It’s October 29, 2024. I live in the USA. Right now, we’re on the cusp of an election that could erode decades of social progress and plunge the country into fascism. Heavy start for an IFComp postmortem, eh? But if I was going to win the competition any year, with any game, I’m glad it was this year with this game. The Bat is now inscribed in IFComp’s historical record as a political statement.
The Bat is indeed a political statement. It’s also a silly game — a slapstick comedy in the traditional “parser puzzle” mode — but as Mary Poppins sang: sugar helps the medicine go down.
The Origin Story
I started writing The Bat in 2020. After working on experimental games like +=x and Deus Ex Ceviche, I decided to go the opposite direction and intentionally lean into old-school parser design.
Terse prose. Compass directions. Medium-sized dry goods. All the things that tend to rankle me about parser games, I embraced. These gameplay elements are often frustrating, in my experience, but I didn’t want to soften their frustration; I wanted to enhance and harness it.
In my tender youth, I worked at a luxury hotel, where I served rich and famous guests. I was a lackey to ring for fresh linens, room service, champagne (and to mop up the resulting vomit). I have found little, in this life, more frustrating than waiting upon “Very Important” patrons, and although you don’t work at a hotel in The Bat, the game still draws inspiration from my own employment history.
You do work at a hotel in “The Bloody Wallpaper,” however, which is an Exceptional Story that I wrote for Fallen London in 2023. I’ve written a lot for Fallen London over the years, including the “Discordant Studies” and “Evolution” quests. While I was working on projects like those, I had to set The Bat aside; and one reason I wrote “The Bloody Wallpaper” is because I still hadn’t finished The Bat. The themes were simmering in my brain, with the political climate applying constant heat.
I’ve already written about “The Bloody Wallpaper” for The Rosebush. I don’t need to cover the same ground twice. But The Bat influenced the “Wallpaper,” and the “Wallpaper,” in turn, influenced The Bat. Much of the design philosophy that I discussed in The Rosebush could apply equally here.
The Bat’s old-school sensibilities — and their frustration — are meant to reflect a servant’s frustration. Not just any servant, but someone whose life has been totally consumed by work, and whose personal traits have been sanded away until they’re just another…
Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person
Like compass directions and medium-sized dry goods, the AFGNCAAP is a parser staple. You’re not actually ageless in The Bat; you’re old. You’re not gender-neutral either; you’re a man. But you might as well be faceless, and your only cultural markers are derived from your job.
You play as the valet to a billionaire: Mr Bryce Wyatt. His name is plastered all over the game, but yours is never mentioned.
Some reviews have compared The Bat’s protagonist to Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster” stories. Although I know about Jeeves via pop-culture osmosis, I’ve never read Wodehouse. Jeeves (correct me if I’m wrong) is a larger-than-life figure, hyper-competent, multi-talented, always ten steps ahead with ingenious solutions to every problem. He moves on the sidelines, operates backstage, because he’s a servant, but he pulls strings like a puppet-master. He is Jeeves — and an AFGNCAAP, Jeeves is not.
The Bat’s protagonist is not Jeeves. You’re not supposed to feel like Jeeves when you’re playing this game. That would be a power fantasy, and The Bat, if it’s anything, is an anti-power fantasy.
Which isn’t to say that you’re not competent. You’re very well-suited for your role — so well-suited that you have become your role. The text doesn’t belabor this. Rather than reading about it, the player is meant to feel it. What the protagonist experiences, you experience via the gameplay: his obligations, his annoyances, his exhaustion. Very few words are devoted to expressing his thoughts, but some creep through the cracks, if you squint.
The Bat has a lot of parentheses. That’s part of the old-school design. Rather than trying to blend the narrative and the error messages more organically (as I did in Eat Me, for example), The Bat simply dumps meta-text everywhere. This text is “not real.” It’s purely instructional, removed from the story by a few degrees, and likewise any text in parentheses is, well, parenthetical. You can chop out the parentheses and their contents, and the story will still function. The game itself often chops out parenthetical text after you view it; re-examine this or that object a second time, and the parenthetical text will be gone. But it’s within these “tangential” and “less real” parentheses – and sometimes within text that isn’t even there – that you can occasionally glimpse your own suppressed character.
One example from early in the game: bringing a severance check to Chef Louis. When you get this check from the study, you forge Bryce Wyatt’s signature. The text doesn’t describe the forgery. The only indication of what’s happening is a parenthetical comment about wet ink.
