Upper Illume (in the Ground Car)
N: Value Enhancement Centre S: Autopsy Tent W: Crowd of Denizens
The streets are choked with shrivelled grey roots.
Dead partisans are lined up neatly on the ground. A single miserable guard in olive fatigues stands watch over them.
The car slows to a halt, driver staring straight ahead. The silhouetted figure in the back seems to take a deep breath.
> OUT
Rho Zero gets out of the back of the car and straightens her unmarked olive uniform. Her face is concealed behind a tinted visor.
The guard salutes, really sloppily. Zero sighs.
> TALK TO GUARD
Zero beckons to the guard with a curt gesture. “Report.”
He leaps forward, almost dropping his gyro rifle. “Uh… No survivors from Alpha Cell. We’ve secured their codebook.”
The guard fumbles in his fatigues and produces a plain notebook.
> READ NOTEBOOK
Zero snatches the codebook and opens it to the first page:
I’ve wanted to make a text-only survival horror for even longer than I wanted to make a text-only space game. It took me years of false starts to make Superluminal Vagrant Twin, and the same was true for Forsaken Denizen. Somehow, making the world of Forsaken Edge for Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince gave me the foundation I needed. After about a year of work, it was finally complete around the time IFComp submissions opened, so in it went…
In the last few years, it feels like I’ve lost my handle on how the modern internet works - everything these days is siloed and nag-walled. I hoped entering my game in IFComp would help me share it with more people.
> GO SOUTH
Autopsy Tent
N: Upper Illume
Figures in white coats are arrayed around an enormous, eviscerated corpse, poking at it with strange instruments. Entrails and bionic components alike spill across plastic sheeting. Cyber-eyes are stacked up around it like fruit at a particularly gruesome market.
Rho Two is draped improbably across an office chair.
> X TWO
He’s wearing a silk robe that’s the colour of the clouds of Forsaken Edge. His face is concealed behind the long veil that hangs from a broad-brimmed hat.
> TALK TO TWO
“You’re out of uniform,” Zero says.
He rolls his eyes. “No-one likes the stupid uniform, Zero.”
She turns to the corpse. “What is this thing?”
Two shrugs. “There’s no non-technical answer to that, but it’s related genetically to the princess. Here, see if you can make any sense of this.”
He offers Zero a clipboard.
> READ CLIPBOARD
Zero takes the clipboard and flips through the pages:
AUTOPSY REPORT
I feel that the reviews of Forsaken Denizen have all been basically accurate in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. I avoided responding to any reviews during the competition, but can all its reviewers please now imagine me stepping ominously out of the shadows behind you and sneaking up to whisper “Thanks for the review!” in your ear, making you jump.
In terms of overall results… Well, I’d been telling myself that Leadlight is a similar game that placed 14th out of 26 games back in 2010, so if I placed in the top half I’d be doing okay. And my game had a lot of aspects that could count against it in the comp. Certainly, in a different era, there have been reviewers who would penalise a game strongly for going over 2 hours or disabling UNDO.
So third place is an outstanding result. I put so much effort into Forsaken Denizen that I’d feel disingenuous to be overly modest, but it is humbling to see extremely high quality games in all quartiles of the rankings. Massive thanks to everyone who voted. I’m glad that you like my silly, not-so-little game.
> X CORPSE
Zero tries to take it all in. “And the launcher didn’t work?”
Two bites back his “I told you so”, instead saying, “Killed by a large number of shadow-corrupted humans. Not really something we can deploy in the field.”
> GO NORTH
Upper Illume
N: Value Enhancement Centre S: Autopsy Tent W: Crowd of Denizens
The streets are choked with shrivelled grey roots.
Dead partisans are lined up neatly on the ground. A single miserable guard in olive fatigues stands watch over them.
Zero’s ground car sits here. The driver stares straight ahead, still as a statue.
Rho Two traipses along behind Zero.
> GO NORTH
Value Enhancement Centre
S: Upper Illume
Partisans in olive fatigues bustle about, stuffing equipment and documents into boxes.
Rho Two traipses along behind Zero.
> TALK TO TWO
“Quite a bit of reading material,” he says. “We’ve already learned a few big secrets.”
> X DOCUMENTS
Zero scans over the boxes. Standing out in particular are: an incident report, a design specification, a bibliography, a signed affidavit and a half-shredded fax.
> READ REPORT
At one point the number of bullets Dor finds while wearing the nurse costume is incorrectly reported - but the actual number added to her inventory is always correct.
The direction the Countess sends Dor flying is dictated by which direction the Countess is facing (the game keeps track of this and makes her waste time turning around), so if you sneak up behind her at the wrong point she will knock Dor in the wrong direction.
> READ SPEC
Although it sounds sci-fi, “junker” is an aristocratic title similar to viscount and archduke. The junkers are all named after real and apocryphal kings and queens from ancient history.
Higher ranking aristocrats from the Accretion Group have greater numbers of cyber-eyes. The junkers have one each, the Viscount has three, the Archduke five, the Dowager King has loads. (The Countess’ eyes aren’t mentioned, but we can assume that she has four.)
The aristocrats always use the same number of words, again dictated by their rank. Junkers: 0; Viscount: 1; Countess: 2; Archduke: 3; Dowager King: 4.
The fact that Dor’s attacks are slightly random was inspired by Harry Mason’s combat performance in the first Silent Hill. The idea of restricting alternate (serious and silly) endings to subsequent playthroughs was inspired by Silent Hill 3. Manipulating a statue, getting a power level just right and waiting for an elevator could all be from any classic Resident Evil.
