I completed this game with surprisingly little use of the walkthrough in about 1h47m.
Things I Appreciated:
(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.
Something that contributes to the smoothness of the game experience echolocates 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:
(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.)
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.
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:
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.
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?
I timed out at the 2-hour mark, having not completed this game. I scored 60 points, solving four of the puzzles. There were two remaining puzzles that I had been working on for a long time but could not solve: I could not find an obol to give to Charon to access the Underworld; I could not solve the puzzle involving scales in Thebes and might have even softlocked it.
Things I Appreciated:
I just recently watched a show called Kaos on Netflix, so I was more interested in Greek mythology than I normally would be. I enjoyed the use of Greek terminology (things like amphora; obol) that I had to learn in order to advance puzzles. I liked the feeling that I was in an unfamiliar cultural location, but where the protagonist is comfortable and isn’t going to spell out for herself exactly what an “obol” is, so I need to do that work for myself. It made it a more active process, and I quickly started looking up things on Wikipedia/Google etc for assistance. As annoying as it can be, not having a walkthrough or in-game definitions of terms does make me approach them differently: like, no one else is going to help you get through this, you’d better get serious. There is something empowering about solving a puzzle under those conditions, even if it is ultimately not ideal.
I liked the gating of puzzles, where they were mostly nonlinear and can be done in any order. When I was stuck on something, I would just go work on something else, until the end when the only puzzles I had left were the ones I couldn’t solve. Being allowed to explore more and gain experience before returning rather than requiring me to solve them in an exact order allowed me to make more progress than I think I otherwise would have.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
I encountered probably dozens of weird bugs and errors. I’ll try to describe these in terms of categories of errors. Feel free to look at the attached transcript if you want more information of how I flailed through this game.
(1) Minor implementation errors: The first main category is minor implementation errors, where clearly there was just a slight mixup in the code. For instance, in the location Agora of Thebes, you are told that one of the exits is “Gates of Thebes (S).” However, there is no exit from the south out of this location, you have to guess that it’s actually southwest. While annoying, this seems like a minor error to me because the text could just be updated to “Gates of Thebes (SW)” and solve this issue. Another example of this would be in the “investigate” command. This command (which I wish I had found earlier) lists out interactable objects in the room. However, this is not always accurate. In the location Heroon of Kadmos, investigate fails to list the “inscription” as one of the interactable objects, even though the inscription is mentioned in the room text.
(2) Chat GPT description carnage: This game features Chat GPT produced/edited text at different locations. Often, things in the (for a parser game, somewhat long) descriptions generated appear to be things that you could interact with, but the game hasn’t implemented them. Why tell me that there are mortars and pestles on a counter, but then deny the existence of the mortars and pestles and the counter if I try to interact with them? This creates a conflicting relationship between the reader and the descriptions. On one hand, I wanted to tune these out since I was so often rebuffed from trying to examine/make sense of objects in the the descriptions. But, on the other hand, in a parser game, to solve puzzles you are required to pick out things in the descriptions to focus on to find solutions. So I found myself trying to do both things at once, in an unproductive way.
(3) Location Permeability: I’m sure there’s a more technical term for this kind of error, but I’m describing it as “location permeability.” By this I mean, when you take actions at a certain location, objects at other locations permeate what the reader imagines is a conceptual wall separating that location from the others to interact in a jarring way. For example: the description in the Secret Garden location says that “[your] eyes would be immediately drawn to a statue of an incomprehensibly beautiful man.” But attempting to “x statue” here calls up the description of the Aphrodite statue in the previous room. The game didn’t recognize that the Aphrodite statue wasn’t here, and this was a significant barrier for me in solving this room because it took me a long time to return to trying to look at the man specifically, which held the instructions to the puzzle that I had been failing to solve and flailing around with. Another example of this, from the same room, is if you try to “extinguish candles” in this room, the game says “You can’t reach into Prytaneion Hall. This doesn’t make any sense.” (On that, the game and I agree.) The game seems to be recalling the torch puzzle from another room, rather than realizing that I am trying to extinguish the candles right here in front of me. The final example of this came when I was desperately trying to solve the scale puzzle in Thebes. I had resorted to placing different objects on the six pans to test them. One of these objects was a water lily. I placed it on the scale without issue. The issue came when I tried picking it up. “Take water lily” summons the text from the apparently super-cursed Secret Garden location where you’re only allotted a single lily: “It would be a shame to remove any more of those beautiful flowers. Frogs could be sleeping in them!” This meant that the water lily was irretrievably stuck on the pan.
Okay, so enough about the errors. I also want to give some feedback on the map and puzzle design. Of the four puzzles that I solved, they were all self contained and solvable within that room. That is, you navigate the world, enter the temple, get the puzzle instructions, and then everything you need is in that room (or in the “help” verb list which is essential reading to make progress). The question that leaves me with is: what is the purpose of the rest of the map? There are many interconnected city/port/gate/agora locations that have been added to the game, but almost none of these locations have anything that you can do in them other than move to a different location. When I couldn’t solve puzzles (like the obol puzzle, which appears to be some kind of social puzzle where I need to find a coin somewhere in the world to give to Charon), I was torn as to what to do. The grim task of going through every overworld location and trying to poke at the uninteractable descriptions in case one of them miraculously produced a coin seemed like a bad strategy, given that all other puzzles seem locked to what’s immediately nearby. Yet, that is what I was contemplating doing. So I think the number of locations could be greatly focused down to match the scope of the world. A smaller world with a higher proportion of locations being puzzle sets feels richer and more satisfying than a sprawling map that is difficult to find things to interact with.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
Using Chat GPT to generate descriptions, which then adds in objects that can’t be interacted with, is deeply frustrating for players. Parser game room descriptions need to be precisely tailored to not lead players to interact with illusory items. This requires a lot of specificity of detail, and efficiency in not overstating what is present, which is the opposite of what Chat GPT seems to provide (loose, generic, and vague text).
This is a valuable lesson in scope. I just think about all the effort that must have gone to programming all the locations that are severely underutilized. As a player, I’d rather have a short game with three beautifully implemented and thoroughly vetted/tested puzzles, than a sprawling game with six or seven messy puzzles that are hit and miss. So as an author, the advice I take away from that is to continually check back in with the scope of the project and the amount of time I have left to submit it (in a case like this where there was a specific deadline), to see if I need to prune some of my planned branches/sections.
Quote:
“The key to passage lies from the lightest touch to the heaviest step.” (I read these words dozens of times trying to make sense of what to do, so they are kind of burned in my memory.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
I really thought I was never going to solve the Poseidon temple season puzzle within the 12-turn time limit, I was so relieved that I had actually solved it after making so many botched guesses.
