2 | UNDER THE COGNOMEN OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
2 | UNDER THE COGNOMEN OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
by: Jim Nelson
Progress:
- After two hours of gameplay (where I’m required to stop for judging) I have found only 7 out of 18 clues and I feel like I’m not that far in the story yet. It’s unfortunate—I’m not really accustomed to analyzing work without completing it. Were this not being judged for a competition, I definitely would have continued playing.
Things I Appreciated:
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The writing quality is very high. It has just enough description to create a scene without belaboring the point. There’s a very distinct tone and mood to it. I feel like I should say more about it since proportionately, my primary experience of playing this game was enjoying immersive, well crafted writing, but I meander on to a lot of other random topics in this response. So, I just want to emphasize that here.
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It has that referential quality where you feel like it is referring to existing works but still retains a distinct identity. As I played I was thinking of Anchorhead (admittedly one of the only two parser games I have ever played before this, but imagine if I compared it to Unnkulia instead…) as well as The Prestige (and maybe even Tenet a bit??) but not in a way where I felt like it was derivative.
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Mr. Belyle (who I am assuming is a demon, i.e., Belial). I have no doubt that I can change him, etc. I wish I made it far enough to become an authentic Mr. Belyle stan.
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The entire split/duplicate plot point is so intriguing, I wish I got to see all the creative ways it would eventually get used since it has a ton of potential.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I want to start this by saying that this game does a great job offering help, hints, and prompting what types of things you should be interacting with. That being said, aspects of the parser gameplay are unnatural to me. For instance, I reached a point in the hotel suite where it turned out that the “solution” was to just leave and go do something else, which turned out to be to return to a different place I had already checked (the bar/polling place) that has someone new there due to the passage of time. I guess I find this unnatural because I don’t like to feel like I have to aimlessly re-check every location every so often just in case a new event is available. There’s a bit of immersion lost for me when I think, in-universe, this character would already know why they should go to this location next based on their internal drives and motivations and just do that, whereas the much more fallible out-of-universe player (my sorry ass) doesn’t always have a strong enough grasp of what’s going on to naturally make the choices that the character would. I suspect that this is a (prior to this, invisible to me) parser game norm that this is how players are expected to interact with locations (i.e., if you don’t know what to do, systematically backtrack through every location until you find something). To bring this long-ass tangent to a merciful end, I don’t think the author has done anything wrong here really and it boils down to my inexperience with the genre, but I figured I’d report my thoughts regardless.
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I found it disorienting that this was in 2nd person point of view, because the perspective character (I think?) is changing over the course of the scenes in different eras. Or maybe it’s the same person in all these times and I just didn’t fully grasp that? The reason I think it’s disorienting is because if written in 3rd person, you’d see “Theophilus does x thing” and be instantly anchored to whoever the point of view character is. But in 2nd person, it’s always “you” doing things regardless of who “you” are, so if the POV character changes it can be hard to track that. I suspect there is a tradeoff here where 3rd person is considered to be less immersive (since you are filtering thoughts and actions more by attributing them to Theophilus instead of just thinking them “yourself”) but I don’t know, I think for my personal tastes if the character is going to be someone extremely specific and distinct (as opposed to a blank protagonist) I would prefer 3rd person. Maybe I’ll change my mind on this if I ever go back to fully play the game after the event ends, having experienced (I assume) several more 2nd person parser games by that point.
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And just a minor point, I feel this game uses a lot of era-specific diction (e.g., “toper”, “gibus”). While I just looked these words up outside the game, I wonder if having an in-game glossary for setting-specific terms like this would be worthwhile?
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Well, in general, I learned a lot about the basic function of parser games. In particular, what I would highlight is how the writing works to direct you to the things that you should interact with. I think this is accomplished especially with the spacing of paragraphs, with each paragraph having a line or two pointing to a specific scene element. This is noticeably different than a more narrative writing style where the reader is a less active participant. This piece makes great use of shorter, punchier paragraphs making a single observation rather than trying to do too much at once. The writing is very efficient, without losing important tone/atmosphere/sensory detail.
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Mental mapping—one of the benefits of the “aimless wandering” gameplay style that I discussed above is that it helps you develop an internal mental map of which locations are connected to each other. This game (at least as far as I got) doesn’t have an overwhelming number of locations, so after traversing them a few times I felt like I intuitively knew which direction commands to enter to get where I needed to go. The “thing I learned” here is the economy of space—having fewer locations that are more densely used is better than having a sprawling map that is more static (and avoiding the feeling that you are just being guided along a hallway). Based on the progress I did make in the 2 hours, I felt like the scope of the map was appropriate to the scope of the game.
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I think based on this experience, it makes me more interested in playing parser games but far less interested in ever trying to write one. I’m just picturing the author spending god knows how long programming this, and then some random no-parser-knowledge-ass person like me types a command like “put gibus on poe’s head” to get the result “Edgar Allan Poe doesn’t appear to have any head,” a patently absurd statement which I laughed at and then felt bad about laughing at. The thought of having to preemptively imagine what kind of wacky ideas your players have so that you can program sensible responses feels like a brutally Sisyphean task. The alternative, being to just have to accept that even in your expertly written game, it’s an inevitability that a player might be told that Poe doesn’t have a head, is something that I would have a hard time coping with as an author.
Quote:
- “Without a doubt, it’s your double lying across the gurney—your duplicate, inert and inanimate.” (The moment I said, “Excuse me, WHAT?”)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
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Choosing between “fame” or “literary” and then walking down the split hallway to see your doppelgänger in the mirror, really punctuates the stakes of the contract and was a really cool moment.