17 | LGG | LIKE A SKY FULL OF LOCUSTS
17 | LGG | LIKE A SKY FULL OF LOCUSTS
by: Ryan Veeder
Progress:
- I reached the end in around 45 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- There’s a lot going on here. At the core of it is this kind of religious horror—the colonel inflicts his morality on everyone else and opens a hellmouth to doom everyone else. It’s a bit like survival horror, in the sense that ammo seems limited, until the point in the game that you finally realize that you can’t really waste bullets much. There’s also a kind of meta element to it. At the very beginning, when I entered the “transcript” command, the game gave me the ominous message “Surely you are not so foolish as to transcribe…” and indeed at the end, I got the message “This game session has ended,” implying the narrator’s death, making it more difficult to extract the transcript. Not to mention the story-within-a-story and the apparent punishment of the critics who found many faults with the tale.
Things I Appreciated:
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I probably don’t have to explain that “shooting demons” is not my preferred pastime. (I kept trying to talk to them… lol). But setting that aside, I thought the game was mechanically interesting. The reason it took me as long to play as it did is not really because of the puzzles or anything like that, but just like… my unwillingness to shoot things both because I didn’t want to, and because I was afraid of running out of bullets. I got the impression from the creative descriptions of the demons that each might require some kind of unique approach to deal with. For instance, one of the first things I encountered was a worm that reacted to sound. Instead of shooting it immediately, I left it alone for a while, with the mindset that I would find some way of dampening sound later to sneak past it and avoid it. No. Literally just… shoot it. That’s it. Throughout the game, I kept hitting dead ends that were 100% psychological because I just had to shoot things and hadn’t shot them yet. So in that sense, I was fascinated with how everything turned out to be an anti-puzzle. The imp keeps escaping? Just shoot it again, it will eventually just work. It was interesting to struggle with my lack of desire/motivation to shoot things, and made for a unique experience as a result.
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This piece has a really strong sense of voice/character. I often found myself in a state of friction with the narrator because I wanted to do things he wasn’t interested in doing. I came to appreciate this friction because of the interesting power struggle that ensues. The narrator is recounting his story, and even though I as the player might feel like I have the power to decide what he does, I really don’t. It sort of calls up the illusion of player agency in an interesting way; the player in any parser game almost always has less agency than they are tricked into thinking they have, so being confronted by that and disempowered as a result, was emotionally engaging.
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One of my favorite game elements was the pentagram points. When I encountered these glyphs early on, I had no idea what to do with them, and tried things like, for instance, infusing the hellfire into them. When I finally got to the letter, I realized that the five glyphs and their locations corresponded to the Colonel’s wacky religious complaints about the fort’s sins. This wasn’t mechanically that important, in the sense that it didn’t speed up solving the game, but I did find it interesting as a storytelling device.
Miscellaneous Comments:
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I guess some of the things I described above could be reframed as criticisms. Why give these elaborate, unique descriptions to the creatures you meet, if their only purpose is to die to your bullets? I think the piece is perhaps meant to feel a bit like a deformed power fantasy (or maybe it’s only deformed to me because of my idiosyncratic hangups). But ultimately, I guess I’m just choosing to look at the side of it where it made for a unique game experience for the game to fool me into thinking I was looking at puzzles when the real puzzle is realizing the obstacles aren’t puzzles.
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I’m still a bit puzzled by the prologue and epilogue about the castle as a framing device. While it adds to the tale in introducing the meta-commentary elements, it did risk feeling extraneous to the core story. When I reached “The End” (the first time), and started trying to type “script off,” I was caught off guard when more text suddenly appeared because I hadn’t even been thinking about the castle part of the narrative. Perhaps this is another of the many examples of literary allusions being lost on me/going over my head, which has happened quite a lot so far during these EctoComp responses. Like maybe I shouldn’t really even be writing these.
(I say as I blithely continue writing all this nonsense regardless…)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
- I thought this was a really good example of writing a parser game with a very strong and specific sense of voice, and intentionally creating a gap between the player and the narrator. Often, it seems like parser games try to give the protagonist a more neutral personality to immerse the player, but this shows that writing with a very specific voice and perspective, using error messages to convey what the protagonist is unwilling to do, can be a compelling way of going about things.
Memorable Moment:
- The thing that spooked me the most was honestly the custom message for the “transcript” command, it really caught me off guard in a great way and I was still thinking about it going forward. The second memorable moment was when I descended to the bottom of the pit and my instinct was to shoot the colonel (everything here is his fault, after all), but was overruled by the narrator, which I found engaging.
DemonApologist_LikeASkyFullOfLocusts.txt (63.7 KB)