Oh, that’s fascinating. There was a conversation back in February about how a lot of us confuse east and west (with each other, flipping the map left/right), so directional confusion is certainly a thing.
But I don’t think I really confuse north/south with up/down. I feel like especially in buildings, I generally think of the separate floors as separate maps, with up/down connecting between them: it helps “chunk” the space into manageable pieces. In fact, I’ve often had confusion when games have directional synonyms for stairs (where you can use both up and east to climb a set of stairs) but now I’m wondering if that’s because they didn’t map to north/south?
But that confusion makes a lot of sense in The Bat where the map is so small and the upstairs and downstairs hardly need to be thought of as separate “floors” – there are only three rooms upstairs and one cellar room?
I don’t know how to encourage that, except that of course, visual maps can work well for the players who can see them: I find the steps confusing in this map from The Master of the Land but I think it illustrates the “separate floors” thing pretty well?
That thread is an interesting read. I don’t have issues with east/west at all that I can recall.
To say a bit more, I visualize the maps in games from a top down perspective, rather from a “standing in the room looking around” perspective.
Retracing the development of my mental map of The Bat, I think what is happening here is:
I start the game upstairs, which is an east/west hallway.
Upstairs Corridor: East and west exits are accounted for, leaving north and south as the options for the staircase entrance. I automatically assigned the staircase as being on the south side of the hallway because of the cognitive bias that south is down. So my mental map has a staircase leading down to the south, even though the text did not state the direction of the staircase beyond “down.”
Kitchen: From the kitchen, north and east exits are accounted for, leaving west and south as the possible walls for the staircase to the cellar. Using the same cognitive bias, my brain auto-assigned the stairs to “south” because south is visually “down” on a map when you are looking at it from above. Then, from the cellar, the stairs in this mental map lead north back into the kitchen.
Mosaic Hall: East and west exits are accounted for. I mapped south as a wall, since there’s a room south of it (the Ballroom) that you can’t access from here. The north exit (foyer) becomes essentially irrelevant after all the guests arrive, so my mind overwrote the north exit with the staircase leading up as a continuation of the map I had written in my head with a staircase leading south from above. In my mental map, the upper corridor is directly above the foyer, even though that makes less sense architecturally. (Why would there be stairs leading up/behind the front door?)
I don’t know if there’s any game design lessons to be learned from this, or if I just learned that my default mental mapping is bad.
Speaking for myself, I did this in my game because the stairs were at the end of an east/west hallway and the description of the hallway pretty much mandated something like “A set of stairs heading down lies to the west.”
I couldn’t think of any way to describe that which would justify refusing an attempt to go west with “You can’t go that way.”
In a large lobby in which there is a grand staircase heading to the upper floor or a tight cave in which there is a tunnel heading down, those kinds of synonyms aren’t really necessary most of the time.
But if the staircase needs to be placed on one specific side of the room in order for the geography of the room to make sense in the player’s head (as in a hallway with two ends), I don’t see a good way around it.
Yes, in parser ideally you’d want to allow both DOWN and WEST to take the stairs if described that way, but you can also simplify it - your description can just say “There are stairs at the end of the hallway leading down.”
This is one thing about the craft of writing adventure game descriptions that some authors struggle with: when thinking about the map and the world model - simpler is better.
The prose can be opulent, but care needs to be taken with the actual things the player must interact with - both for comprehension and disambiguation. Something described as a “silver ladle” might not be comprehended as the “dipping spoon” the player needs to transfer tadpoles from a pond into a jar. In this case all synonyms should be available “silver/-- ladle/spoon” and “silver/-- dipping spoon” - especially if the prose calls the same object all those things. But it’s much easier to keep descriptions consistent and let a noun be one thing.
Similarly we all know that stairs tend to go both up and down and a direction. They might even turn 90 degrees on the way to the cellar due to space constraints. For gameplay, this type of thing rarely matters much as we just need the player to indicate which portal they’re using to leave a room so the map knows where to put them next. Even if you’ve drawn a realistic map and your stairs need to double back on each other to exist properly so that EAST leads both downstairs from above and upstairs from down below - that’s usually unnecessary detail that will cause directional confusion in most players’ heads and it’s best to let the stairs just be UP/DOWN no matter what tricky twists the author is imagining.
The only place more complication would be justified would be something like one room that contains both a ladder and stairs leading up, but ideally you’d want to avoid such tricky rooms so the player has less trouble envisioning the map. While it is possible to make a path between rooms bend “around a corner” and that might be a realistic thing a path does, it increases confusion on a game map when a player must go south to return to a room they just exited by going west. Twisty-passage map navigation historically was an accepted gameplay trope of parser, but is less understandable and acceptable to modern audiences.
I played through a few different times, spending around 15 minutes on this one.
Things I Appreciated:
One of the more disturbing things about the game is the hidden real-time timer that seems to dictate when she dies. I’ve become accustomed to taking as much time as I need to consider my options in a choice-based game, but here, the abruptness of the menu opening and immediately closing because time is up is disconcerting. It’s worse the more you play it, because it emphasizes the inevitability of the melting. You are trying to think of anything else to do within that time that would make a difference, knowing that you have to at least pick something from the many unappealing options or else just wait it out while offering no comfort at all beyond your presence.
There’s something cruelly realistic about the sliver of the hope the piece creates. It isn’t lying to you. It is, as they say, exactly what it says on the tin. But in the context of a form often used for games, and with front matter that says that there’s five different endings, isn’t there a part of you that’s like, maybe there’s something I can actually do to prevent this? As if you’re going to have a breakthrough and solve The Melting Issue™ with something in your immediate vicinity in the next 90 seconds or however long it is. But no, nothing (as far as I found) will prevent it from proceeding at that awkward speed: you wish it was either faster so she would have to suffer less, or slower so there was time to do anything substantive. It’s essentially a grief horror simulator that will feel familiar to anyone who has lost a loved one (especially to a longer term illness like this).
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
The main thing I wonder about is the complexity of the menu given the amount of time you have to do or say anything. On one hand, I could see this being meant to create an emotional response where you are aware of the clock and overwhelmed by the options. But on the other, I found it more distracting to try and navigate the layers of the menu looking for the type of thing I wanted to say (I wanted to make a comment about melting witch in The Wizard of Oz to see if that made her laugh at least) where realistically, I would just say whatever morbid or cursed thought crossed my mind.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This was a thematic use of a real-time time limit with a hidden timer, which isn’t too common. For a short piece with a clear sense of purpose, it worked really well.
For a short piece, this gives ample opportunity to provide a density of flavor text. I found that there were kind of a lot of different disturbing ways that you could see/hear the melting take place based on the descriptions. Had this not be developed as much, it would’ve made the piece feel a lot flatter given the likelihood of multiple playthroughs.
