By All Reasonable Knowledge by BMB Johnson
By playing a parser game, the player enters a contract with the author. The author gets to set most of the terms, but some things tend to be non-negotaible. Parser games should mention all important objects in a room, for example. They should be constructed so that paths forward might be reasonably guessed or seen, even if they are not straightforward. And so forth.
By All Reasonable Knowledge doesn’t always fulfill that contract, unfortunately. The opening tone is light enough, with a tinge of satire, as it employs the exhausted “you wake up not knowing who you are nor where you are” opening trope. We’re then given a thorough description of the wrecked room we’re trapped in and suggested things to interact with to get out. It’s a decent start. But then the game begins to falter, forcing players to return to this original description time and again. LOOK only provides the briefest of descriptions (“You are in a dingy bedroom”—which is useless, since there is only one location in the game) and VERBOSE doesn’t rectify the issue. So I wound up constantly scrolling back up to see what I had missed, breaking the flow of the game.
Sensible actions sometimes fail. You begin the game with a lighter, but LIGHT LIGHTER fails, giving the default Inform response (“This dangerous act would achieve little.”). Some nonsensical actions do work. You begin the game with your Brain in your inventory, which you then can drop with seemingly no ill effects. Sometimes, the game is poorly coded: KICK NOUN gives no response whatsoever. X ME, which would likely be important in our amnesiac scenario, gives “As good-looking as ever,” as ever. Standard Inform responses abound for many verbs, preventing progress by not suggesting more useful avenues of inquiry. There is apparently an “LSM Manual hint system” which doesn’t seem to work—I could never correctly specify what I wanted help about.
The inability to interact reasonably with the parser made this game a slog for me. The fundamental mechanic to progress is THINK ABOUT X, which is interesting, but X is often very unclear. Again, filling in X for a noun that’s in the room (but that isn’t one of the hard-coded topics) gives a blank response. By recovering your memories, the game slowly advances, and it starts to reveal some darker secrets, such as an estranged parent and a miscarriage.
Eventually, after some trial and an abundance of errors, and the discovery of a phone I could dial which isn’t accessible in the game world (and yet is one of the game’s most thoroughly implemented interactions), I got out of the room. Apparently my wife had locked me in there and I decided to reconcile with her, achieving “the best way this game could have ended” with a score of 150 out of 80 since point-earning actions can be repeated ad infinitum. The barking of a dog appeared as an item in the room, but LISTEN didn’t do much. I never opened the room’s cabinet, either.
The game is not irredeemable, despite my kvetching. The writing is serviceable with some comic underpinnings and the mechanic of using memory to advance the story rather than object-on-object interactions has potential. I liked seeing the memories accumulate in my inventory and using them to move forward. There are some good possibilities here. I wish the game were more thoroughly implemented to satisfyingly explore them.
In How to Talk about Videogames, Ian Bogost says, “You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again.” That might apply to a range of parser games, but for By All Reasonable Knowledge, I fear the machine is too broken to be enjoyable.