WITHOUT Corporation
Made in ZIL, parser-based. I never pay that much attention to how long I’ve played something, but I might say ~2 hours? The IFComp entry and blurb for this probably gives you a good indication that you’re in for something a bit different and a bit meta, but this is ambitious, slightly chaotic… and maybe overloaded with TOO many ideas? The mechanics this introduces were more than interesting enough to kept me engaged, even though it was sometimes hard to tell why something wasn’t behaving the way I expected. I wonder if players without a programming background might have more trouble coming to grips with some of this, if it might help if you’ve authored a parser game and have some idea about the nuts and bolts workings? I can’t help but admire the audacity of this, even though it felt like a sometimes relentless barrage of information to take in every single turn–I’d enter a command and then find myself spending half a minute trying to process what’s coming back at me. What’s an AP? Who is “you”? Who is Albert? What child? What’s this “AI” going on about? What did Paul do? Who am I? Is this just fantasy? (Nice dream). ERROR ERROR–
I finished this, but I couldn’t fully describe the backstory afterwards, like every plot point that happened. The story was one of those things I kind of just let wash over me, just taking in what I could while I oohed and ahhed over the screen effects and the technical prowess on display (“wow, look at those fireworks!”). I also don’t know if I fully grasped the puzzle mechanics even by the end, if I even solved the “puzzles” here the right way, if I cheated them, if parts of them were unintentionally buggy–genuinely a bit hard to tell! There’s a couple lore entries I don’t think I read (never noticed the passwords for a lot of the research). Part of me wonders if you should experience the whole thing yourself instead of me explaining any part of it, but the mechanical aspect is somehow the more straightforward aspect of this, so…
Putting aside any of the story for the moment: there’s a parser-game-within-this-game called CLIMBING UP THE WALLS. You’re not the “player” of CutW, that’s someone else. CutW is a bit buggy and isn’t working properly, and your job is actually to manually queue up routines and move game objects around as needed in response to the commands that the actual “player” is performing, so that their experience works the way it’s supposed to. I found that the important part of understanding what’s going on is that there’s a lot of differently styled and colored lines of text every turn, but all of the “normal” text are the lines that would be seen from the POV of that “player” and I tried to focus on making that part make sense, for what you want them to do. So you see the room description that they see, and you see the commands that the “player” types in every turn as well. If you call a routine like “wind-whips,” that’ll add a little background event that adds a line about how a harsh wind is blowing through the open window in the bedroom, which might then incentivize the “player” to go and close the window. You also have the ability to move objects around, so you might put a flashlight in the right place for the player to find (Everything in its right place). You’re basically guiding them through the game in those ways, to the ending. The ending for them, at least; you meanwhile, operate on a different plane.
Hiding some words so the post isn't as long
The mechanics are so interesting that I’d love to see it explored in further games; the tutorial teaches you about this whole QUEUE command, where you can set off routines to go off after a number of turns, but that didn’t really seem to come into play past the prologue, or at least I didn’t find a reason to use it for a more timing-based puzzle or anything like that. Always a chance I missed stuff though, there were alternate ways through, other endings or secrets, etc.
Then there’s the actual experience of playing this. In the Text Adventure Literacy Jam this year which requires every single entry have a tutorial, one thing I learned was that players don’t seem to like following in-game tutorials that are overly on-rails. You can’t just, turn by turn, tell the player what command you want them to type and expect them to follow precisely along; they’ll try typing other things, and might not like if they get chided or endlessly reminded if they stray. TALJ games are aimed at teaching complete beginners, so I did wonder if the players that already knew the basics would get restless a bit quicker than someone actually learning. But then what about something like WITHOUT Corporation, which really does have its own set of special mechanics it needs to teach, and which has an AI helper character that explains to you what’s going on and pushes the story forward? What playing this made me think about was how strict on-rails tutorials aren’t just sometimes problems for those skipping ahead, but also for the experimentation which can be a huge part of learning anything. As the AI taught me about the various commands in CutW, I dequeued a routine instead of changing its queue timer like it wanted me to, not because I was trying to disobey–though I did want to see if the game would let me–but also because I wanted to play around with the commands it was teaching me and feel like I understood everything before continuing on. That’s actually a huge part of playing parser games, isn’t it, just testing commands and responses? Like you type X ME just to see if the game overrode it and that tells you something; if something’s dusty you try CLEANing it, you SING, you try TALK TO and ASK, you try lighting yourself on fire or JUMP OFF CLIFF just to feel out the expectations and limitations; part of the open-endedness of a parser means you have to figure out what each parser game wants from you and its a bit of a back and forth. But the AI voice here kept telling me what I should be doing, earnestly trying to keep me on track, and while I was still experimenting with the commands, CutW ends and game overs because I didn’t do something and ran out of time, and the AI tells me I wasn’t following its instructions well enough. Restart?