Quote:
“She has been a solid and your friend for a long time.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
This might be a weird one, but I found the moving liquid in the title screen mesmerizing in a kind of disturbing way. It’s so rhythmic as to almost be peaceful, but reflects something much more sinister. I would often stop just to look at it and think about its ceaseless gentle sloshing.
(It’s more than a little jarring to go from the previous entry, Deliquescence, to this one The randomizer decided that after watching my friend melt and die multiple times in front of me, it’s time to dissociate with some birdwatching!)
60 | BIRDING IN POPE LICK PARK
60 | BIRDING IN POPE LICK PARK by: Eric Lathrop
Progress:
I played for around 20 minutes, choosing to end when I felt satisfied that I had seen a variety of birds. (I ended up seeing 17 species/40 individual birds.)
Things I Appreciated:
I appreciated most the moments where I got glimpses of perspective from the character that hinted at more from them. For instance, choosing to walk on the grass instead of the gravel to avoid disturbing the animals implies a sense of care; wondering about the mallards’ ducklings implies a familiarity with these birds from previous years; the discussion about thinking the mourning dove song might be from an owl before becoming a birdwatcher reveals a bit about how much you’ve grown and learned.
This location feels pleasant, but very ordinary/approachable. Considering that one of the stated goals of the piece is to promote birding as a hobby, I think it was successful in doing that. I haven’t been to Kentucky before, but the public park described feels very reminiscent to other public parks I’ve walked through in other parts of the U.S. As I was playing, I felt like, if I really wanted to do go out and do this, it wouldn’t be that hard to get started. Especially since the game explicitly directs you to resources that would help you.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
I found it difficult to become emotionally involved with this piece. To say a bit more: the writing style feels very crisp and professional to me. It tells you what happened without giving much more information than whatever is needed to explain the state of the location you’re in, and the clarifying details that allowed you to determine which bird it was. As a result, I found myself being held at a distance from what was happening. It’s all business here. We’re here to look at birds. There’s a value in that, but I think because I’ve been through such an intense range of emotions while reading/playing these IF Comp submissions, I was craving a writing style that had just a little more emotional involvement in the activity, rather than viewing the birds in what felt like a more detached/clinical/scientific way, as though I were a researcher conducting an avian census.
An interesting side effect of the realism of the piece is that I had a hard time understanding the game-map’s interconnections. In a constructed fictional environment, things can be manipulated to be memorable and distinctive a lot more. Here, I found myself a bit disoriented by the similar sounding locations: a path, a gravel path, a dirt road, an old road, the field, the smaller soccer fields, etc. This is realistic and accurate to what is there, but something about the navigation didn’t feel the most intuitive to me.
I think as a player, it would’ve been more immersive if I was given a chance to try to learn for myself what the birds were (even if just to choose between a few curated options in a low-stakes way), so that I felt like I was absorbing more of what I was reading about their distinguishing characteristics. This carries through in what I feel was an underutilized part of the game, which was the “notes” section for recording the birds that you’ve seen. The most that I saw here was a description of the number/age/sex of the birds, or nothing. I felt like I wanted to be able to look at the photo and type in my own short note that was my impression of what was important or interesting about the bird and the situation I found them in. So I would encourage thinking about immersion beyond the visuals/realism, and consider strategies for making the game feel more mechanically involving to help create a stronger emotional resonance between the player and the activity of birdwatching.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I liked this as an example of a game devoted to the specificity and accuracy of place. There are so many places around the world and in all imaginable fictional worlds where a story could be set, but for the 20 minutes that I played, Pope Lick Park was the most important place in the world. I think there’s something charming and interesting about taking what could be seen as “just another public park” and decide that it is worthy of this level of detailed observation and attention.
This game gives the player the agency to leave at any time. I mean, I’m not sure why you’d choose to play a birdwatching game and exit the moment you got to the park, but you could do that, if you wanted to. For this style of game that isn’t plot-driven, character-driven, or narrative-driven, I liked that I didn’t feel pressure to be a completionist for the sake of seeing every possible bird. The game did not judge me for the amount of birds that I saw, and even though there were almost certainly more birds out there, I felt satisfied with what I did. So the lesson I take from this is, to consider how the option of showing the player that they can end at any time and it is completely up to them will impact the experience. It’s not always the right design choice, but here, it makes perfect sense.
Quote:
“You wonder why this pair doesn’t have any ducklings this year.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
I liked going into the most overgrown path, and the feeling that I wasn’t sure if I was really supposed to be there or not. I find locations like that inherently kind of interesting—a place where there used to be, and sort of still is, something, but the lack of maintenance lends it a liminal feeling.
I normally don’t reply to reviews, but since the conversation has segued into a discussion about general design principles, I think I can pinpoint the problem: compass directions in parser games are terrible!
Dual-mapping directions like UP/NORTH personally confuses me in other games. In The Bat, it wouldn’t work because you control Bryce with the compass. The current setup with UP/DOWN keeps him out of the cellar and the upper rooms, where his presence might compromise a few puzzles. It also limits the possibility space to prevent the player from moving Bryce into unnecessary areas and wasting time.
Fortunately, I was tipped off by the structure of the game to start it a few weeks ago, which is great considering the randomizer gave this to me so close to the end. (Imagine if I had just started playing this now, that would’ve been awkward.) I have played a total of seven sessions, which I estimate total around 1h15m from my notes. I’m not actually sure if the game is over or not; I did solve all the cryptic puzzles (fourteen on my own, and the last with a hint from the thread that helped me), and it feels like I’ve resolved the main plot involving Aïssatou. But, the game still allows me to do more shifts. Based on the nature of the game, I’m not sure that it does actually “end.”
Things I Appreciated:
(This is a comment in two parts about the unique use of time—this is the first part). Since the game’s real-time element is distinctive, here I want to talk about the aspects of it that work really well. I love the immersion of the real time element. For instance, once when playing, I happened to be outside earlier in the day and noticed the moon, so later when the game described the moon’s current phase accurately, I thought that was clever. I think the game’s cryptic crossword puzzle benefits enormously from the time format. If I had to sit down and solve all these in a single 2 hour session, I’d probably have found it annoying. But the clues are doled out over a longer period of time, and I found that if I stuck, when I came back to it later, I could usually solve them. (The one exception: “Idleness infraction after French leaves (8)” which had a rule [the assumption that you should naturally reduce “French” to “FR”] that I didn’t feel was well hinted by the attached guide. I also had tunnelvisioned on wrong answers like ADULATES [adieu + lates] which made it hard for me to get back on track). The game picks a puzzle type that benefits from fresh eyes over a long period of time, rather than sustained focus.
