Steam and Sacrilege
[spoiler]6
The author opened up with both barrels in the opening sequence of the game, this is what I like to see, hit the player with everything you’ve got early, get them hooked, and then proceed from there with how you want to pace the game. This could mean a lot of different things, in this situation the author set the backdrop of the hotel in its prime, a building of wonders that showcased humanity’s greatest technical achievements in this alternative steampunk universe, the fire of creativity coinciding with the passions of the couple.
Now for the bad. The author nailed the pacing out of the gate, and then it stalled fast, and never really returned. Many, many words and synonyms were not implemented which made the experience very clunky for me. Here is one example after the mechanical bellhop was introduced:
">give suitcase to mechanical bellhop
You can only do that to something animate.
give suitcase to bellhop
You give the suitcase to the bellhop."
And then you flash forward to a kitchen scene where you are introduced to the actual protagonist of the game. It’s a breakfast scene, you have to wait for you don’t know what, your husband doesn’t sound too talkative, so you try asking him about your business:
“>ask derek about paper paradise
Derek is humming to himself, likely composing some new melody in his head like he does. You can talk to him later.”
So now that even your spouse is blowing you off, you try to leave to go to work and are told that you haven’t had your caffeine yet, so you drink the coffee, try and go to work, and you get:
">e
Not so fast. You can’t start the day without the proper dose of caffeine.
drink coffee
There is no coffee left."
Well, now you just have to wait around for whatever reason you don’t know with captain talkative until some mysterious stranger you weren’t even expecting knocks on your door to drop off a pamphlet.
Hooray you can finally leave your house and go to work!
You go to work and have to wait around because I guess as the owner of a business you don’t have any other responsibilities while waiting for customers. One arrives, you are in the process of selling her a wreath and then you see this:
“…glimpse of Derek walking to work. As he passes by the ally across the street you see him stop. An old homeless man stumbles to his feet and talks to him. Derek rummages for some change. Then there’s a blur of motion. Derek stumbles and falls out of sight. You lean to look, but your customer shifts and blocks your view.”
Oh my! I hope my spouse is OK I think to myself, so as a player I:
“>e
But you just got here. You should probably put in a little time in the store before gallivanting off.”
Forget making sure my spouse isn’t hurt, gotta make that sale first I suppose.
Then you call the police, to which they say you need to wait 24 hours before filing a missing persons report.
Really?
This is just completely absurd.
First, it is your spouse, not a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. The fact that it is your spouse makes it an elevated level of concern for the police. So the first logical question they would ask you is “What is your full name?” followed by “What is your husband’s full name?” and then “What did you see?”, to which you would respond something like: “I was working at the shop I own, I saw my husband walking to work, there was some sort of confrontation that I didn’t quite see, it was all so fast, like a blur, I ran out as fast as I could to check on him, and he was gone! He was on foot, and he was just GONE! Officer, I am so worried, I haven’t heard from him, and I don’t know what to do!”. To which the officer would probably respond with something like “Did you try calling his job to see if anybody saw him come in today, or if he mentioned something about having to leave work early, or if he was going somewhere?”. To which the wife would respond “No, I haven’t tried that yet”, and the officer would say “Why don’t we start there then”, and then it would progress to either some reasonable explanation for where the husband is at, or there would be a serious concern on the part of law enforcement to investigate things right now and in the immediate, starting with first calling into dispatch to see if a report was filed by the husband, and then a drive over to the last place the person was seen, which is right in front of that hotel, followed by some serious police work. Instead you get a nonchalant promise to drive by the hotel, no big deal, whatever answer from the police.
So the police just blow you off for no reason like your husband did at the breakfast table. So you go to investigate yourself, and what do you find?
You find some locked room where your husband is unconscious and hooked up to a bunch of machines. So you wander around the hotel trying to figure out some way of freeing him. One of the rooms I tried going through a door to the south and got some message along the lines of you can’t leave now because your husband is in danger, and the police would just think you are nuts if you tried explaining the situation to them…?
No.
You tell the police you found your husband, the man you tried filing a missing persons report on earlier, locked up in a room in that abandoned hotel, he is unconscious, you believe him to be drugged, you can’t seem to get to him, and then watch how quickly the police station erupts into a flurry of footsteps, bright flashing lights, and loud sirens.
An author has a tremendous amount of freedom to craft the story however they want, but in doing so there are many rules that need to be followed, and when these rules start getting broken: It disrupts the player’s experience unless also presented are some graceful subtleties to regain their trust in the narrative.
For example, figures of authority not believing you when you are in a helpless and grave situation is a common theme that runs through most of Hitchcock’s films. One of the things that Hitchcock did was implant certain subtleties, maybe a camera technique, an abnormality shown in the eyes, a facial gesture, a word, or line, or absence there of, or bit of sound, something discreet to cue the audience in to the fact that something is just not right here, and this strengthens your bond with the protagonist because you are now in this together with them. In this game you just need to take it on the chin that nobody is going to help you for no good reason.
You make it the caretaker, ask him a bunch of questions, get a bunch of silly answers about how the hotel is some sort of prison or something for the angel of death somehow, and it needs a caretaker for some reason, and it’s the current caretaker’s job to shanghai unsuspecting future caretakers, it was all really bad honestly. And then I tried asking some logical questions that weren’t implemented, and then I get zapped with a needle, and wake up zip tied to a wheelchair. I then broke one of the zip ties with a burr which pretty much never exist on wheelchairs because you don’t want to further injure people who already are unable to walk. I couldn’t get the other zip ties freed despite having a ton of stuff that could easily work through a zip tie, and I got stuck, and I was getting close to running out of time, so I resorted to the walkthrough which told me I need some scissors which I didn’t have, couldn’t find, maybe I forgot to bring them? I don’t know, this game had lost me by this point anyways.
My experience with this game in how it was presented is a 6. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever read, and there was quite a bit going on, there was many locations that were all different and interesting, the hotel design was really cool in particular, and I liked the classical grab a bunch of items and solve some puzzles parser feel to the game. If the author cleans up some sloppy mechanics, and straightens out the story a good bit, this could be a really good game. If the author did that, and added a lot more puzzles it would be an outstanding game.[/spoiler]