The game is in the third-person (with respect to the PC) as an allusion to the fixed-camera third-person perspective of classic survival horror games. But a dry description of someone else doing things wasn’t very exciting to me, so I decided to have an in-universe narrator with a more interesting voice. (It turned out one of my beta testers, David T. Marchand, actually made a game that does cool things with this concept: Úrquel, the Black Dragon.) This is supposed to be justified in-universe by Cath’s auto-hacker.
> READ BIBLIOGRAPHY
The term “survival horror” was coined for the Japanese marketing of the original Resident Evil. These days it’s perhaps more commonly applied to games like Alien Isolation and Outlast, but Forsaken Denizen uses it in the original sense.
The phrase “This game contains scenes of implicit violence and gore” is a reference to the initial “This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore” screen that would appear before classic Capcom survival horror games.
Dor’s optional line “Unthinkable? I’ll give you unthinkable!” was inspired by Jill’s infamous “You want STARS? I’ll give you STARS!” at the end of the original Resident Evil 3 (and in a random chase sequence in the remake).
All the bonus costumes are references to my favourite survival horror games, plus Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies - which might or might not be survival horror-adjacent but has certainly been a major inspiration for this and other games I’ve made. The games referenced are overwhelmingly Japanese, plus one Norwegian (Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies) and one German. I would have liked to include a token American survival horror game, but I played Dead Space 1/2 too late. Hollowbody and Crow Country, two recent British survival horror games, both released too late to get a look in. (To my great shame, I also still have not played Leadlight, even though Wade Clarke was an enormously helpful beta tester and composed some music inspired by Forsaken Denizen…) Anyway, 9 bonus costumes is probably plenty.
> READ AFFIDAVIT
Originally I imagined the workers being drained of their energy by “crimson tendrils”, but the landscape I pictured looked a bit too much like the meat-encroached environments of Signalis, so I reimagined the tendrils as roots and changed the colour to gold (since it’s all economics). And now there were roots, why not a tree that it all feeds into? I can’t say I wasn’t subconsciously inspired by Elden Ring, but the giant golden tree looming over the city wasn’t an intentional reference. Subsequently the indie survival horror Hollowbody has been released which also has root and tree motifs in its sci-fi setting…
> READ FAX
An early title for this game, more closely following the format of Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince, was “Everyone Hates Holo-Princess”.
The Countess cannot be killed, but originally Dor was going to enter the finale in the Adumbral Space location, where she would see the Countess’ corpse tangled in the shadow creature’s tendrils (it had already gotten a taste for her, after all). But I quickly decided this would add too many useless rooms to the endgame. Still, to me, this is the Countess’ canon fate.
It’s possible to examine the components of Dor’s normal outfits (e.g. the blouse and shorts of her default outfit), but not of her bonus outfits. Those parts were created, but I commented them out when I started running into Z-machine/Dialog issues with the game being too large.
In the extra/feely “zine.pdf”, the neighbour who faxed Nel to ask her to turn down her “cartoons or whatever” was Dor.
> GO SOUTH
Upper Illume
N: Value Enhancement Centre S: Autopsy Tent W: Crowd of Denizens
The streets are choked with shrivelled grey roots.
Dead partisans are lined up neatly on the ground. A single miserable guard in olive fatigues stands watch over them.
Zero’s ground car sits here. The driver stares straight ahead, still as a statue. Probably asleep, let’s be honest.
Rho Two traipses along behind Zero.
> TALK TO TWO
Zero squares her shoulders. “So, right now an informal group of denizens are in charge of Illume?”
Two smirks. “I mean, the Militia has them significantly outgunned, so there’s a debate to be had about the power dynamics in play, but yes, a group of denizens has seized the city from the Empire.”
Zero looks at him expectantly.
“For now,” he adds, on cue.
Zero’s expression behind the visor is withering, and he’ll know it. “This is what we want. This is how we want to keep it.”
Two stands to attention, perfect and by-the-book. Only Zero could read the sarcasm in his posture. “I’m all ears, Commander,” he says.
- “I have a plan.”
- “I don’t have a plan.”
> 2
Zero shrugs. “I don’t have a plan. It’s not my place to have a plan. But apparently the denizens here do. There’s no-one left from Alpha Cell to hear what it is, so they sent us instead.”
Two raises a finger as if he’s had an idea. “Holding the princess hostage!”
Zero shakes her head, but not disapprovingly. “She’s slipped away somewhere. And it seems they have a different tactic anyway.”
“And once we’ve heard it, we can go home?” Two asks. “Illume gave me the creeps before all this happened.”
“We’ll see.”
> STATUS
HEALTH MONITOR: Green
OUTFIT: Forsaken Militia (olive fatigues)
LEFT HAND: codebook (<READ CODEBOOK>)
RIGHT HAND: (empty)
FATIGUES: secret orders (<READ ORDERS>)
> READ ORDERS
I feel like the couple of little bugs still in the game aren’t really worth the palaver of a new version on their own.
I have considered making a “Newcomer Edition” with hyperlink interactions, but I feel like that would trivialise the search for ammo and health.
I’ve also considered adding a “hardcore mode” that would make escaping from enemies more difficult… But ultimately I just like it when games are easier to interact with and move around in (c.f. how in this one I used compass directions) - even if that is at odds with this game’s direct inspirations.
And I also have the excuse of Forsaken Denizen being very close to the apparent limit of the size and/or complexity that Dialog allows for Z-machine output. Any significant additions would either be tricky to do or would require outputting to the Å-machine.
Probably my next focus is a new story at Forsaken Edge, but it’s not impossible that I’ll come back to make a new version one day…
> TALK TO TWO
“Well,” Two says, “if you play Militia liaison, I’ll stand next to you and look pretty.”
Zero wonders how she’d manage without him to do the heavy lifting.
> GO WEST