Josh Grams's IFComp 2026

Competitions IFComp
,
61

Without Corporation

Hmm. Indirect control is tricky to pull off and this game’s coding feels like it’s extremely brittle. I kept triggering things in ways that felt out of order and then the game didn’t quite know what to do? Sometimes it felt like it was following a script and events were happening in order without reference to whether you’d already done the thing it was telling you to do, so you’d get redundant information. Sometimes it would instantly clear the screen without you pressing a key, or it’d get you used to always having to press a key so you cleared the screen by mistake and then well, I hope you have a transcript going or you might not ever get the information you need to continue. And sometimes it felt like it was triggering events based on the world state (but maybe not quite the bit of world state that I’d expect the event to be attached to?) so if you’d already experimented and done the thing then again, you might not get important information.

And then the game-in-the-game is intentionally glitchy, making it even harder to tell if anything is functioning as intended. I did get through this, and I think I have a picture of how it’s supposed to go, but it’s hard to tell.

sequence?

So I think:

No, wait, maybe I should delete the external files and run through it again to see if I’m right. Eh. I’m not sure I feel like it. So some of this may be wrong.

  • You get a bunch of commentary at the beginning.
  • You begin the game-within-a-game
  • You get a lot of stuff dumped on you, you’re supposed to figure out that you’re messing with the game while the protagonist goes around doing sometimes-random-sometimes-scripted stuff, and you need to get her (or him? I think this is randomly chosen and then saved?) to do the things to advance the game.
  • Your first goal is wake-up. You can do other stuff until the time runs out, or you can run it directly. If you run it directly but don’t dequeue wake-up then you’ll get yelled at for running it twice when it fires again.
  • You’ll get some new goals: child (there’s a male and a female version; again, I think gender chosen randomly but a bunch of the messages only match one gender; I’m almost certain this is intentional), gown, torch.
  • So you can move gown to dresser before the PC gets out of bed and looks in there, then they’ll find it. There’s also (sometimes?) a run wear-gown possible.
  • Once the PC gets the gown they’ll leave the room. The child is supposed to follow but they don’t. You might think you could run the [child]-follow routine but no, you have to move them manually: move [child-name] to entrance-hall.
  • Then the PC might (?) move to child’s bedroom? The child had the torch hidden under their blankets, or the game is buggy and doesn’t mention it; I’m not sure how you’re supposed to trigger the PC to put the kid to bed. I think I just did move [kid] to [kid]-bed and move torch to player to get those goals to happen?
  • After that the PC will go outside. You can move them around (there’s also a kitchen, for instance, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there?) but they’ll just head back out. Eventually (maybe after a very long time) they will dig a hole and fall back in to the scene where you started (I think?).
  • While all this is going on, the narrator will occasionally throw passwords and filenames at you (I think in a particular order)? And occasionally throw a little temper tantrum and restart the game on you. I assume you’re supposed to see “app” to “ncc” and “diA” to “qvN” and “Poe” to “Cbr” and realize that it’s a consistent letter substitution and in fact rot13. Then you can go open (most of) the other files. But the narrator may yell you to read at least one of them later even though you already have and you just have to do it again.
  • PC is in the hole, stuff happens, eventually a sturdy root shows up, but the PC seems to ignore it. I think the thing I did that triggered it to move on was move root to deep-underground (the game prints capitalization but it doesn’t seem to care about it in the input at all).
  • But you get the player to grab the root and Rudolf helps them out.
  • Also at some point in here the narrator wants you to do an “update” and gives you the “zilf” command. I think if you type in the thing that you’re supposed to you’ll completely miss a cue that you need later, so try zilf by itself and zilf file by itself to find out about the command-line options and then maybe zilf not-the-update-file -X with all the options to find out what they do.
  • Now you’re back in the Front-Yard: the PC will randomly try to go back down but the game won’t let them. There’s supposed to be a chase sequence here and the narrator strongly implies that you shouldn’t trigger it but I never figured out how to get the game to do it. So I died/looped the game a few times.
  • Eventually I think what did it was putting Rudolf in the front yard and then running chase? But I’m not sure when chase showed up: I don’t think it was there initially.
  • Rudolf moved around a bit and eventually I triggered advance. The PC tried to UNDO which the narrator didn’t like (actually I had typed UNDO way early on so I’d already seen this message).
  • I wasn’t sure what to try so I started CUtW again and tried the same thing (rudolf, chase, advance?) and this time the PC quit, which seemed to be the game moving on.
  • Now the Narrator said that someone “is coming for you” and has plugged in an external drive so if you’ve played enough with zilf you suspect will allow the -C (copy) command to work. And if you’ve seen the error message when you try to open MFog.zip in the FILES list then you know what that file is, so you’ll try copying it.
  • Which triggers the end of the game. I’m not sure why jumping from a running computer to a random drive that some unknown person (who may be the one coming to stop you?) is better, but there you go.

Hmm, actually, that was pretty long. Let’s see if I can manage a tl;dr.

tl;dr

There are kind of two separate threads; advancing the inner game (CUtW) and advancing the narrator’s story. I’m not sure how tightly they’re tied together. I think pretty closely but I don’t remember the exact order of interweaving so here they are separately.

CUtW

There’s space in between: list or routines or goals would make time pass: it seems sorta arbitrary whether z works or whether it makes the narrator throw a temper tantrum and restart the game or whether it doesn’t work at all, so I didn’t use it much.

  • dequeue wake-up
  • move gown to dresser
  • move [child] to entrance-hall
  • I don’t know how to trigger the PC to achieve the torch and child goals, so
  • move [child] to [child]-bed
  • move torch to player
  • player goes to yard, eventually goes in hole. Can you just move player to deep-underground? dunno.
  • sturdy root shows up, move root to deep-underground makes player notice it?
  • player is back in front yard.
  • move rudolf to front-yard; run chase ?? not sure about these last steps; I was flailing around forever.
  • Then run advance
  • Do these last three steps repeatedly (I think?) until you trigger the player to quit

Narrator:

  • files (open files the narrator tells you to, find out that MFog.zip is a model file)
  • maybe rot13 first-three letters + day/month from log as password to check out the other files
  • “update” the terminal, but play around with the zilf command with different arguments before running the actual update command.
  • (you want to find that zilf filename -C is copy, but it needs an external drive and there’s none right now)
  • Once the PC quits you’ll get the narrator triggering an end-game, zilf MFog.zip -C

Anyway. I don’t know. I’m also not the audience for this game at all; I usually find this kind of meta-storytelling pretentious and boring, I’m so done with AI stories, and glitchiness is not my thing either unless it’s really strongly tied to a believable fictional author like Lake Adventure or whatever.

I ended up thinking this game was attempting something interesting, but getting in its own way a lot (the endless key-presses between typing a command and typing another command were super frustrating and distracting and “hey, do you remember what you were trying to do now that we’ve interrupted you once or twice?” – would it have been better if it did the PC action first and just didn’t bother with the press-any-key-to-continue? I think so) and advancing the story was too brittle and it was hard to tell if you were running into intentional glitchiness or actual bugginess.

4 Likes
WITHOUT corporation hints