I’ve been eager to dive in to Spring Thing, but haven’t had much time until now. These are my reflections.
“23 Minutes” by George Larkwright. A poem/story told line by line at whatever pace the reader chooses. No branching, which I typically disfavor in an interactive fiction, but I’d like to judge this for what I perceive it is trying to do and what it does well.
The game opens with what I perceived as a breathing exercise. I was invited to breath, and breath again, each time holding my breath, then breathing out in a long relaxed exhale. This is the way I have learned to breathe for relaxation. I felt sympathy for the narrator as his story began to unfold, and realized that this was not a relaxation exercise at all, but a story told from the perspective of a new father, a school teacher and commuter living in the London suburbs, who in spite of his young age (or maybe because of it) already feels burdened by responsibilities and regrets.
The story is well told, each little source of anxiety unfolding with multiple clicks. There is no branching. The clicks are the mode of interaction, one line at a time. The reader is invited to click a their own pace. I varied my pace, clicking faster as began to realize how long the story was actually going to become, and slower when I needed to process what was happening to the narrator, and to regulate my own breathing so I didn’t internalize his crippling angst.
He has fair reason to be angsty; his own father has been emotionally abusive to him and his young wife. He feels stuck in a job which he is frankly not well suited for. And he has the additional pressures of being his family’s primary breadwinner in the face of newborn child. But still…
Was the click poetry the right way to tell this story? Maybe. It forces the reader to make choices about what pace to experience the narrative. These are subtle, almost involuntary choices which are not like the more active choices IF usually invites. For me I found that frustrating and anxiety provoking, although that is certainly an emotional response well matched to the story being told.
“Coffee Cake Caper” by Darius Foo, is a full length Cozy Mystery played as a choice based adventure with continuous scroll. Not sure which system was used to code it.
As I was playing it, I kept thinking of the old Encyclopedia Brown mysteries I read as a kid; one of the earliest book series I checked out from the library and read on my own (first grade, maybe). Coffee Cake Caper is more aimed at adults, of course, with an adult cast of characters, but it also had some elements of the Encyclopedia Brown series: the homey small town charm, along side the tantalizing promise that “you could solve this mystery yourself, if you apply sufficient observational and deductive reasoning skills”
The resolution of the mystery mostly made sense, once it was over (as the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries usually did). Set at a local carnival, this caper involves the disappearance of a cake from a baking competition with only two contestants, each with quite different personalities and baking skills. If you want more details than that about the backstory, play the game.
Interrogation is conducted by choosing words from a word bank; a rather long word bank, which appears to grow longer during the game. Evidently each word is used exactly once in the game, which might have helped if I had been able to remember which words I had already drawn. Some of the interrogations can be completed by choosing a single word to answer the prompt (what is the character lying about? or some variation thereof). Others require constructing an entire sentence from the word bank, or selecting up to four pieces of evidence simultaneously. In the few cases where I could do this successfully, without the walkthrough, I felt proud of myself. There were other cases where I had an inkling of what was going on, but didn’t know exactly how to express it with the available words. And there was one suspect where I really had no idea how to crack their alibi. Lawn-mowering helped (slang for trying every available option in a hypertext IF game). I was caught off guard when the game kept track of this and reported back to me in the end game how many times I had guessed incorrectly. Maybe I won’t make detective after all.
So the story was charming and the game was a lot of fun, and I did use the hints and walk-through quite a bit.
This morning I played “Cryptid Hunter”, a short Twine game with three listed authors: Adam Wade, Alex Kutza, and Skye Murrell. In this game, the player is hired by a private collector of cryptids to hunt down and deliver three legendary beasts. The challenge is that there are six different locations to search, and they are ALL inhabited by some strange beast. The player must study the creatures at each location, and take care only to return with the three that were described in the requisition. It’s not an easy task, and I only got 2 out of 3 on my first round. The writing is evocative, the locations are all suitably rural and spooky, the encounters with the creatures tense and action filled.
As a personal aside, I live in New Jersey (USA) where our resident cryptid is a creature known as the Jersey Devil. Soon after I first moved here, about thirty years ago, I would have sworn to you that I saw the Jersey Devil, with my own eyes, running across the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall. However, now that I am more familiar with the fauna of this state, I think it might have been a fox or a coyote I saw. I have never encountered the Jersey Devil since then, but I have seen some mangy looking coyotes.
The Universal Robot (Assembled by Hex) is a hypertext TWINE game by Agnieszka Trzaska. The main character in this game reminded me of Chuk from “Chuk and the Arena”, one of Agnieszka Trzaska’s earlier games. Both are scrappy heroes on board a remote space station, defeating larger alien antagonists through clever tricks. The character in this game is a maintenance worker on a remote manufacturing ship who has been tasked with building and training a maintenance robot who will replace him. One of the features drawing attention to this game currently in this forum, are the game’s multiple endings. One of these endings is very easy to reach, but I played for quite a while before I discovered any of the other endings. There are two parts which need to be replaced before the robot can be trained and I was unable to find an appropriate arm without (eventually) searching the code. It is neat to see how the game is constructed from the inside, but I won’t give away those spoilers either.
There is some wry social commentary in this game. We live in an age when there is a lot of anxiety about being replaced by robots. Even traditional “desk jobs” and “creative jobs” are threatened by the proliferation of AI. But this game takes the allegory a step further, setting it on board a floating manufacturing plant located so deep in space that they can not afford to ship their worthless gizmos to market, so they just dump them out into space, earning profit from the government subsidies, and cutting costs by replacing the workforce with robots. The head of the plant has already been replaced by an alien monster who ate him, and everyone just goes along pretending it didn’t happen. In at least one of the endings, the boss can be replaced again by the robot. We already live in a world where students submit papers written by AI to professors who grade the papers with AI, and nobody ever reads them. Will we reach such a state with all matters of human endeavor? Will the human race become irrelevant? Heavy stuff. Fortunately the treatment in Agnieszka Trzaska’s light allegory is written by a talented human, making it fun to play by humans.