The Horseman of Famine now sits down to review each dish. Hunger piqued, pangs sharpened throughout the contest, is it any surprise that he finally launches himself at the table like a ravenous hound?
What a sumptuous banquet both the Challenger and the Iron ChIF have prepared for our delectation! Two plates with their own unique flavors, almost entirely unalike. So unalike, in fact, that they seem to operate almost at separate ends of the IF spectrum.
First, let us study the Challenger’s dish. It is narratively rich. An entire avian world suggested! With dueling clans, censored gods, political prisoners, war, espionage, and not one but two protagonists: Constance and Horatio. Our perspective flips between them. We briefly play as both birds, each with different abilities, and the unexpected change to play Horatio struck this judge as a particularly satisfying turn of the plot. I knew about Horatio beforehand, from peeking at the Challenger’s code; I did not know about his introduction – a little jailbreak sequence! The “escape from prison” spice is a classic, and here it is employed well. The world constricts from Constance’s “go anywhere” map to Horatio’s small, unadorned cell. This narrows the player’s focus, ensuring that the action will be driven along without too much loitering, while also providing a glimpse into Horatio’s unjustly impoverished life.
In contrast, the Iron ChIF’s game begins with this banner: “a puzzle game by Ryan Veeder, easy on the plot.” An accurate summary! There are touches of a plot here, to be sure. The game revolves around a pair of married magicians – around their empty house, anyway, soon slated to be demolished – and their personalities and ambitions are sprinkled throughout the environment. But the story takes a backseat – a far, far backseat – to the puzzles. The puzzles are complex, demanding, and frankly devious. As the player grapples with their confounding logic, the game’s fictional world quickly flakes away as mechanical elements rise into a more dominant prominence. Soon enough, the player is treating the world not like a “world” at all, but like a device, a machine, indeed like a game: something to be poked and prodded and manipulated and conquered.
With course correction, we have a dish steeped in human warmth. It is a light game, nothing too heavy or depressing, but it develops emotional depths, and it strikes universal chords, posing moral questions about the nature of religion, of civilization, of tribalism, of compassion. With The Van der Nagel Papyrus, on the other hand, we have a dish whose calculations shine like surgical implements. There is warmth in the Van der Nagel marriage, and the game touches briefly upon profound questions – “What is reality?” – but the atmosphere that develops is intellectual, distant, chilly. Still, the prose glimmers and glints! In the smallest snippets, the Iron ChIF evokes powerful sensory impressions.
Like The Eleventh Hour, from which it draws inspiration (and upon which at least one puzzle depends, requiring the player to plunder the book for information to solve a cipher in the game!), The Van der Nagel Papyrus is a fun-house of puzzles first, and everything else second. The puzzles are diverse. Two levels of reality are involved, between which the player must swap back and forth. The entire map ultimately transforms. The geography is wildly unstable. I have not played all of the Iron ChIF’s games, so perhaps he has other items like this on his menu, but Papyrus strikes me as far more mechanically-minded than his standard fare. It reminds me, not of Veeder games, but of Plotkin games – Dual Transform and Delightful Wallpaper – and DiBianca games – The Wand and The Temple of Shorgil. But unlike Plotkin’s and DiBianca’s games, Papyrus doesn’t ramp up gradually; it plunges the player into the deep end, and “sink” and “swim” are both very realistic possibilities. Some people may find Papyrus outright hostile. Although it may offer a balm in the shape of the philosophy that “you are done whenever you choose to be done; everyone is a winner, and you can stop at any time,” this doesn’t actually soften the game’s difficulty. For players who stick with it, though, the depths will open! Puzzle-fiends may find themselves in heaven (or in another place).
(At the time of this writing, I have only found 5/6 papyri myself, and therefore have not completed 100% of the game. But the clock ticks, and reviews must be written!)
course correction is a far more approachable game. Even its demands upon the player’s time are more lenient: I finished the game in perhaps one hour, versus 8+ for Papyrus. The Challenger expressed some concern, during the competition, that his compass navigation system might confuse players – but I’m pleased to report that he has ironed out the wrinkles in the final dish, and I never had any problems with navigation. A few implementation bumps persisted, true. But nothing game-breaking. The puzzles were simple and intuitive, arranged more in the service of narrative texture than as brain-teasers. Could they have been more elaborate? Perhaps. Although the player has multiple magical abilities as Constance, I finished the game without using them all. Maybe I could have used them but inadvertently solved certain puzzles without needing to. This is possible! Multiple puzzle solutions are generally a boon for a game. Still, I would have liked to find applications for every magic spell during my playthrough.