Another example, much bigger, from late in the game: during the tussle on the roof, you’re shot by Detective Gundersøn. The compass blocks the bullet, barely saving your life. But this happens between ACT II.2 and the Epilogue. The text doesn’t describe your near-death experience, and the other characters don’t care about it. Instead, they start demanding drinks again. The protagonist’s own reaction is, once more, relegated to a parenthetical – the most load-bearing parenthetical in the game – until he finally breaks out of his AFGNCAAP role and speaks his only line of dialogue: “I quit.” Even this dialogue, however, doesn’t exist within the game’s text; it’s outside the narrative, in the ending banner.
Compass Directions
Brian Rushton wrote in his review that: “Perhaps the later parts of the game where the compass serves as a tool for control and destruction serves as an unconscious metaphor for the community’s over-emphasis and use of the compass and the pressure it puts on authors to do the same.”
Take out the words “perhaps” and “unconscious,” and you’ve got it!
When I wrote Eat Me, I included compass directions by popular demand. They’re a black mark on that game. They don’t complement the mechanics. They clash with the aesthetics. In Eat Me’s fantasy world, north and south, east and west shouldn’t even exist. But I built The Bat from the ground up with the compass as a centerpiece.
The compass in this game serves many roles. It’s not just a commentary on conventions in parser games. And even as a commentary, it’s complex: neither wholly good nor wholly bad. You move with the compass. You move Bryce Wyatt with the compass. Bryce Wyatt’s wealth, and therefore the entire plot and all its conflicts, was founded upon and derived from the compass. This positions the compass smack-dab in the middle of everything. It’s literally in the middle of Wyatt Manor.
Despite my own difficulties with compass navigation, I wanted this game to be simple to navigate (with the rooftop sequence as the sole exception). It doesn’t use ordinal directions. Only cardinals. The map is also relatively small, despite the “opulent manor” setting.
Economy of Implementation
In reality, a house like Wyatt Manor would have many rooms. We’re not at the Biltmore Estate tier here, but the Wyatts roughly correspond to real-world dynasties like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. One reason that Wyatt Manor isn’t larger is because I envisioned it as a city residence; if it were out in the countryside, then it might have approached the Biltmore’s size.
But the level design, more importantly, is another old-school element. Not quite as pared-down as a Scott Adams game, but flirting with that style. All the rooms are maximally functional. Any extraneous corridors and chambers have been trimmed. A house like this would probably have a library, for instance, but since the story didn’t call for a library, I didn’t include one. It would certainly have more than one bedroom, but that would’ve muddled the puzzles.
The player has to move around a lot. Most of the gameplay involves dashing nonstop between rooms. You need to quickly learn the map, and to hold the map in your head, and a gigantic, sprawling floor-plan just won’t do.
This same principle applies to the items. Wyatt Manor would have rich furnishings galore, antiques, artwork, etc. But since the game is so hectic, I needed the player to immediately pick out the important items from the environment. Therefore, only the important items are implemented. The player cannot get distracted by fiddling with some piece of non-essential scenery because none exists.
Almost every item in the game drives the story forward. Many items are multi-use, such as the newspaper, chair, and curtain-rod. As I was designing each puzzle, before I created new items, I would always ask myself if preexisting items could be used instead. Often, they could be.
The game’s small map and sparse inventory tie back into my Rosebush article. They’re another answer to the question: How can a game evoke frustration without being frustrating? Although you might feel like you’re juggling many items in The Bat, you’re not; there are only a few. Although you might feel like you’re dashing around a great house, you’re not; the map is tight.
The Inventory Limit
The Bat’s limited inventory is yet another old-school design element. All the game’s mechanics are meta-fictional, in a sense. They’re not just mechanics; they carry thematic weight. But the limited inventory, above the rest, does the most heavy-lifting.
Compass navigation might frustrate me, but it doesn’t frustrate everyone. I might sometimes yearn for more when I read terse prose in a parser game, but other people prefer it! Almost everyone, though, dislikes an inventory limit. It’s so universally reviled that, during The Bat’s beta-testing, I had a few players express disbelief that, in 2024, I would still design a game like this.
I knew that I was playing with fire. I didn’t realize how hot it might be until beta-testing. The game initially had a short blurb, but I expanded it purely to mention the inventory limit. This seems to have been the right choice. Players knew, going into the game, that I knew what I was doing. They knew the inventory limit was there on purpose. The game didn’t have to weather reviews asking: “An inventory limit in 2024? Really?”
The inventory limit is a core mechanic in The Bat. The puzzles spring from it. The narrative tension springs from it. If the player feels the protagonist’s frustration, the inventory limit is what generates that emotion. The text doesn’t say you’re stressed out; the inventory limit stresses you out.
But inventory limits are annoying. I wanted this inventory limit to inspire empathy for the protagonist, but I didn’t want it to mangle the game’s pace. It needed to be just cumbersome enough, and then no more.
This required some careful balance — balance that goes hand-in-hand with the map’s size and the number of objects in the game. You may have to constantly drop and fetch objects, but they’re always nearby, and there are never too many.