I liked the snippets of seeing different woodland creatures and fey/mythological beings showing up and being able to help them. The game doesn’t necessarily ask a lot of you, making the short sessions approachable even if you’ve forgotten how a round of the game works after a longer break. Similarly, I liked the aspect of only getting to ask Aïssatou about one thing per session; it made that dialogue choice feel consequential, in the sense that I was choosing to privilege a certain topic, but not in a tense way, since you can always come back tomorrow to learn more.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
(This is a comment in two parts about the unique use of time—this is the second part). The main drawback of the real-time system is the ephemerality of purpose that I experienced while playing this. Unlike a game that is condensed into a short period of time, I quickly lost track of the main plot and purpose for playing (beyond the general premise of doing a shift to help out the apothecary). I just couldn’t remember the text from the beginning of the game, so when I did eventually solve the cryptic puzzles weeks later, I didn’t feel as much of an emotional weight to how it affected Aïssatou, given that I had completely forgotten what her issue was in the first place. I also feel like, akin to watching weekly episodes of a TV show, I would’ve loved some kind of minor recap or reference to what I did during the previous shift. Like, “you think back to last shift when you met the [x person],” to facilitate returning to the game world.
Similarly, I think this game would benefit from some kind of journal/note system that just records what woodland creatures you’ve found, what you’ve learned about from Aïssatou, or who you’ve seen at the café. That’s probably hard to implement but it would be cool to see it gradually fill in over the shifts as you become more familiar with the environment and lend a sense of progression to the game.
I happened to receive a number of very similar tasks that involved differentiating between two insects. I’m not sure if this is because I kept going at similar times of day/days of the week without realizing, or had bad luck, but I felt like given the nature of the game (asking you to do multiple, structurally similar shifts) it’s well worth developing a wide range of task types to keep things fresh.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The thing that stands out here is the use of real-time, which makes this entry have a completely different feel. It’s interesting to think about, if developed further, a game that becomes a kind of companion, rather than a more intense one-time experience that is more self-contained. It’s a different approach to game design. This is an interesting approach, and it also has me thinking about real-world time-specific information could even be used for games that are meant for a one-time experience.
The importance of selecting a mini-puzzle type that aligns with the pace of a game. Finding a difficult cryptic crossword puzzle in the midst of a parser adventure game would be terrible for pacing, forcing you to stop dead to solve it. Likewise, having some kind of convoluted social puzzle in a game paced like this (with day- and week-long breaks between sessions) would be similarly irritating. The puzzles were well-scaled here: very easy puzzles for short bursts, and one longer term puzzle that was more difficult but not time sensitive.
Quote:
“The Hunter’s Moon is very bad news for us, so we diligently prepare for it every year. Many of us have lost friends and relatives to the Hunt… we’ll fight tooth and nail to protect every resident of the sanctuary so that they don’t become prey too.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
Any time that I came back from a break and just suddenly knew the answer to a cryptic, as though my mind had been working on it in the background of my day-to-day life without me noticing.
I played through Fiia’s path, which took roughly 40 minutes to complete. Ordinarily, I would’ve tried the other paths, but as you’ll see if you read the rest of this response, I was derailed by a weird emotional incident I had at the end of this game. I’m still curious to know if it’s possible to get a good ending rather than the ending that I chose, but I don’t think it would be wise for me to play again without… I don’t know, a lot of reassurance?
Things I Appreciated:
I love the worldbuilding and portrayal of vampires in general. Playing as Fiia, I like that there was an empathy for her but also a recognition of the grisly details of what that entails (details like: her stomach decaying and crumbling). It does not overly romanticize the implications of being a vampire, but also doesn’t treat being a vampire as some morality-ending state that Fiia needs to be smited for.
I enjoyed the prospect of the multi-POV format. I love multi-POV writing, and seeing how the narrative intertwines is fascinating. I liked that I had the option of picking from perspectives (vampire hunter, experienced vampire, new vampire) that would be noticeably distinct from each other.
There’s a lot of good writing here—I liked the introduction to Fiia’s incoherent hunger thoughts as the start of her perspective, which then develops into a much more coherent and worldly perspective of someone who’s been through some shit and has a lot of ideas of how to get revenge. Her characterization built well over the course of the piece.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
This response turned into a hot mess (see below, I guess ), so I think I need to just describe how this playthrough went to explain why it went this way for me. Starting with the front matter, this game immediately piqued my interest. One of my strongest narrative biases (that I’ve discussed a bit throughout these responses) that I have is in favor stories where “villainous”/“monster”/“demon” archetypes are treated empathetically rather than as flatly evil. If I see a character like that in the text, my natural inclination is to identify with them, even if they’ve been set up as the antagonist. Given the front matter, I was excited going into this game. It isn’t a straightforwardly, humans=good, vampires=evil world, and the characters normally want to use nonviolent and diplomatic approaches to solve problems. But, oddly, while that is the normal methods used by these characters, this story claims to be an exception: “Only one thing is certain: Rosco Jeppson has to die.” That really got my gears turning. I felt certain that there was something interesting thematically afoot here: it would be subverted in some way, and the diplomatic approach would somehow win out at the end.
During character selection, I gravitated immediately to picking Fiia. I ruled out Declan because, since I already am predisposed to empathize with a vampire character, playing as a vampire hunter would not be a good fit for me if I was fighting against that predisposition. I then ruled out Lynette, with the logic that since I am a new player to this game world, it might be a difficult to roleplay as an experienced vampire. So, Fiia was the perfect choice: a newly turned vampire.
