In 2024 my work schedule did not allow me to engage with as many comp games as I would have liked. I’m certainly making up for it this year. When I recently finished playing “Wise Woman’s Dog”, I thought of the “37 percent rule” and rushed to see if I had made it through 37% of the games. Alas, I had only made it through 33%. (If you’re unfamiliar with the 37 percent rule, also known as the secretary problem or optimal stopping theory, probably better for you to read about it somewhere else than to read my clumsy explanation)
Now that I’m at thirty seven percent, I decided to celebrate by picking a game by a known author which has been on my comp wish list since the beginning. I know this is an invalid interpretation of the 37 percent rule, since the order of the things being evaluated is supposed to be kept random. But I’ll take a break from the randomizer this time.
“Cart”, a dark short story written in Twine by Brett Witty. I have not read any other reviews before playing this, but I am familiar with the author’s other work.
Analysis and spoilers
“Cart” tells the story of someone without any resources struggling for survival under an authoritarian regime. The PC acquires a night-soil cart (euphemism for the cart used to port latrine waste out of the city) and with that he ekes out his living. The story does not indicate a specific place or time, leaving it open to interpretation whether this is an allegory for right now, or the human condition more generally.
The story is written very well, but told in a mostly linear way. There are a few choice points. I don’t think they make a difference to the long term arc of the narrative. They do have some impact on how the player forms their own relationship with the character: whether you would knock a gold tooth out of the face of a dead man (I did), whether to show compassion for an orphan boy (I also did).
The local villain is a character named Sir Harrington, someone who rallies the masses to anger and racist violence with his public harangues. No matter what choices the player makes, the PC ultimately becomes a target and then a victim of Sir Harrington. No matter what choices the player makes, Sir Harrington ultimately becomes a victim of himself. It is easy to make comparisons to the allegorical Sir Harringtons in my own country (USA), or other contemporary authoritarian figures throughout the world.
However the scene I played in my own mind while I read Cart was informed by a book I read last year called “The Blazing World” a history of the English Civil War of the 1600s. The royal title “sir” and the primitive methods of moving shit around the city reinforced this in my mind. I knew very little about this period of English history before picking up “Blazing World”, but I sensed it might resonate with current events, and that it might even be cathartic. It certainly was. For all the power that England had acquired by the 19th century, it was a hot mess in the 17th century. Decades of war and power struggles between the royal and middle classes, most of it tied to religious identities, none of it having any benefit for the peasant classes. Close to 200,000 dead during the conflicts. Oliver Cromwell (the leader of the anti-royalist faction) served only five years as Lord Protector, died of natural causes, later was post-humously hung AND beheaded.
I’m of the mind that “Cart” is not an allegory about right now, but the human condition more generally. Cathartic. Yes, cathartic.
“A winter morning on the beach”, a parser game by E. Cuchel started out with an inviting splash screen photo of the beach, an introduction to the character (whose physician told him he needs to get more steps in) preparing for a walk, then a play button. Almost everything went downhill from there.
I assumed this would be a hiking simulator in the style of last year’s “Birding in Pope Lick Park” (Eric Lathrop) or the 2004 story “The Fire Tower” (Jacqueline A. Lott) or even the cozy “Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing” (Ryan Veeder). Interactive Fiction has great potential to convey a sense of place, in some instances entertaining without telling any story at all.
Hitting PLAY in “A winter morning” opens an unsightly black and green screen with a parser and some highlighted text. I do like parser/text hybrids, but after putting so much creative design into the splash screen, the choice of colors on the parser screen was unfortunate. Under other circumstances, maybe that wouldn’t matter, but I assumed this game was to simulate a relaxing walk on the beach, not the boot screen colors of a 1981 personal computer.
In terms of world modeling the game is a mixed bag. The “x me” gives a very detailed description of the player character and the clothing. The game impletments “touch”, “smell” and “taste” verb for nearly every examinable object. But there just isn’t that much to examine. Every numbered stretch of the long beach looks more or less like every other section. Infrequently there is a sign to read. But there isn’t much time to read them. If you stop for too long, a seagull drops its load on your head and the game ends.
I never imagined that a game about a walk on the beach could be so cruel on the Zarfian scale. If you stop too long, the game ends. If you don’t stop often enough, the game ends. Sometime resting for a mere two turns is long enough to summon the infernal sea gulls. There is no undo command. The doctor tells me that I need to build up to 10,000 steps (which I presume is the win state) but that is almost impossible to achieve in this game.
I don’t know if this was meant as an ironic commentary on the unpleasantness of following the doctor’s orders, but back in the real world I actually enjoy a walk on the beach, so this didn’t work for me.
“The Little Four”, a parser game by Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E. This is a cozy slice of life about the relationship between Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings (Agatha Christie characters). I am only familiar with Poirot from a number of film adaptations I’ve seen, and even less familiar with Hastings, so I’m quite sure I missed some of the references to the team’s past cases. But this Interactive Fiction is still engaging without that prior knowledge.
In an earlier review I wrote “Interactive Fiction has great potential to convey a sense of place, in some instances entertaining without telling any story at all.” This present work (Little Four) conveys the character and deep friendship between the protagonists, largely through an exploration of their shared Sussex apartment, on a relaxed Sunday in 1939, sometime near the end of Poirot’s career.
Everything about the game design encourages a relaxed experience. The goals of each chapter are clearly communicated and straightforward to complete. Select a tie, drink some coffee, walk the dog. The only mystery introduced is an observation game proposed by Poirot to entertain Hasting’s son while they’re waiting for their communal supper.
The verb set is largely constrained to exploring and examining commands. Important features of each room are bolded, then text highlighting is removed once the item has been properly examined. What this means is that there are no puzzles per se, but great freedom to explore the environs. Every object examined comes loaded with fresh details about that item’s history, or special meaning to the various characters. The parser is simple, but it doesn’t need to do more for this game to be what it is.