Clickbait by Reilly Olson
I really enjoy the premise of Clickbait. You’ve recently learned about a weird online photo contest, and you’ve chosen to be truant for the day from your dull corporate job to explore an abandoned subway tunnel that you read about on Reddit. You climb down there and (of course) get locked in. You want to escape, but you also really want to win that contest and its concomitant fake Internet points.
The narrative voice is lovely with its cynical edge. We are subtly mocked for having an iPhone 9 and for drinking disgusting energy drinks. The various messages to replace “Taken” are amusing (for a FitBit we find: “This doesn’t belong to you but that doesn’t seem to be stopping you, does it?”). We are further humorously scolded for attempting to take various things we shouldn’t, particularly when they are bolted or otherwise affixed to our surroundings.
Yet the game tries to be helpful overall. When we meet characters, it cheerfully suggests everything we can try in an ASK CHARACTER ABOUT TOPIC format. It often clues the correct course of action—at times, perhaps too much so—which makes the game reasonably simple to complete, with a surprise twist at the end.
I really enjoyed the setting, the descriptions of the disused train and tunnels, and the real, present-day milieu. The game makes it easy to imagine this type of adventure could happen tomorrow in some semi-forgotten city. The game is fun. The game is good.
But it isn’t great. And I’ve been contemplating what draws that dividing line.
In Clickbait, it’s a bunch of small things. The map is very east-west linear, which is admittedly mimetic of a train tunnel, but could have perhaps benefited from a bit of intercardinal curve at one point (even though I typically hate NORTHEAST and its ilk). The puzzles are well clued, but there are so many locked doors, often with the same solution: find the appropriately colored keycard. The game tries its best with its characters and its ASK epistemology, but for an abandoned subway system, there sure are a lot of people here, and none are developed deeply—they exist as puzzle devices. The photography mechanic, crucial to the player’s motivation, is unevenly used throughout—I didn’t feel the need to take that many photos. (And the most important photo I did take seems like a major loose end—the person seemingly trapped in an inaccessible room.) There are also several Inform issues that could be handled more deftly. In our very first train car, an “old coffee cup (closed)” will not open; a few cars to the east there are “an underseat shadows” which are problematic for both their grammar and their odd callout in the first place—presumably there are shadows everywhere in the train. As for the twist ending, I found it forced; the game, otherwise pleasingly realistic, veers into unlikely cliché.
I’m being picky and giving a litany of gripes when the overall gameplay is solid. In terms of my ballot, this game feels like a 5 or 6 to me. But with another round of polish, and not too much additional time (given the scope of what’s already been done well in the game), it could easily be a 7 or higher. Perhaps that’s my dividing line? Many good stories have solid settings, narrators, interactions, and the like. But the truly great games of Comps past have spent the time and care to get all the little details polished until they shine.