die, but it has an extremely philosophical conclusion that prepares you for trying again (probably loading from your AutoSave position).

I particularly like the way the death soliloquy was written and performed. It gave meaning to the rabbi’s death without suggesting that it was enough. In fact, the speech wished he could have another chance which, because it is a game, is possible. It suggested that our choices do have meaning.

As for that final scene, let me offer a few words of counsel that shouldn’t serve as spoilers. First, don’t be afraid to do the same thing more than once. Second, pay attention to what the ultimate bad guy does—his position and focus of attention are important to your success. Third, even though Rabbi Stone is a former youth league boxing champion, you cannot rely of fisticuffs alone to get him out of the spot he is in. It will take a combination of rabbinic dialogue and solid punches to set him free. What questions would make the “bad guy” most uncomfortable, uncomfortable enough to drop his guard and allow successful punches?

Theological Aside

If you aren’t interested in theology, skip ahead to the ratings below. If you are, let me note that The Shivah doesn’t really contain much theology. Rabbi Stone is obviously familiar with the work of Rabbi Harold Kushner and he takes Kushner’s tack with regard to why bad things happen to good people. It is more the idea that God allows evil and problems to fall across the board, but provides strength for His people to endure them. I find Rabbi Lawrence Kushner to be more convincing when he speaks of religious experiences as being times of transformation, noting that only sometimes do believers step into the sea to find that they are walking on dry ground (The River of Light: Spirituality, Judaiam, and the Evolution of Consciousness, pp. 115-116) or to discover in some mystical sense that “In the same way that God can be anywhere and anytime, so too any act may be historic.” (God was in this Place & I, i did not know: Finding Self, Spirituality, and Ultimate Meaning, p. 117)

Rabbi Stone proves himself to be a “compassionate conservative” in the true sense. He holds to the old traditions and rules for he believes that to betray them is to betray all Jews. But he is true to himself as a human. He acts, ultimately, in love and preaches, ultimately, of faithfulness. That is why I believe that, even though the religious aspects of The Shivah may be more for atmosphere and setting than the center of the story, it is significant, meaningful, and a welcome addition to my list of important games.

Reviewer’s Snapshot: 7 (short, but significant)

Graphics/Animation: 4 (So retro that they may cause many to show disrespect)
Music/Sound Effects: 7 (just right, not virtuoso)
Game Play: 7 (relatively short and simple)
Story: 7 (generally true to characters and reality)
Price/Performance: 10 (the best deal around)

Reviewer’s Bias: 6 (wrongly thought it was just an adventure with Jewish veneer)