In the game state I had set up, Fiia, who was acting as the tertiary accomplice—because I didn’t really want to kill Rosco, so I took the cowardly approach of making the other characters do it for me—had to trick Rosco into being alone so the rest of the team could kill him. I saw what the options were, and of course, I knew that (as Fiia) using Vincent as a key piece, essentially preying upon Rosco’s semi-closeted queerness and love for Vincent, would cause the plan to kill him to succeed. And once I clicked that, I felt like I set in motion a chain of events that I couldn’t recover from. Because of the role I had selected, I became a passenger witnessing a scene where Rosco desperately tries to save himself and his boyfriend from getting murdered by Lynette and Declan, and I was hoping for him to somehow survive this while my point of view character is thinking the exact opposite. I had fully been ejected from Fiia’s point of view and wanted nothing more than the antagonists not to die, but of course, Fiia’s plan worked brilliantly, just as I predicted it would. And worse? I feel guilty about feeling this way. (1) The narrative does a lot of work justifying why Fiia wants him dead, and I can’t morally fault her that much for her revenge power fantasy. (2) The power was in my hands. I chose this option, because I privileged the strategic thought of winning the game and getting Fiia’s goals accomplished over any real consideration to how I, an apparently more sensitive than I realized gay guy, would feel about watching it play out; and (3) maybe worst of all, I have had the realization that if Rosco had been written as a straight guy, I probably wouldn’t have felt anything nearly as intense as what I felt. What does it say about me, the limits of my empathy, that merely having one innate characteristic (queerness) in common with this character overrode everything else I had been told about him and caused me to identify more with him and Vincent than anyone else? I feel miserable and pathetic for feeling this much in such an unproductive way. So, okay, now I need say this: this isn’t really even criticism of the game? I had kind of an extraordinary volatile negative emotional response to the end of the game, and while it was wild to go through, I am in a weird way still glad to have felt something so powerful while playing? I really don’t want the fact that me, essentially a random person on the internet playing this game, had a kind of “4 standard deviations away from normal” emotional response to be discouraging to the author. This game has so many great things, it’s bold and interesting and I don’t want that to get lost in this. It’s not their fault that “taking advantage of a gay vampire’s love for his boyfriend to orchestrate his murder” turned out to be the perfectly-shaped key to unlock all my emotional barriers at once and cause me to psychologically crumble while playing their game. That’s just like… incredibly bad luck. As an author, how could you even guess that that exact situation would happen when you’re just trying to write an awesome thriller. I want to balance being honest about what playing this was like for me while not giving the impression that I think the author was in some way wrong for writing the story this way. Hopefully I found that balance enough here.
Now here is the section of criticism that is thankfully, unrelated to the above. My major writing concern I have with this piece is the point-of-view slippage between Fiia and Lynette. Multi-POV writing is already challenging, because in order for it to work, you need to edit each character’s narrative with the mindset of what only that specific character would know, think, be able to see, etc. That seems even more important in second-person multi-POV, because the text is being addressed to “you.” There were several times during Fiia’s narrative where I became conscious that she was thinking something that only Lynette would be thinking. Here’s an example of a chunk of narrative in Fiia’s point of view. “‘I was wondering why a vampire was working as a hunter,’ she says, somewhat sheepishly. The arrangement, especially to younger vampires, was indeed odd at first glance. But it wasn’t some newfangled feeble attempt at campfire-singalong altruism. It had a history all its own. And damn it: it got results.” This is Lynette speaking. That part is fine: Fiia can hear what Lynette says and make physical observations about Lynette standing there. The second part, though, is Lynette’s perspective. It would only occur to Lynette that this method “had a history all its own. And damn it: it got results,” because that’s Lynette’s experience and familiarity with her methods. Why would Fiia, who is just now learning about all this, think in this way? For Fiia’s POV to feel immersive, she needs to not have access to this detailed internal information about what Lynette feels about the world. So my specific writing advice is: go through Fiia’s narrative with the revision mindset of, “is this something that newly turned vampire Fiia would think, or be able to access in a conversation with Lynette?” I think more details will pop out when you read through this lens. There were moments that felt like I was reading text that was originally written in Lynette’s POV with the pronouns shifted to match the correct character without a deeper revision for inhabiting that new character’s perspective. This could be wildly inaccurate, but that’s how I felt when the boundaries between POVs started blurring. Each character voice needs to be sharp, distinctive, and accurate to the information and perspective they inhabit.
A minor technical issue that I encountered was that, in the conversation with Lynette, the game required me to select the dialogue option “about you and Declan” two times before I was allowed to advance, causing that scene to repeat. That is hopefully
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This game has a really compelling approach with the multi-POV, but it alerts me to the dangers of writing especially second-person POV and how disorienting that can get. I have to applaud the many authors in games that I’ve played for choosing to write in 2nd person and the unique challenge that creates. You have to be even more crisp and accurate with voice to make this work, where I feel like 3rd-person-limited POV allows a little more flexibility.
I really liked the recurring symbol of the red jacket and how that played out. I like in stories when there are certain objects that gain more and more importance over the course of a narrative—Fiia starts with an ill-fitting new jacket that represents her initiation, and then finally, receives the gift of the perfectly tailored jacket that represents how Lynette has accepted and welcomed her at a deeper level.
Quote:
“But what if we just killed a guy and traumatized his boyfriend for nothing?”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
It’s subtle, but I think if you read the response carefully you might be able to guess which part had a lasting emotional impact on me
63 | DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEK SUPER-BRAIN by: jkj yuio
Progress:
I reached the end of the game in about 20 minutes. In the ending I received, Todd ended up dying of radiation poisoning (RIP) but I at least got a shoutout for selecting the correct sonic screwdriver attachment on the first try. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
Things I Appreciated:
The main thing I liked about this game is that it’s campy. The explosion effect that was on screen when the Dalek exterminated me made me laugh. While it looks like a ton of work went into the visuals, the somewhat uncanny way they fit together adds to the retro appeal. Add that to the ridiculousness of the Daleks’ behavior, it just was an absurd time. I’m not personally a huge Doctor Who fan (no ill will, I just haven’t seen that many seasons and don’t necessarily find myself seeking it out) but I do feel like this successfully captured the campy sci fi tone.
Even though I detailed my struggles with the UI below, I like the multimedia aspect of it. I appreciated the care to put a black tinted backdrop to the text to make it a little more readable on the background, as I had issues with readability in other games that involved text on complicated backgrounds. I especially liked the weird sound effects, which caught me off guard (like the Bex scream paired with the extreme close-up zoom on her face) in a funny way.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
The main issue I have is that the user interface is cumbersome. I kept adjusting my browser window trying to find a way to make the game look right, but no matter how I positioned it there was always something at least a little off. The most significant instance of this was when I tried talking to NPCs and it caused an extreme zoom such that I could only see the top two-thirds or so of their head, which was disconcerting the first time it happened, but then I just found it funny because it added to the camp factor of the experience after that. There seem to be a lot of moving parts here, and the interface just never felt that comfortable or natural to me.
I found that a major moment in the game was unsatisfying. In my exploration, I approached the super brain and talked to them. The doctor proceeded to explain a paradox to the brain to confuse it, without me really having a chance to choose to do anything. It makes sense that the doctor would know to do this, but it created a lack of immersion for the game to dog-walk the scene for me like this. If “confuse the daleks with a paradox” had been one of a few different options I could have selected, it would’ve felt a little more satisfying to realize that that was the right approach. As it stood, the game didn’t give me an opportunity to solve what felt like it should be a key puzzle, it was more like a cutscene.
