Emily Short is one of my favorite IF authors. Her fairy tale retellings did a lot to draw me in to the form, and Counterfeit Monkey is a pinnacle of implementation. Pytho’s Mask is an enjoyable game, and it includes Short’s signature experiments in conversation, but it lacks the polish she became famous for in her later works. There is a regrettably large number of bugs, and I had to look at the walkthrough to find out the correct syntax for switching the glasses and what to do in the ending scene. I also got a fatal error when perusing the books.
Discussion of the ending
My main critique of Pytho’s Mask, however, is how it handles the ending. There are several ways the game can end, but there’s clearly only one that Short intended to be the end of the story. If a game offers multiple endings, each one should be meaningful in its own right. Since every ending but one is essentially an extended “You have failed” message, it would have been better either not to offer the choice at all (i. e. After Soteria takes the cup, she immediately swaps it with the Earth Minister’s cup.), or to have made each ending a satisfying one.
The original version of the recent Iron ChIF game course correction initially handled multiple endings in much the same manner as Pytho’s Mask; there was the one ending that the story had been building towards, while the rest of the endings left the primary tensions unresolved. These secondary endings were rewritten for the updated version of course correction, and they work much better; each one feels like it resolves both of the protagonists’ stories in a way that follows naturally from their actions. There might be an objectively better ending, but it doesn’t feel like it’s punishing the player for having made the wrong decision.
In Pytho’s Mask, it does not feel like Short tried to understand why the player might make a different choice. Soteria, as Short imagined her, has certain motivations that lead her to make a certain decision. It’s possible to imagine reasons that Soteria might choose to put the King’s goblet in anyone’s spot, or even to leave it where it is. Swapping the King’s cup with Valkir’s cup, especially, seems like it should have led to a better ending. Perhaps the player’s version of Soteria believes, like the conspirators, that the time has come for the regime to change, or perhaps she believes that the Prince would be better suited to rule if he his personality were radically altered. The secondary endings of Pytho’s Mask would have been far stronger if Short had tried to imagine why a player might have chosen the option they did, and had written endings that aligned with those motivations. As it is, it seems that the these endings are only there for flavor, and that the player is meant to try again if they get one of them.
Non-meaningful flavor choices are a core part of creating the illusion of freedom in IF, but they don’t belong in the climax. Cut the Sky, for instance, allows the player to choose how to end each scene, creating their own version of the story, but (as far as I know) it always builds to the same ending, ensuring that the player comes away satisfied. Many works allow the player to solve puzzles in a different order, or customize the PC, or even lose halfway through the game. But how a game ends has such a big impact on the player’s experience that it’s worthwhile to put in the extra effort to flesh out each ending the game offers.
This isn’t to say that Pytho’s Mask is a bad game; I thought it could have ended better, but it’s definitely still worth playing. It did a number of things very well. If you make the right decision at the end, the rest of the climax flows smoothly. The mixed parser-choice conversations worked fairly well. Short was careful to ensure there are multiple ways a player can learn the necessary information, and created a unique world. From here, I’ll be heading north to another Emily Short game, The First Draft of the Revolution.
) and the overall mystery was well constructed with plenty of subtle clues. I guess the end puzzle (solve the mystery) was the one point where you could get it right or wrong.