valley of glass by Devan Wardrop-Saxton
I’m of two minds about valley of glass.
I.
I come to IF by way of poetry, and have specifically yearned for a lyrical use of the parser form, or at least a satisfying short-parser experience. Other examples entered into past Comps have tended to collapse under their own weight, oozing pretentiousness or evaporating into ellipses. The opening line of valley of glass awakens me:
It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith.
The prose is tight and immediately introduces the story’s twin tensions: you are trapped in the eponymous valley and are indentured to a blacksmith. Heading east from the starting road presents a river, “a silvery, south-flowing snake,” whose water is “cold enough to cut you, sharp and glacial even through your boots.” The writing is lovely—chiseled and ominous. Each description is imbued with myth, even if we’re not certain what those myths mean.
Most directions you travel are instead those you’ve traveled in memory. And each describes some egress you’ve previously attempted and failed. We are trapped, then, in this valley of glass, on the brink of another blacksmith day.
The game is a meditation on what it means to wait, to do nothing but remember, and it’s about the vacant moments that other stories elide. It’s about what it means to literally have no escape, how long seven years of required labor must feel when we are only at the beginning of the first one.
The game economically offers these themes through minimal but meaningful travelling. It is an excellent example of what a cohesive, lyric parser game might be.
II.
I wear a pair of boots and hold a polishing cloth. Logically, I try to polish my boots:
*** Run-time problem P10: Since leather boots is not allowed the property “polished”, it is against the rules to try to use it.
You polish leather boots until it gleams.
The game’s spell is irrevocably broken.
Beyond this particular error, the problem with valley of glass is that Inform comes with preloaded actions and responses that are helpful in many other scenarios but are useless here. “You jump on the spot.” “Time passes.” “You aren’t feeling especially drowsy.” None of that dross matters in this particular context, and yet it still exists. It’d be nice to be told something other than “That’s plainly inedible” when I attempt to eat my silver apple or golden pear.
I’ve read that some players use X ME as an acid test for how they expect a Comp parser game to fare. A meaningful response augurs well; “as good-looking as ever” suggests the author is failing to show their membership card. It might be gatekeeping in the abstract, but here X ME would very much benefit from something other than the default response it provides, because the story is drawn from a particular folk tale, and we are inhabiting a particular character from it. Motivation and worldview matter.
I briefly wondered if the game should instead be choice-based, though I’m convinced the act of traveling has meaning. It would be markedly better, then, to trim valley of glass to a limited-verb format: the directions, X, and maybe POLISH. (RUB and CLEAN also elicit default responses, alas.)
I’m dismayed the author has made some fundamental missteps, and I don’t trust their command of the form. Perhaps it was just a few rooms’ worth of pretty writing after all.
III.
Which mind is right? I’d prefer to give the author the benefit of the doubt. If we play the game the way it exactly expects us to play it, the effects are luminous. But parser games are never played so cleanly. That’s why authors have playtesters and transcripts and hours of arguing with code. It appears valley of glass did not go through such a process; it feels more like a whim than anything else. That diminishes any effect it might have. And that’s unfortunate, because there are good strategies to be studied here for future short-form parser auteurs.