I had a similar issue with the interactivity of the area prior to the radioactive mine section. There were a few different rooms to explore, but not much that I could find to do there. It felt like the only way to proceed the game was to just keep talking to the Dalek commander, as opposed to finding some way to sabotage the situation. If there was something I should have clicked on to progress things differently, I didn’t find it.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
Mainly, the challenges of creating a balanced visual panel where you are trying to include a lot of information. In this game, each scene has to communicate: the background; clickable/interactable characters and objects; the text of the game; the choices available; and that turned out to be a lot to cram into the space. While this game wouldn’t have been as charming without the wacky graphics, it really shows the strengths of approaches where a card or other inset is used to allow the author to gain control of the proportions. I think if this game had some kind of standardized window size rather than the chaotic “anything goes” experience that I had, it could all for more polish in terms oof layout and utility.
This is another example of how it feels to be playing a puzzle/navigation game where the character does something really exciting or pivotal without player input. I think this is a good reminder for myself that if I’m going to do some kind of parser-ish or puzzle-forward game, to make sure the player is given at least the illusion of involvement when the character does a key action to advance the narrative.
Quote:
“They do, however, get to wear little red hemispheres, which are quite fashionable in Dalek society.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
Definitely when I returned to unplug the super-brain and it was ON FIRE.
Very subtle! Thanks for that powerful review. I wonder whether one of the things that put you on a different emotional path than the one the game expects you to take, is a fairly confusing feature of the game. The weird thing is that although the entire set-up with vampire hunters and everything suggests that the Bad Guy is bad because he’s a vampire, it actually turns out that this has nothing to do with his badness, and the only problem is that he’s a ruthless crime lord. I wonder whether you would have had an easier time with the game if that had been clear from the beginning: ‘We’re gonna murder him… oh yeah, not because he’s a vampire, that’s cool, but because he’s Al Capone only worse.’
To say a bit more, though… I don’t know if I should continue bogging down this game’s response with all my weird mess-ness, I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue, at least directly.
More comments, with spoilers etc.
The game is pretty clear in informing the reader why this character in particular is being murdered—for being an unaccountable billionaire crime lord who has abusive/toxic relationships with people. I got that he’s not being killed for being a vampire.
I do think there is a significant disjuncture happening between the informed traits of the vampire hunter group and what you are actually doing in the game. That is to say, the “empathetic/harm reduction/mediation” approach that the group normally uses happens off-screen in the past. We’re told that it works really well, in these historical cases that are not experienced by the player.
Additionally, the previous attempts of using that approach with Rosco that didn’t work are also off-screen in the past, so at least in my playthrough, I didn’t feel like I had been built a strong case for this extreme abrogation of the vampire hunter group’s stated philosophy as all this information is not what I’ve directly experienced as I was playing.
If this entire game was the second half of a game where the first half is showing how Rosco thwarts the player’s attempts to reason with him, I think it would have landed at least a little better for me.
I think I would rather play either: a game with a vampire hunter group that uses empathetic/mediation tactics and the player works hard to solve the social/tactical puzzle to get this to work out; or, a vampire hunter group that is openly just a violent vigilante group taking things into their own hands without any pretense at caring about mediation.
There was something about this combination of, we’ve said we care about remediation but what we’re doing all game is vigilante violence that kind of teed up my spectacular emotional flameout at the end. It gave me a kind of delusional false hope that I would be able to find some kind of diplomatic approach. And maybe that was possible and I just made really bad choices! But I just fundamentally didn’t want to kill him, and his death happened in such a specifically horrible way for me, in particular, to imagine and experience because I connected with him on an identity level and that forged a stronger bond than my connection with Fiia who absolutely did not feel what I was feeling (understandably so).
FWIW, while it wasn’t as strong as yours, my response to the end of Redjackets wasn’t too dissimilar; the disconnect between “we’re all about restorative justice” and the especially grisly way Rosco gets killed, and the fact that in that sequence his instinct is to protect his partner and even at first Fialla even though he has intimations that she’s betrayed him, sure make it feel unheroic and brutal. I think there’s also a show vs. tell issue: we’re told the Redjackets use violence as a last resort, and in fairness in the other paths some small examples of that make it on screen, but as you point out there aren’t any specifics given about prior attempts with Rosco. Beyond that, his villainy is also something that felt extremely theoretical to me: his deal with Fialla is at least somewhat consensual, his involvement in crime isn’t shown as especially victimizing anyone, and the worst thing we see him do is be more brutal than Fialla thinks is necessary with someone who betrayed / failed him. It’s not a sympathetic picture, but it’s not one IMO that makes him so awful that the violence visited on him winds up feeling cathartic.
It’s possible all this is meant to subvert the game’s simplistic good vs evil framing, but if it is, I don’t think it lands, and as a result that ending sequence just felt like a confusing downer to me too. So yeah maybe the intensity of your response was a bit idiosyncratic, but I do think it stems from issues that are present in the piece.
Thank you so much for reviewing The Apothecary’s Assistant! I’m loving your thoughtful and well-structured commentary on the games, and I seriously applaud you for soldiering through so many entries in such a short time! It’s been a real joy to follow this thread.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to comment on some of the (excellent) points you made:
The amnesia effect of waiting days or weeks in-between shifts is something that was very hard to properly replicate during the testing phase; that definitely proved to be a major issue, as during testing I was very sensitive to repetitiveness and I cut out several descriptions or interactions that were too similar to previous shifts. But I’m realizing that I should have kept some of those details that felt redundant, because players experiencing the game in its real 6-week timeframe have more than enough time to forget them!
It’s very interesting you bring up the journal/notes idea, as that was a feature I wanted to include but had to cut due to time constraints. I hesitated about putting it back in for the post-comp version. But you’ve convinced me to give it a shot, and I’m already excited to try out different ideas for the implementation!
I’ve also been making small adjustments to give better instructions and more hint channels for the cryptics, as the initial setup was problematic for a good chunk of players. Hopefully soon we’ll hit a good balance of challenge and available help. Sincere apologies for anything that was frustrating or felt unfair — but well done solving 14 of them on your own, that’s impressive!
I can confirm that the insect shifts are in the same timeslot: the closing time between Friday and Saturday. There’s also the Thu/Fri shifts with various other arthropods, and the late Saturday slot with aquatic animals has one insect pair later on. I’m sorry I made you spend so much time with bugs! At least you can now tell a hoverfly from a bee (if you couldn’t already), haha.
It made me so happy to read that you had that moment of connection between the real-life moon and the in-game one! Though the lunar phases angle was ultimately not developed as much as I initially planned, I did put care into researching them and making sure that everything lined up with our own reality. Fun fact that I learned in the process: everyone in the world sees the same phases at the same time (assuming moon visibility), but flipped in different directions!
Thanks again for all your time/efforts and for kindly purchasing a bead! I feel honoured that my game could help you discover a slightly different side of IF.
I spent about 50 minutes with this game, reaching an ending. This isn’t very representative of the amount of time it would take to normally play the game, because almost all of my progress in the game was dictated by the walkthrough. I will say more about that later, but for whatever reason, the clue style did not mesh well with how I’ve learned to play these games over the last few weeks.