Speaking of magic spells, I must mention the challenge ingredient: a scroll that alters the world around it. Both the Challenger and the Iron ChIF embraced this ingredient wholeheartedly! It infuses course correction and Papyrus to the marrow. Everything in both these games revolves completely around their scrolls.
Curiously, both the Challenger and the Iron ChIF implemented not the reading of the scrolls as the main mechanic by which the player interacts with them (although the scrolls can indeed be read), but rather the opening/closing of the scrolls! When a scroll is open, it has one effect; when closed, another – in both games. Perhaps the fact that scrolls unroll gives their opening/closing a bit more attraction for the imagination, and prompted both chefs to focus on opening/closing as a primary mechanic (even if the opening/closing is managed by other devices like rings and capsae).
But to return to the question of approachability – allow me to reiterate the care that course correction takes re: the player’s ease of interaction. It wants to be easy to play, and it largely succeeds! It occasionally slides from a pure parser into a choice-based interface, presenting the player with numbered dialogue options. Anyone who is familiar with the IF canon should have no great trouble working their way through this game. It is solidly designed all the way around.
The same, I am afraid, cannot be said of The Van der Nagel Papyrus. It innovates more than course correction, but that innovation involves the creation of a fiendishly complex, rearrangable map – (the movie Murder by Death comes to mind, with its rearrangable mansion) – and the map is not easy to rearrange! It is really a visual puzzle embedded in text, and the player must constantly refer to an ASCII map for orientation. One nudge, and then check the map; another nudge, and check the map; another nudge, map; another, map – and this process must be repeated quite literally hundreds of times. Hence my largest strike against the Iron ChIF’s dish in the “playability” category. We type into parser games; that is their nature; but there is typing, and then there is typing. Too much can become an obstacle as tricky to surmount as any puzzle. (A later addendum – far too late: it is apparently possible to display the ASCII map automatically when the rooms change, but this is an “opt-in” feature. I would make it the default! In the whirlwind of puzzle madness, I missed the “opt-in” direction and only learned about it from another judge, hours and hours after the fact.)
The ambition of this map, however, is somewhat staggering. Earlier in the competition, the Iron ChIF reported his re-engineering of the standard navigation model, an effort that for most games would have been purposelessly convoluted – but Papyrus is purposefully convoluted! Its convolutions are mind-boggling. I can only stare slack-jawed at what the Iron ChIF has accomplished – in five days – and gawp, furthermore, at the fact that it works. In how many ways might this system have gone wrong? The danger of catastrophic failure is everywhere, but the Iron ChIF walks the technical tightrope breezily and never falters. I did not encounter a single bug.
In the end, my scores for both dishes brushed so closely against each other that they were almost identical, although for very different reasons. “Apples and oranges,” the saying goes, and that is certainly true here! But when I tallied up my little scorecard, Papyrus barely eked out a victory – by one point. I must bow before the Iron ChIF’s astonishing mastery of Inform 7 on a systems level, and his ability to twist its language, much like a magician, to reshape reality.
But I must also commend the Challenger, and indeed, I would not be surprised if the Challenger’s dish, far more palatable and warmly-spiced, ultimately wins the favor of the audience! Not everyone possesses the Horseman of Famine’s penchant for meta nonsense, but who will not resonate, at least partially, with the story of our exiled Constance and imprisoned Horatio, struggling against the odds to make their world a safer place? What a “safer place” means is not something the game clarifies beyond a doubt; the player is left to make their own choice at the end, deciding to employ a pivotal scroll either for local but guaranteed benefits, or for global but uncertain benefits. It happens to be a scroll bestowing “health,” and as someone who lives in the USA, I could not help comparing the situation in-game to the USA’s utterly criminal healthcare system. But I will spare everyone a political rant! We are here to celebrate the games, and there is enough strife outside Keyboard Stadium; we needn’t invite it to sit down at the table too.
I must finally mention the Challenger’s “old school” approach to game design, something that he highlights in his original video diary. In the white-hot fervor of Keyboard Stadium, where the chefs clash upon the culinary field, they bring their own backstories like standards borne into battle, representing This or That philosophy or attitude – and the Challenger has stepped across a span of almost three decades to prepare his dish! He has contributed to other games in the interim, but his last solo-authored games (including IFComp winner The Edifice) cluster in the late 1990s – and yet the Challenger is not bound by the design principles of the '90s. He arrives right here, right now, as a cutting-edge author, crafting an exquisite game under a tight deadline and immense public pressure – as far from “old school” as one can get! He has collapsed the timeline. He has bridged the gap. IF is not an art-form consigned to the past, but one that lives and breathes just as powerfully in the present.