I played Anchorhead many, many years ago, and of course I loved it and it’s brilliant and I never forgot it.
And now it is time for me to try the Anniversary edition.
The quality-of-like improvements and the updated prose, not to mention the illustrations, all improve on the experience. Excellent. But I have a bit of a tiny issue, and I was wondering whether there were going to be any more instances like this. It’s about player knowledge and PC knowledge of the earliest incident the player gets to find out about.
Spoiler (kinda. It’s really information you learn really early on) Also, if you haven’t played Anchorhead, CW: reference to deadly violence.
So, in the original, as soon as you entered your bedroom for the first time, you were explicitly told that Edward Verlac murdered his wife and daughter with a shotgun.
In the anniversary edition, you are not. But when you examine the bed, you are told that the person who last slept here murdered his family. Unlike the previous expositionary longish text which is of the type “this is information you must now know”, this is more typically like “this is information that references something you know already”. Of course, it may be a stylistic choice to make it so that the player doesn’t know what the PC knows, so we go “huh? What? What happened here?”, except that we can’t instruct the PC to tell us that, obviously. >ASK YOURSELF ABOUT MURDER would be silly. >THINK ABOUT MURDER might be ok if hinted, but it’s not hinted and doesn’t work anyway.
Then, in the Anniversary, when we get to the kitchen, we are treated to:
Kitchen
The kitchen has been picked completely clean; nothing but ranks of dusty cabinets and empty hooks line the walls. Doorways lead west and north, a small pantry lies to the east, and to the south, the back door leads out of the house.Someone’s flashlight is lying on the kitchen counter; one of the movers must have left it.
An odd feeling of gloom overtakes you momentarily, and you find yourself thinking about the Verlac family’s personal effects — the everyday mundanities, the spare lightbulbs, the kitchen utensils. Were they all thrown out? Donated to charity? Auctioned off as grisly souvenirs? For a morbid minute or two, you are fascinated by the question of what Mrs. Edward Verlac might have been cooking for dinner, the night her husband blew her head off. What about canned goods, did anyone think to take them? Could they still be in the cabinets?
And, again, this feels like referencing something I should know about. Plus, in my playthrough, the PC is now specifically referring to Edward Verlac by name. In the beginning of the game she is all vague about Mike’s family, she doesn’t remember the family’s last name, and there is no indication of anyone called Edward being anywhere in the story up until this point. Well, there can be if you did other stuff previously, but I specifically went through a playthrough that didn’t (anyway, the previous one was just a reference to an Edward, brother of William; connecting that to this Edward, without specific references of an Edward-the-murderer, seems unlikely).
I honestly don’t know whether I’m being lenient or hard on this edition by virtue of knowing the original. Lenient because I can appreciate it’s a different approach, and I can’t say it’s bad or doesn’t work; it’s different. But hard because I really feel the disconnect. Very much so. In a game where gathering information is so important, to have the PC know about something like this which I really also should know about, and indeed originally did… it feels very odd, and honestly, clumsy.
Checking the two versions side-by-side, which I did to figure out what the deal was with this dissociation, impressed on me the care that went on fine tuning the prose and the gameplay, so I’m definitely sticking to it. I’ll keep playing. I was wondering whether I was being unduly harsh and finding a fault where there is only a bold new artistic choice. I was also wondering whether there were going to be any more, because it really took me out of the game. I kept thinking, “what did I miss? What did I not examine? What did I not ask someone that would allow me to know this information?” Because, again, in the original, the information is given explicitly. But here, it’s presented as though I already knew about it.