Things I Appreciated:
This game is incredibly effective at immersing you in the feeling that you are doing arcane research. The scope of the game’s lore, library, and logic is sprawling and disorganized. To honestly play this game, you would have to do what an actual researcher would do: take copious notes, define terms and concepts to see how they connect to each other. The game delivers in a strong way on the concept that it promises.
I like the murkiness of the various factions. Every faction, agent, or historical figure in the game is some degree of self-interested or otherwise untrustworthy, so it’s really up to the player to decide how they want to interpret what they’re seeing.
One of the only moments that I made progress on my own, was when I realized that I could talk to the bust in the room. That was an exciting moment, because I felt like I had intuited something correctly in the game. I imagine had I not gotten overly spoiled with the walkthrough, more moments like this would’ve happened. I liked the fact that I could speak with non-standard NPCs. When I read the book about a conversation with a mysterious entity, it made me want to figure out more about them to see if I, too, could have a conversation with some kind of otherworldly demonic figure.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
I think this is the type of game that I could only enjoy if there was no walkthrough. I had to go to the walkthrough early because I didn’t understand what I was even trying to do, and quickly realized that the game was incredibly difficult. Like at a basic level: since when was there a “seventh” bookcase? It’s not a game that benefits from fast-paced exploration in any way. I think this is the type of game that should be played over a longer period of time, and very deliberately, with the player taking notes and frequently rereading every bit of text. Looking at the walkthrough ended up poisoning my playthrough because I saw steps and was like, I’d never have thought to do that, so I ended up just looking at more and more of it to even get a sense of how to play. So what I’m saying is: the approach of playing this in the context of 60+ games in a short period of time, which is what I’m doing here, is not the right approach. This game, if approached outside of the competition context, for players who want something that requires a lot of deliberation and extrapolation, would be really good, I think.
That being said: I was still craving the types of commands I had encountered in previous games. Even if I, the player, doesn’t know what’s going on, surely the in-universe protagonist has a better sense of things. A command like “think” from The Bat, where the protagonist recalls a list of their current goals for the player, would help with the overwhelming sense of wtf-am-I-even-supposed-to-be-trying-to-do that permeated my time with the game. If my character was like, I’m interested in learning more about x thing, I would’ve been able to focus on that aspect of the lore and made connections that way, rather than the lore just kind of swirling as a ceaseless mass of undifferentiated information. Similarly, something like the “spellbook” from Hildy would be useful: a list of powers/abilities that the character has gained through their research, so that it would be clear that progress is being made. This would shift the focus on puzzles from “what can I even do/what should I even want to do” to “here’s some things I could do/how and why should I use them?” Becoming aware that I was now capable of casting fireballs would’ve gotten me thinking: okay. Is there something I want to burn? What can I accomplish by burning something? Where is fire mentioned in the lore? And maybe that’s not the game Forbidden Lore wants to be. It probably wants to be as unapproachable as it is, to force players to really earn their progress, and have it feel thematically appropriate. But for where I am at in this IF Comp response process and parser game skill level, I really needed a bit more structure and guidance than the game presented. At the very least, tell me that there are seven bookcases at the outset, since that’s something that the character in the room would plainly be able to observe.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
For a few games, I’ve talked about how long room descriptions create focus problems and frustration when the long list of description mentions things that you can’t interact with, and how important it is to be concise. Here, I guess, is the rare example of what happens when descriptions are underwritten. Most often you’ll receive information that is just the bare minimum or slightly less than what you need to be signaled to do something. The writing errs on the side of implication and subtlety, which I was not well-tuned for. I think it’s good to have examples from both sides of this dilemma to help triangulate how the “right” amount of explicit description feels.
This was a great example of theme/content aligning with structure. It’s a game about occult research, that is structured to feel like you are doing occult research. I think it creates a distinctive experience when this type of alignment is possible.
Quote:
“For a practitioner of the dark arts, you are very ordinary looking.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
When I suddenly had the thought, can I use the mirror to… go to the MOON?! The answer: yes, but… maybe it’s not the best idea to just teleport to the moon without a plan. There’s no air there.
(Courtesy of the randomizer: the second consecutive game featuring reptilian aliens)
65 | BUREAU OF STRANGE HAPPENINGS
65 | BUREAU OF STRANGE HAPPENINGS by: Phil Riley
Progress:
At the 2-hour mark, I timed out. It’s really hard to say how far I got, but I was wandering around in a labyrinthine town in the 1950s trying to collect items to do… something. Really specific, I know. I would guess I was at most, halfway through, and probably less than that.
Things I Appreciated:
I thought this had a lot of wacky and interesting game mechanics. One of the most cursed puzzles I solved was an absolutely miserable time wandering around in a seemingly infinite hyperdimensional plane, and I feel like I wasted a lot of time just doing that. But, it was extremely satisfying to finally make sense of the puzzle and work out what I had to do. Unfortunately that’s the only major puzzle that I’ve solved, since most of the rest of the game has been collecting objects that will eventually go together. But of what I played, I feel confident that the rest of the puzzles will be similarly engaging.
I enjoyed the absurd dialogue in the game. The responses you receive from characters are varying degrees of useless, but in an entertaining way that can still direct you toward a new objective. Overall, the writing in this game is very polished and tonally consistent.
As far as I can tell, the entire game is a meta-joke about needing to solve the entire game to solve the tutorial puzzle to answer the phone. The game presents answering the phone as the first thing to do, but leads you further and further away from being able to do it. I kept thinking, whenever I was stuck with something else, am I being ridiculous here? Do I need to be focusing on getting a watch, so I can trade it for money, so I can get a screwdriver, so I can open a vent, so I can disassemble a desk, so I can answer a phone? Why am I trying to construct an arcane machine in the past instead of looking for the watch? I think I’m just more used to games that have a more self-contained tutorial puzzles, and the game preys upon that expectation to create a lot of humorous moments.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
Based on the cover art, going into the game I was like, oh, I’m going to be playing as a lizard person/reptilian. That’s interesting! I wonder how having reptilian features will affect navigating the world. Will I need to use a tail to interact with objects? Taste things with a super sensitive tongue to gain key information? Then I started the game: “An agent of the Bureau of Strange Happenings. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark sense of humor.” Okay, well never mind then! I guess that’s reason #10,000 why I shouldn’t read too much into front matter I mean I still enjoyed the game quite a lot, but now I kind of want to see a parser game featuring some kind of lizard-like protagonist that does those things.