I still got the balance wrong at first. You didn’t originally have a pocket for smaller items like the matchbox. I added the pocket based on feedback from beta-testing, which, like the expanded blurb, was the right choice.
Limited Actions
The Bat’s limited inventory might be old-school, but its limited actions are, at least in this game’s context, new-school. Limited parser games are kind of my schtick. Toby’s Nose, Eat Me, and Midnight. Swordfight. all have limited parser mechanics. In all these games, the limited parser means something in the story, although I’m not sure if people usually notice. But The Bat beats you over the head with its message, and the walkthrough states it outright:
The experienced valet will ATTEND TO the master and his guests for every act of service. No other action shall distract the valet from his duties; no other action shall be permitted.
In addition to providing thematic grist, I also like limited parser mechanics because they’re easy for new players to learn.
I myself was a new parser player in 2014. I’m still keenly aware of which traditional mechanics made me stumble the most, and I try to avoid them when I write my own games. But I took extra care with The Bat to make it beginner-friendly. I wanted to design something that would be safe to recommend to a new generation – people who did not grow up with Infocom, and who aren’t familiar with parser conventions.
ATTEND TO is a wide-ranging command with many applications. It’s not simply a synonym for USE. It often means TALK TO in The Bat.
If you ATTEND TO an object and the protagonist picks it up, this means that ATTENDING TO the same object again will drop it; and ATTENDING TO it again will pick it up; and ATTENDING again, drop it. Etc.
If you ATTEND TO an object and do not pick it up, then you likely never will. This type of object isn’t transportable. Instead, you’ll have to act upon it by bringing a transportable object to it.
One thing the game might’ve done better is distinguishing these two types of items: the transportable versus the stationary. Perhaps by making the stationary bold and the transportable italic, or some other formatting trick. As it stands, you won’t know an item’s type until you ATTEND TO it and either pick it up or don’t. The distinction is typically commonsense – you can carry shoes around; you can’t carry the guests around – but some players still struggled with this. Even if the struggle fits the game’s slapstick sensibility, it’s something I could’ve finessed a bit more.
THINK, on the other hand, seems to have worked perfectly. Challenge in The Bat doesn’t come from trying to crack the puzzles. They’re meant to be easily solved. Their quantity, rather than their difficulty, is what the player has to overcome. Therefore, giving the player a transparent to-do list, with all the puzzles explicitly spelled out, doesn’t hurt the story. On the contrary, the THINK command induces stress while also making the game easier to play: a highly appropriate paradox!
The Score
The score in The Bat is a monetary value. It represents how much cash you’ve managed to earn for the Widows & Orphans Fund.
I had the idea to implement this system very early in development. It tracks your general progress through the game, providing a kind of handrail for the player, but it also applies pressure. Please the guests? Earn money. Displease them? Lose it.
A few reviews for The Bat (and for “The Bloody Wallpaper”) expressed a desire for the guests to adjust their donations (or tips in “Wallpaper”) based on your performance. This would’ve transformed the game into an optimization puzzle. Refine your timing, tweak your routine, and get a higher score.
But I have no interest in implementing such a puzzle in a game like this, and I’ll tell you why: it would be dishonest.
If you were able to do things differently in The Bat to extract a higher score, this would mean that your skill is actually valued. The mechanics would change to become merit-based. Bryce Wyatt and his friends would have to notice you, notice the improvement in your performance, and then financially compensate you!
In my experience, this is not how the world works at all. Admittedly, my experience is limited and anecdotal. But I have served people in Bryce Wyatt’s tax bracket. I have, on more than one occasion, run myself ragged to appease moguls and multi-millionaires, only to receive a grand total of $0 as thanks. What my own life has taught me is that society’s upper-crust will pay you as little as possible, on their own terms, and usually only on a whim.
So, no, you cannot optimize your score in The Bat. You’ll get paid whatever you’re paid. You’ll earn or lose money whether you deserve to or not.
Does this mean the score is “fake” or that it doesn’t matter? No! It motivates all the action. It characterizes the NPCs based on how much they donate, and when, and why. And it provides a final knife-twist when Bryce Wyatt himself dumps millions into the pot, revealing the whole fundraiser to be a farce. You went through hell for no reason. He already had the money.
The Widows & Orphans Fund is managed by the Repentance Navy, which adds another unsavory dimension to the score. Many institutions in New Gothenburg have real-world analogues. In this case: the Salvation Army. Not the most upstanding charity, if anyone isn’t aware.
The Genre
If you translate the title of Die Fledermaus, an 1874 opera by Johann Strauss II, it simply means The Bat. It’s a high-society comedy about a man who, dressed as a bat for a costume party, drinks too much, suffers public humiliation, and concocts an elaborate prank to exact petty revenge.
