FInished “The Den” by Ben Jackson. I enjoyed playing Ben Jackson’s game “Lunium” in 2023, and looked forward to trying this one. “Lunium” showcased Jackson’s graphic design skills, an exceptional graphics based puzzler in the classic tradition of “escape room” games. Lots of codebreaking and numbers based puzzles.
“The Den” is different in most ways from “Lunium”, the most significant difference being “The Den” has no graphics. “The Den” is similar to “Lunium” in a few ways, which I’ll detail further on, but the most important similarity is the level of professional-quality design and polish that went into both projects. These are both comercial quality games. “The Den” does everything I value in a choice game well, and does most things I value from interactive fiction exceptionally well. “The Den” is the best Twine game I’ve played so far this competition, and possibly the best Twine game I’ve ever played.
The setting is an underground bunker, beginning to fall apart during a series of earthquakes. The two protagonists, adolescent-young adults, Aiden and Vee are separated at first, but later connected by computer link, and then in person, before being separated again. By that point of the game, the player has the option to switch back and forth between the two characters, much like the classic “Fireboy and Watergirl” series, or Paul O’Brien’s “Earth and Sky” superhero interactive fiction. Each character depends on the actions and choices of the other to escape their predicament before “Father” wakes up.
Who is “Father”, you ask? To answer that would be to spoil too much. Leave it to say he is an authority figure within the underground complex, who exists mostly (but not altogether) off screen during the game, and whose uncertain motives or moral code add drama and tension to the story.
What I value in interactive fiction includes
-descriptive writing
-story telling
-player agency
-some light puzzles and game-like quality to assist with pacing and tension, but ideally the game design integrates with the story-telling.
-maybe some higher level symbolism or meaning to keep me thinking after I finish.
These are all quality features that “Lunium” and “The Den” share in common. “Lunium” was purely an escape room adventure with a twist at the end. “The Den” is much longer game (took me about four hours), and to call it merely an “escape room” cheats it of its emotional signficance. It is an escape room of sorts: the two characters must escape their crumbling bunker, and there are a series of codebreaking puzzles along the way. But the length of the game ensures a more gradual story arc, with correspondingly more thorough development of charcter, tension, and symbolic meaning.
Without giving much more away, “The Den” combines post-apocalyptic horror, coming of age story, and allusions to the Western literary canon in a manner that will likely give this game some lasting influence on future IF design.