This game has a unique hyperspace system where there are new directions (back and forth) that intermingle with the others. This was mostly fine and interesting, but I question the wisdom of choosing words, especially “back,” that are in common usage when writing normal directions. When I got deeper in the game, I started getting tripped up by descriptions like: “There is also a back entrance onto the park to the north.” Well is it back, or is it north? Is it a back entrance or is it a back entrance? Maybe it would’ve been better to make up your own terms, or use ana and kata to more fully differentiate hyperspace directions. Otherwise, trying to eradicate other uses of a common word like “back” seems like it would be annoying to implement.
I found the layout of the Enigma Lake town incredibly unintuitive. I’m not sure why, but even after spending around 40 minutes or so there, I was still getting confused by the streets and I could not envision where I was relative to anything else. It feels too densely gridded, relative to the amount of buildings you can actually access. I’m guessing this has something to do with the mechanic of wandering reptilians that teleport you away if you approach them, but overall it felt like this area could be significantly restructured for geographic clarity. I think if I had spent another hour there, I probably would’ve eventually gotten used to it, but I found myself bogged down by navigation and unable to progress the actual puzzles as a result of that cognitive burden.
There was a puzzle about entering the portal to the past that I found unintuitive. I had read the note before giving it to Doris, so I knew what the code was. I had also been given my mission and told the time and place I was going to, so I wasted a lot of time trying to input the code, input the year, try to get a code from the weirdly evasive Maggie when that didn’t work. When I finally asked the game for a hint, the hint was “talk to Doris,” which I had already done, extensively. That did turn out to be the solution: for some reason, the game needed me to talk to him even more times than I already had for the portal to become active. I think it would’ve been a lot more intuitive if he gave me the recall button and activated the portal the moment that he tells you where and when you’re going. Something about this sequence didn’t connect for me.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
A unique feature of this game is its hyperspace geometry. It sounds disorienting—and it is!—but the game is well-crafted enough that for as intimidating as four-dimensional movement seems, you are nonetheless given enough clues to make sense of it. I think there’s a value in building puzzles around a game mechanic that’s disruptive to a genre fundamental (in this case, the standard compass) as a major conceit. It gives your game a distinctive flair and is engaging to the player to have to think more about how the new mechanic can be used to accomplish tasks. Similarly, making a screwdriver an (apparently) unreachable endgame MacGuffin, rather than a fodder tool for an early puzzle like it’d normally be used for.
I thought this was an interesting example of taking a very banal setting (a run down strip mall → a run down suburban town) and making it seem weird and interesting through plot and game mechanics.
Quote:
“I’m Maggie. I’m the receptionist here at the BOSH Hyperspace Field Office. I’m here to help you with whatever you need, as long as it’s not touching the control panel.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
When I finally escaped the endless hyperspace plane, I typed “THANK GOD LOL THAT WAS HORRIFIC” into the interface. Not because it was actually horrific, but I was just so satisfied that I had actually figured out what to do and wouldn’t be condemned to wander here for the rest of the 2 hours.
66 | QUEST FOR THE TEACUP OF MINOR SENTIMENTAL VALUE
66 | QUEST FOR THE TEACUP OF MINOR SENTIMENTAL VALUE by: Damon L. Wakes
Progress:
I played this game for about 30 minutes, receiving several hilarious “bad” endings, and two “good” endings.
Things I Appreciated:
When I first looked at the IF Comp games, this one stood out to me with the content warning, “Actual, Literal Satan,” but the randomizer assigned it to 66th, so I just kind of had to keep waiting to play it. I had a lot of time to idly speculate about what this would look like in-game. Actual, Literal Satan is so adorable and ridiculous! I loved the house tour scene especially. I thought at first because of the RPG graphic presentation this game might turn into a dating sim (sadly, it did not) and he unfortunately still turned out to be the actual, literal villain of the narrative, but I couldn’t even be that disappointed because of how weird and funny this game is.
This game is super unique in its use of an RPG-Maker interface which is made into a choice-based narrative (thankfully avoiding the annoying wandering around that you’d have to do as she just walks along pre-determine routes when you make a choice), and this interface is used to produce several shockingly funny gags. I actually laughed several times because I was surprised/amused by things that were happening. Like omg she did NOT just run face-first into a toxic swamp and die. (She did.) She did NOT just get ejected from a completely different scene to fly into the same swamp and die (She did!). There was another movement-based gag where you spend forever walking up a multi-story tower for no reason. I just really liked the playful way that the interface was used to great comedic effect.
I thought the autosave system worked well. Every time I reached a bad ending, I would just reload and continue on without much of an issue, so I didn’t feel like my time was being wasted that much to encounter these goofy endings.
The writing was really funny, and I loved the comedic timing of a lot of the line delivery, especially when multiple characters would roast Jasmine for how ridiculous her quest was.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
Honestly I don’t know that I can fault the game much, I feel like it did exactly what it set out to do, be a low stakes, funny game using a campy interface to tell an absurd short story. I could ask for more developed characters, for instance, but would that really serve the purpose of the game? Make the game longer with more choices, but wouldn’t it start to wear thin and become grating if it was significantly longer? Maybe add even more JRPG mechanical jokes? But I feel satisfied with my experience of playing this. Sorry for not offering much in the way of constructive feedback
Ok I actually thought of something—the interface made it hard for me to collect quotes because I would sometimes accidentally click through something I didn’t mean to. I mean granted, under ordinary play circumstances you’re probably not going to have people taking notes on this game, but I wish it had been possible to copy/paste text or otherwise save/recall it without messing up the conversation flow.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This was a great exhibition of using a graphics-forward format like RPG-maker and creating something that is structurally just like a choice-based interactive fiction piece. In this case, the format was used to explore comedic moments—which works well because let’s face it, RPG-maker is campy as hell and hard to take that seriously. But it raises an interesting question about how a controlled-movement graphical map like this could be used in a choice-based narrative, and I bet it could be used for more dramatic ends as well.
Extending the above: making jokes that could only be told in this exact medium. In this reading/playing journey I’ve been on these last few weeks, I’ve enjoyed a lot of different kinds of interactive fiction pieces. And frankly, I still love a lot of the pieces where the interactivity is more of an accompaniment to a more static text rather than being made central to the structure of the piece. Even so, isn’t it just satisfying when you encounter a piece like this that could only work because of how its interactivity is implemented? It makes the work feel more special to know that its interactivity is essential, rather than peripheral, to its existence.
Quote:
“So it’s basically a regular white teacup?” ( … Yes.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
It has to be when the genie ejected Jasmine out of the scene into the toxic swamp. I was so shocked and surprised that this happened, I probably laughed for a good 10-15 seconds at the “Bad Ending” screen.
By process of elimination:
I can now give a dubious congratulations (?) to the game Why Pout? for being assigned 67th out of 67 on my personal shuffle list.