Turn the calendar to 1926, and The Bat premieres. It’s a silent film, based on an earlier play by the same name, based on a book called The Circular Staircase, about a man who – you guessed it – dresses up like a bat. But this bat isn’t a prankster. He’s a jewel-thief and a murderer.
And then in 1939, inspired by The Bat, the Caped Crusader first appears in Detective Comics.
The story in this game is original. It’s not adapted from the opera, the book, the movie, or any comic. Bryce Wyatt is not Bruce Wayne, but they share the same lineage, and The Bat is positioned in conversation with The Bat, The Bat, and, of course, Batman. Beyond these chiropteran media properties, however, The Bat speaks to the superhero genre as a whole.
Superheroes have existed in one form or another for ages, but the modern superhero is a specific breed. Stan Lee called the Scarlet Pimpernel “the first character who could be called a superhero,” and as the genre’s protoplasmic point of origin, the Pimpernel is an interesting case study. Conceived by an aristocratic author – Baroness Orczy – the Pimpernel himself is an aristocrat: Sir Percy Blakeney. He adopts his Scarlet Pimpernel persona to hide his true identity. The Pimpernel’s main occupation: smuggling French nobles to safety during the Reign of Terror.
So in The Scarlet Pimpernel, we have an aristocratic hero whose deeds of derring-do are devoted to preserving the ancien régime. This anti-revolutionary text, penned by an actual aristocrat with imperialist sympathies, is one of the principle wellsprings of the modern superhero genre. A wealthy gentleman with high-society connections, who can afford lots of expensive toys, and whose heroic exploits involve getting into costumes and slumming it with criminals to pull off death-defying stunts – sound familiar?
I like the Scarlet Pimpernel (the 1982 movie with Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymour, and Ian McKellen is great). I also like Batman (Batman Returns is one of the first movies I ever saw in theaters as a kid). But these characters embody problematic ideologies (to put it mildly), and as more years pass, certain undercurrents in the superhero genre increasingly disturb me. Alan Moore, although he sometimes comes off as a “cranky old man,” has criticized society’s current appetite for superheroes as a prelude to fascism; my own concern is that he’s possibly right.
Far too many monarchs and billionaires are depicted as superheroes. Aquaman is a king. Black Panther is a king. Iron Man is a billionaire. Batman is a billionaire. Wonder Woman is a princess. Etc. Etc. Obviously not all superheroes fall into these ultra-wealthy and/or royal categories, but plenty do. And yes, these characters are often legitimately well-intentioned and philanthropic in their fictional universes. Much has been written in Batman’s defense to argue in favor of his position as a billionaire: he’s charitable, he uses the money for good, and so on. But that is precisely what disturbs me. In the character of Batman (and other superheroes), the concept of “heroic billionaire” has been normalized.
In my ideal world, the word “king” would be one of the dirtiest insults you could sling at a person. And a billionaire is simply a king without a crown. Some billionaires, in fact, wield more power than kings, even if they aren’t sitting on thrones.
Bryce Wyatt is my attempt – in my own little way, in this small corner – to inject an alternative depiction of the “heroic billionaire” into the pop-culture landscape. If anyone is a superhero in The Bat, it’s not Master Bryce; it’s his valet.
The Rules of the Game
In the past, I’ve refrained from interpreting my own games. I think that can stifle how players interpret them. But The Bat is a different beast. 2024 is a different year. There’s too much at stake for subtlety. Few people seemed to identify “consumerism” as a theme in Eat Me, even though I felt like I was screaming through a megaphone. With The Bat’s IFComp victory, I’ve been given an even bigger megaphone. Whatever the game says might echo decades from now. I hope it’s loud and clear and obvious.
The Bat took four years to develop. During that period, the seemingly airy political issues I’ve been discussing have had concrete and traumatic impacts on my life. I started a Patreon at a low point when I needed help. Maintaining a Patreon takes time and effort; it hasn’t been easy; I’m grateful to everyone for sticking with me. Without the community’s support, I’m not sure that I would’ve finished The Bat.
The future still seems uncertain. I hope I’m being melodramatic, and that I’ll be able to look back in a few years, read these words, and shake my head at myself. But at this point in 2024, The Bat seems more important than it did in 2020.
Apart from the pieces I’ve already mentioned, The Bat had one last source of inspiration: The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir. In many respects, it’s a light, frothy, trivial movie, but it stirs deep waters, like a stone skipping over an abyss.
Thank you to everyone for playing – and for reading this long-winded postmortem! It would have been shorter, but you don’t win IFComp every day, and despite The Bat’s light, frothy tone, I hope it can spread some ripples.