19 | FORSAKEN DENIZEN
19 | FORSAKEN DENIZEN
by: C.E.J. Pacian
Progress:
- I timed out after 2 hours of gameplay, having not yet completed the game. It’s a bit difficult to describe my progress due to there being a lot of nonlinear tasks (I’ve attached my transcript in case that’s useful to anyone, I don’t know that it’s particularly juicy but enjoy my typos due to my finnicky x key not always working I guess). At the time I stopped, I was in the midst of trying to wait in a room to allow a space elevator to arrive. I have no real sense of what percentage of the game I had completed.
Things I Appreciated:
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My favorite puzzle that I encountered was the battery puzzle. I intuitively knew how to solve it based on the note and that made me feel good. Other puzzles were less intuitive to me (like inducing shadow people to grab the viscountess and then walk all the way around to the other side), but I didn’t feel too bad about asking Cathabel for help since it was reasonable in-universe for Dor to ask Cathabel what to do. What I’m getting at is, the game signaled to me that this was a hint system, but also gave me permission to feel like it wasn’t such a failure on my part to have wanted the assistance.
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One design choice that I found brilliant is that in your inventory, objects with obvious uses have the exact command listed next to them, such as “crowbar (< PRY BARRICADE >).” The reason this is so brilliant to me is that, given the time-sensitive turns where after wandering around trying to get junkers to be in the different locations from the one you’re in so you can get one turn to do something, as a player you cannot afford to be wasting that single turn on parser errors like “use crowbar on barricade” (apparently I need to fight my urge to say “use”, parser games seem to really hate that one. I assume it’s because “use” is too all-purpose and vague). Because of this design feature, I had the confidence to know that when my window of opportunity opened, I would be allowed to “pry barricade” and know for sure that it would work. I also don’t think that this detracts in any way from the puzzles. It’s not that interesting to guess what exact language a game expects for you in using a crowbar to do basic crowbar things, so just telling me the verb it expects streamlines the process. In the context of this type of game, where the parsing is in competition with the survival horror timing management, I really think it was an inspired design decision.
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Oh, similarly: I love how at the start of each location page, it just has a very clear description of the available directions at the top so I can focus on other things. Example: “N: Custodian’s Closet S: [CHAINED] W: Audit Department.” When you are flitting between rooms at low health, the efficiency of not having to sift through sentence-long descriptions to recall which directions were available was appreciated to ease some of the cognitive burden of managing the game’s systems.
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Maybe it’s because I have just been playing Elden Ring (or at least I was, until I started playing Interactive Fiction all week… RIP muscle memory I guess), but the image of a giant golden tree leeching the life from a gray and crumbling environment was especially vivid and inspiring. I thought that description was breathtaking, and it has an interesting thematic element where something so bright and beautiful is also deadly and parasitic. The atmosphere of this game follows one of my favorite aesthetic environments: foreboding and grim but still eerily beautiful.
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This game plays with point of view in a really engaging way. Consider this narration, from Cathabel: “Just as Dor arrives, Junker Brutus leaves to the west - his elegant, dangerous and inhuman figure disappearing from view.” Would Dor see Junker Brutus as “elegant”? Or have we learned something important about Cath’s class perspective, that even when deposed, she’s still invested in the beauty of the terrible things (most of which are named after titles of nobility) that have ruined this world? I did not reach far enough the game to see this play out, but I wonder if Cathabel would really be willing to accept the destruction of the golden tree when (if?) it finally comes to that. She makes some wry comments about feeling inadequate when Dor is now wealthier than her. Would she be tempted to reinstate her own power despite the noxious ethical implications of doing so, instead of allowing the system to be shattered?
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Similarly, some really interesting moments happened where the relationship between the narrator (Cathabel), the player character (Dor), and the player (me) becomes entangled. In the first dialogue tree of the game, I picked one of three options, and then Dor overruled me to say something else, which was an exciting storytelling moment because of its implications for this power triangle. I also liked moments where there were dialogue “trees” with just a singular option, activating a similar sense of player agency revocation when it comes to Dor asserting her perspective.
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I was really invested in Cathabel and Dor as characters, and their relationship. I liked how when I got to Dor’s apartment, I automatically knew that I would find the ring on the bed, and sure enough, I did. I wish I had gotten to see more of this arc before my time ran out.
