** The Bat **
Vague mechanical spoilers in this review.
I put off playing this for a while because I don’t have any interest in Batman, and I thought this might be deeply related, but I needn’t have worried. There may have been loads of Bamtan references that I missed, but I almost never felt as though I was missing out. I would say that this story is not very precious about the superhero franchise, far more interested in skewering it than treating it with any dignity whatsoever, which I’m glad of.
Again, as mentioned above, I have minimal experience with parser games so the fact that this game had a limited verb set appealed to me, and the game does have a little tutorial at the beginning which explains the basics. One thing I missed was that I needed to type “Inventory” to know what I was carrying. Sometimes I needed to pick something up, but couldn’t because my hands were full, but I couldn’t put down what I was carrying…because I didn’t know what it was. I did get a bit frustrated with this. It seemed like it would be harmless to have the PC drop whatever they were carrying automatically if I tried to pick something else up, but item management is actually quite a large part of the game. For example if there’s something that needs to be swept, you’re going to need to get the broom, so maybe the extra friction of considering where to put the broom down plays in to this chore like nature of the game. I did take a sort of satisfaction from for example putting the tray down next to the drinks cabinet, because that’s where I’d need it, or the broom next to the debris pile, because that made sense.
Not all the game’s interactions are so straight forward or indeed, logical. Several of them operate on surreal dream logic. I’ve never known a newspaper to have physical properties even close to the one in this game. The puzzles themselves also have this element, which is fitting for the setting. Though I found the use of a moose head and engine oil quite jarring with regards to what I believe is strongly implied to be a lesbian incest threesome? This whole sequence really threw me for a loop, the one time in the game I had the uneasy feeling that I might have been missing something. I didn’t really know what to make of it.
One aspect of the game that I found very strong was a sense of dynamism in the party itself, the guests moved around, spoke to different people, rang the door. It sounds paltry when I write it up like that but inside the game itself the effect was quite strong. Things were happening regardless of what I was doing, and even whilst I was trying to do something else.
Due to my parser game naivete I didn’t realise was that I could abbreviate commands to just one letter until after finishing the game. Not having to type “attend to” would possibly have been a boon, but at the same time, the fact that the verb is so closely tied to the PC and the setting meant that typing it in full did feel conceptually fitting. I can’t imagine the PC using many abbreviations in their speech and it felt like a nice bit of role playing.
The writing overall felt very strong. I got a great idea of the PC’s background and temperament just from the way they described the world and interacted with it. It provides a nicely grounded counter valence to the more surreal elements of the world and story. The plot is put across with a light touch, though unless I missed it, there isn’t a huge amount of it, and it mostly exists to provide a light armature for the madcap scenes of the story itself.
I feel like it’s traditional to sum things up in a final paragraph, but my thoughts on this one feel pretty diffuse. I’m not sure the puzzles were to my taste, but in honesty, puzzles almost never are, and the perfectly written walkthrough helped smooth them out. I enjoyed being placed in the patent leather shoes of the player character, and the tight design of the game mechanics kept me secure that no matter how screwball the situation, the game itself would never come undone.