Now this is built to be played more than once and restarts are an intended part of it–it recognizes when you start over as well, and the actual loop of what you’re meant to be doing isn’t long. This first restart didn’t bother me much, though there was a later game over which felt slightly more like the game booting me out for not following along at the pace it wanted as opposed to the one I wanted to play at. But it’s more the pacing of how it wanted me to take in everything: every turn the AI telling me to do stuff OR giving me background story, meanwhile there were a lot of things i wanted to EXAMINE and learn about, then there’s multiple layers of story, notifications pinging, and you’re telling me I might be under a time limit as well?
The mid-game felt a bit less tuned than the beginning, as the tutorial gives way but sometimes the player NPC wasn’t doing what I wanted them to do, but it also opened up more and slowed down a bit so I felt like I could play around and figure things out. It kind of ends up being the segment of this I was most engaged with, and also the part I wanted a bit more out of. I really loved the idea here of being in this role as a sort of parser director and manually cuing things for a “player” on the other side, and that kept be hooked even when the “player” felt like they weren’t always cooperating. I spent a lot of time here, and I finally got the player to the end without quite feeling like I’d earned it and directed them in a complete smooth and fair way, and then almost before I knew it, I’d entered the end-game and then eventually reached the ending. The end sequence is pretty neat, though it does feel a bit like a parallel story I let go on in the background while I was more focusing on the whole “getting the game to work for the player” behind-the-curtains jerry-rigging I was doing.
That’s the other thing about the game over/restarts, that–you know how in some games, they’re paced so that when you finally solve a big satisfying puzzle, you get some story, maybe a scene where you get some plot progression and things happen, and it feels like a reward? In this, I’d get a game over, and it’s handing me story while I’m still mulling over what I did wrong. It was hard to really refocus on absorbing a whole bunch of lore entries (not written in the most direct way either) when what I really wanted to do was go back in and try again!
Other meta-story games, IF and beyond, might start off normally in one genre before surprising you, slowly introducing weird things, slowly subverting expectations. This starts off telling you it’s weird before you even start, when you’re just looking at the IFComp page. It’s throwing story and mechanics and bowling pins and spinning plates at me and asking me to juggle, it’s a song that’s just guitar soloing for five minutes, it’s a fireworks display going off all at once, volume warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVhgq1yHdA! (That’s overstating things, but look, I found that youtube link already, so the sentence is staying!)
What I did feel was I would’ve liked if everything had more room to breathe: the tutorial, the story, and me-the-player. It’s sometimes overwhelming, very disorienting, mostly interesting (mostly harmless), quite different, and I enjoyed seeing it through just to see everything it was trying. A lot of the presentation and the surrounding pieces of this, like the IFComp blurb, the “reviews”–I saw Mike Russo once, then got JJMcC after that, and this JJMcC DID seem a bit less upbeat and energetic than normal, perhaps playing CutW really effected their mood!-- and the meta feelies, the screen effects all show the work that’s been put into them, and all of that end up being fun to see.
transcripts (first transcript is on a Sept 2 download, second one I restarted on the Sept 12 update version) :
dgtziea-with.log.txt (34.0 KB)
dgtziea-without-2.log.txt (191.7 KB)
(I might add some spoiler-y story or gameplay specifics discussion to this later, but I’ll move on for now)