Astrologaster

Astrologaster is an excellent comedy set in the Elizabethan era. It’s full of wit and whimsy: its characters are always introduced with a song, its themes are carefully developed and subverted, its twists are made to be silly and humorous. Boasting some great writing by Katherine Neil, the game more than makes up for its simple visual design.

The protagonist is doctor Simon Forman, a man who doesn’t let boring details like not having a medical license stop him from practicing medicine and calling himself a doctor. Simon uses astrology to help people, seeing in the sky the solution to their various plights. His growing success, however, starts to bother the College of Physicians, who vouch to prove that Simon is a fraud.

Astrologaster’s structure is a simple one. Each character is briefly introduced by a choir, which often makes fun of them, exposing their problems and flaws. After the chorus, they come to doctor Forman and explain what ails them – it doesn’t have to be a medical issue – and the good doctor pledges to look at the stars for an answer. This is where you come in: you have to choose which reading Simon should make from the available options.

Simon has a clear goal: he wants to be taken seriously by his peers even though his craft is more akin to fortune-telling than actual physic. To that end, he needs to get eight letters of recommendation, which will prove that he’s not a farse and that he’s perfectly capable of practicing his craft. You have a total of thirteen querents, which leaves some room for error and experimentation.

At first, choosing the right answer is not a difficult task. One patient, for example, explains that he’s feeling great pain during urination and in his lower back. You may choose the reading of the stars that says that he has kidney stones, or the ones that claim that he has dysentery or that he’s suffering from gout. In other words, you are not actually using astrology to find an answer; you’re using it to validate an opinion that has been formed beforehand: the stars are not the source of the diagnosis, but a tool to make the querents believe it. Sometimes, even Simon himself will comment about how he already knows what the problem is but will study the alignment of the planets nonetheless, just to be sure.

This is made even clearer when you and Simon don’t know what the right answer is beforehand: when dean Thomas Blague asks for guidance as to which expedition he should invest in, Simon doesn’t have a clue for obvious reasons, which means that you will just have to choose a star at random – or try to figure out if Blague is talking of real expeditions and search what happened to them. Either way, the stars by themselves don’t help, which makes the protagonist repeated claims that he’s using a bullet-proof scientifical method sound even more ridiculous.

Discovering the truth is not always the best course of action, however. Your patients are characters with peculiar motivations. There’s one that inquires about the gravity of their partner’s illness, but they are not really wanting to find a cure, but a pretext. Another character may not want the right diagnosis and treatment for their symptoms, but the wildest and most preposterous ones, because they are a hypochondriac or are deviously trying to push Simon to make mistakes. Since the goal is to get in their best graces and not necessarily cure them, there are times when you are encouraged not to read their symptoms to find the right diagnosis, but to read their character traits to find out what they want to hear.

It’s not every game that introduces its characters with a song – and a polyphonic madrigal to boot – and these songs always give some hints about their personalities to point you in the right direction, sometimes warning you that they are no fools; sometimes laughing at them because they are:

“Almighty God

Guide thy servant Thomas Blague

Reach forth thy gracious hand

And slap sense into him.”

These madrigals serve other functions as well. Sometimes, they talk about the nature of a character’s narrative arc: the verse “She is but a lady” that ends every introduction about Emilia Lanier explains how her troubles are connected to her gender, framing her attempts to become a successful writer as doomed from the start. Other times, the verses are reverent and respectful, but in a deeply ironic way: Archbishop John Whitgift, for example, is introduced as God’s faithful servant, but it doesn’t take long for him to show a certain predilection to Simon’s young manservant William.

The humor often comes from the characters’ blatant hypocrisy – they are usually scandalized by sins they themselves commit – or from their ridiculous ignorance. After serving a raw, green, exotic vegetable called “potahto”, a noblewoman and her guests are suddenly stricken by incessant purging and indigestion. The writing mocks the rich and the pious, displaying the former’s stupidity and the latter’s lack of empathy.

There are also several plotlines converging: many of the problems Simon must solve are of his own making. A character’s plight might be closely related to the ill advice Simon gave to another character – and sometimes the doctor is also pushed to reveal information about his patients or is tempted to use this information in his favor.

The absurd nature of some of the cases or of the treatment suggested by Simon also help make the narrative more comic: the good doctor, for example, can advise a patient suffering from intestinal worms to fast for two days and then smell a bowl of porridge so to tempt the worm to leave their body for the food. The narrative shows that Simon is not completely ignorant when it comes to his craft, which doesn’t mean that he won’t claim now and again that the cause of a man’s strange desire to laugh and dance everywhere is the tarantula that bit him. Since there isn’t much of a penalty for failing to acquire a medical license for Forman, the player is encouraged to choose the funniest answer and just play with the system.

Simon, meanwhile, is depicted as a pathetic man. He’s full of himself, defending the notion that he’s using science to come to the diagnosis; that’s he’s a doctor not just of the body but also of the soul – this is why he promises to solve any sort of problem, not just medical ones – and that the College of Physicians is just jealous of his success. He’s a man that masks his incompetence with pretty words and conspiracy theories, and who is constantly getting in trouble because of the absurd advice he gives. He truly believes what he preaches, however, which gives a touch of pathos to his journey.

The only problem regarding Astrologaster’s story is that the ending is anticlimactic. The narrative is building up to a final confrontation with the College of Physicians, but it never happens, making a game that starts with a wonderful madrigal end with a whimper.

Presentation-wise, Astrologaster uses a storybook aesthetic that fits the tone of the narrative, making the game look and sound like a play – there’s even a good pun with the word at the end. It’s pretty simple, however, with the backgrounds never changing through the course of the game, which can make it visually repetitive.

But Astrologaster is a game about its writing; not its visuals. With a fascinating – and pretty detestable – cast of characters, Astrologaster offers a witty, charming, bawdy story that certainly leaves an impression.

March 01, 2021.