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This game was deeply engaging. Given the ominous “more than two hours” play time, I was expecting that it might be another overwhelming parser game and I’d need to take some breaks. Instead, I ended up getting so drawn into the game that the two hours really flew by. I think the best compliment that I can give to this work is that even after playing nonstop for two hours, I was still reluctant to stop.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The biggest stall point (though honestly not a huge one) that I had was a result of a reading error I made. So, just first, I will take accountability that I was at fault here. But, it still comes with a recommendation at the end. (Significant puzzle spoilers) After finding a silver bullet from Lis for the first time, I was on my way to finally unlock the DNA lock. I was having trouble getting to do that because of all the junkers swarming the area, so eventually I shot the viscount. I didn’t realize that I had used a silver bullet to do that, since I had never actively equipped a silver bullet. Incidentally, I had never attempted to shoot the viscount so didn’t recognize that he required a silver bullet in the first place. Later, when I learned that the archduke needed to be shot with a special bullet, I was like oh great! I have that silver bullet! Well, I didn’t. I kept trying to examine it or figure out where it was, and Dor would respond as I was using terms that the game didn’t recognize. I went back to talk to Lis in case I had accidentally lost the bullet due to a save/load, but that wasn’t it. I finally searched for “silver bullet” in my transcript to figure out where I had accidentally used it. The game did tell me, I just had directed my attention to the viscount dying and being out of the way rather than noticing the message about the automatic bullet swap. So while the game didn’t make the mistake, I did, I still have a really minor recommendation that I think would’ve helped in my case. I think after finding a silver bullet for the first time, if you use them up, your ammo counter should say “+0 Silver” instead of just disappearing the silver count as if you never had them. Similarly, after you’ve found one but used them up, if you try to “x silver bullets,” the game should say something to the effect of, “Dor is out of silver bullets.” That would’ve helped me get out of this stall faster. At that point, I thought I had softlocked by accidentally using a silver bullet on the viscount, so I called up the walkthrough and was reassured that there were multiple silver bullets in the game, so I was able to continue.
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There was a UI choice that took some getting used to, which was that when talking to Cathabel’s hologram, I would often try to leave to do something but get stuck having to press “4” multiple times to exit the dialogue tree. I learned to (I guess) be less rude to the NPCs in the game by properly saying goodbye to them instead of running off, but I didn’t like situations like that where my mind and fingers are that far ahead of what I’m trying to do that I get interrupted from that to exit menu.
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Over time, the threat of the junkers faded as I got used to them. However, instead, they became very irritating when I just wanted to do literally anything at a location and was constantly forced to leave. It felt random whether or not they would follow me into a new location, allowing me to backtrack into a possibly empty room. You might see areas in my transcripts where I’m just moving back and forth between rooms every turn waiting for an opportunity to have a free turn to do something. Eventually, I would just have to waste bullets to get past those areas. The fact that I sometimes was able to (apparently) get good RNG made it feel a bit frustrating when I couldn’t find the right combination of room navigations to get them to leave me alone for a single turn. Perhaps the intent was to make the player use bullets more liberally, but I was worried about the meta-knowledge I had that survival horror games can punish you intensely if you’re not extremely stingy with ammo. (I do not generally play survival horror games but that’s just like… an impression that has filtered to me through cultural zeitgeist about them). Even after being advised by Cathabel that I should use them, I still was pretty worried about it.
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While I enjoyed the different descriptions of each junker, they felt very mechanically similar to me. Regardless of how they’re described, my experience was that each one behaved the same way and had the same impact on the player (a reduction in health status by one level if you attempted a second turn in that location after they’ve “wound up” an attack).
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I found the dialogue trees at minor NPCs to be repetitive, where I was often asking the exact same questions to different people. I think even some subtle variation in the dialogue choices would help with immersion. I noticed that I was thinking about the conversations in a more transactional way to extract what I needed, rather than taking seriously the opportunity to learn about someone new. Maybe this could be read as intentional, revealing something about Dor’s character?
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I want to emphasize again, the brilliance of the inventory verb labeling. This is a lesson to be
very demure andvery mindful of the context of parsing. If the game is more relaxed and not time sensitive, it makes sense for there to not be verb labels and to let the player organically learn to develop the syntax the game wants. In this game, with an environment with harsh time penalties, smoothing out the parsing as much as possible allows for a balance to be achieved where the player is able to focus less on the basic parser and more on higher-order puzzles. -
In terms of dialogue tree systems, the note I take away from this game is that while these trees narrow down the possibilities so that the player doesn’t have to waste time guessing what to ask about, it can also show the seams a bit by restricting options so much, especially if there isn’t sufficient variety in those options to sustain immersion across multiple NPC encounters. It makes me wonder if these NPC encounters would’ve felt more satisfying if delivered in-scene as a singular pre-written conversation, with dialogue trees only after that if you need clarification or a reminder of something, rather than using the dialogue trees to lead the initial conversation.
Quote:
- “These are the old streets of the original city: grey brick buildings with peaked roofs crisscrossed with sagging, tangled cables. Behind the familiar skyline, obscuring the stormy face of Forsaken Edge, looming over even the incongruous silhouette of my Night Palace: a great golden tree spreads its branches across the sky.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- There’s one line in my transcript where I wrote in all caps, and it was “SHOOT BRUTUS” because I was so excited to finally have a way of stopping this thing from camping out at the bridge controls. It was a great moment in player agency that came after training me to use evasive tactics first, but still giving me a gun after that lesson so I had the option to get rid of something if it’s really annoying me that much.
DemonApologist_ForsakenDenizen.txt (231.6 KB)