57 | THE BAT
57 | THE BAT
by: Chandler Groover
Progress:
- I completed this game with surprisingly little use of the walkthrough in about 1h47m.
Things I Appreciated:
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(This is a comment in two parts—this is the second part.) After returning from my break, I had calmed down and thought, okay, my prior approach to the game was creating too much anxiety for me to enjoy playing what appeared to be a well-crafted game, so I thought about what to do. I decided that I would just actively ignore the donation increases/decreases and play as though I had infinite turns, despite the game creating the strong impression that time-sensitive events were occurring. Using the “think” command, I looked at the list of tasks and just started doing whatever from that list seemed easiest. From there, this turned into one of my best experiences in playing IF Comp games so far. I eventually entered a flow state where I was just seamlessly breezing through the game, typing letters almost automatically to go from place to place. Any time I encountered something I didn’t know how to do yet (for instance: I needed something pronged, but had no idea what that would be), I would focus on a different task and then the game would clue me into something important (I ended up holding a moose head? Oh, I know what to do with that.) This game is so well-implemented and its puzzles so well-designed that truly, the main barrier I had to enjoying it was just… my own attitude and hangups.
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Something that contributes to the smoothness of the game experience echo
locates back to many of my earlier parser game discussions where I talked about how I would instinctively type the verb “use” to solve puzzles when it seemed obvious to me how that object would be used in that situation, but the games would slow me down by forcing me to figure out what exact language they wanted for me, refusing the use of “use.” In this game, the only thing you do other than basic navigation and examining, is the game’s selected verb, “attend to [x thing]”. This behaved as if I was only required to use the verb “use,” and as a result, once I was used to using the use-replacement “attend to,” I was able to use that experience to make myself useful. This system works very well with the inventory limitations. I don’t think I ever solved a puzzle by accident, I had to make an active choice to be in that location with whatever tool and attend to something. For me, this just… really worked. The game systems aligned with each other. -
This game is exceedingly strange in its premise. It is essentially satirical Batman fanfiction—what if legally-distinct-from-Bruce-Wayne was actually an irradiated bat creature that needed to be managed as such—that takes on an absurd bent when you’re presented with surreal situations like facilitating a threesome involving two characters with the exact same name, a rude countess who turns out to be a detective delighted to receive “clues” such as cat litter, and puppeteering your master as a bludgeoning device to advance puzzles. This was a very distinctive piece, I feel like I haven’t seen anything like it before. And I guess it comes across at the end as a playful skewering of, certainly, people with main-character syndrome, but also the entitled demands of an upper class who don’t truly view your character as a person.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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(This is a comment in two parts—this is the first part.) I had a visceral negative reaction to this game once the guests started arriving. It was honestly too immersive. I felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that was happening around me, and the game had communicated to me a sense of urgency that I needed to do all these overlapping tasks or face significant consequences. The donation addition/subtraction mechanic and the way people were wandering around to different rooms in the manor gave the impression that these were time-sensitive events that I was in the process of failing. This part of the game was an actual nightmare, in the sense that most of my nightmares are often this kind of social anxiety horror situation where I am not able to do what people are demanding that I do quickly. I entered a state of decision paralysis where I was afraid to continue exploring the game and was spending too much time thinking about each turn, as more and more guests kept arriving while I was in the middle of other tasks. So, at the 50-minute mark, I stopped playing to do something else for a while, and then returned. (See part two of this comment, above.)
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I noticed one game-state error in this playthrough during the tutorial phase. After I had put Bryce’s spectacles on (causing him to stop scrambling under the bed, he was now chewing on his feet), attempting to attend to him without having retrieved his shoes yet resulted in the message: “You inform the master that you’ll fetch his spectacles. He doesn’t seem to hear you. He is too busy trying to flatten himself to get under the bed.” This message seems like it should’ve been set for before he was already wearing his spectacles, and should’ve been replaced with a message about how I was going to find his shoes.
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One area of minor friction involves the commands to go up and down stairs. I’m not sure why this is, it must be some kind of psychological error, but from the cellar I would often type “north” instead of “up” trying to go back to the kitchen, similarly make north/south mistakes going up and down the main staircase. I think I only noticed this because otherwise, navigation became so frictionless. A question I have is, why did this mismapping happen? Is it an expression of the cognitive bias that north is “up” based on standard map orientation? Is there something less natural about up/down navigation in these games that inherently creates friction, or am I just personally weird about it? (What I’m getting at is: is this more of a “me” issue in terms of just doing a better job to not misfire directional commands, or is there something about the game world and navigation experience that lends itself to this?) I don’t have a recommendation here since this seems like such a trivial issue, but the game is so well-crafted I figured I would say it in case anyone wants to chime in about mental mapping of locations/navigation and how to encourage players to create a durable and consistent mental map of a game world.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This was a great illustration of how game systems can work in harmony with each other. I discussed this a bit above, but to summarize again: you have a minimalist verb set, reducing the mental clutter around having linguistic altercations with the game when you’ve already mentally solved the in-universe puzzle. But if you could just “attend to” every object in every room, it would trivialize the puzzles. So the complementary system is the ability to hold at most, two things in your hands at once. This feels counter-intuitive. Fewer verbs and fewer objects seems like it would make puzzles shallower due to the lower number of combinations. But instead, I felt like the puzzles had more depth because it required me to have a spark of intuition or recognition to fetch an object and bring it to a particular location to use. This reminds me a lot of the design philosophy I talked about in Response #26 for A Very Strong Gland, where the puzzles were quite difficult despite the limited actions, locations, and objects available. While I don’t think there is any singular formula for a satisfying set of puzzles, you could do a lot worse than taking the approach of, “I want the player to do as much as possible with as few resources as possible,” and being incredibly skeptical of each new location, object, or verb added to make sure it is pulling its weight in the game.
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This was also a good example of making weird uses of objects seem intuitive and natural. In a game like this, if you encounter a “newspaper,” you’d typically expect to read it for clues, or maybe use it as fuel for a fire. In this game, it functions as an absorbent rag, which I’m just now realizing is a joke about the newspaper being… you know, a rag. I mean, you could do this in real life, but I feel like a newspaper isn’t the go-to object for cleaning a spill. Nevertheless, it didn’t take me long to adjust to seeing the newspaper as an all-purpose transportation device for various liquids, smears, and messes. Similarly, Bryce himself becomes a tool (well arguably, he was always kind of a tool), and before long I was weaponizing him to complete various tasks to advance puzzles.
Quote:
- “Whatever you must tell the doctor to put him at ease, your long years as a valet have equipped you with precisely what to say: namely, next to nothing, with the assurance you’ll venture no more.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- My favorite moment was the sudden realization that I was building toward a larger goal of getting every person to gather in the same room. This wasn’t obvious to me at the outset, and your task list is full of essentially “fake” tasks to distract you (finding missing items that you will not be able to find). Once this clicked for me, I had an instant sense of how much progress I was making, and started to view the game through the lens of, what do I need to do to get each person to move into this location?
DemonApologist_TheBat.txt (282.8 KB)