Thank you for the kind review! Don’t worry, I’m workin’ on that post-comp release…
4 Likes
Thanks for your review. Its really helpfull to get so many reviews.
I would love to play the games mentioned by you about disabilities. Where do i find them? Searching for disability didnt help.
Btw, the interface mechanics were chosen for practical reasons, as the game was printed as a booklet in german language.
The question of the subjectivity certainly gets me thinking, how to improve that. I did try in the text, as sometimes the thoughts of the protagonist are told. I am not sure, what else could be done. For that it would be great to see the other games, that you mentioned.
3 Likes
Thanks for the additional info on the game - cool that it was actually printed!
For some of the other games I had in mind, here are a couple examples:
3 Likes
How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title, by John Ziegler
(I beta tested this game)
I always find it hard to review games I’ve tested, because even when I replay the final, finished version, my first impression is inescapably of a no-longer-extant game still in the process of reaching its ultimate form; I sometimes attempt some mental gymnastics to try to figure out how my sense of a game might differ from that of someone coming to it fresh, but that’s especially challenging here, because Prince Quisborne is a massive game that I haven’t had the opportunity to revisit in any depth, and I first started testing it in February. So my memories are more distant than I’d like, I haven’t refreshed them recently, and I suspect the addition of some new features, like the NUDGE command that points you to areas where you’re able to make progress, or the DESTINATIONS-based fast travel system to minimize the challenge of navigating the large, diagonal-direction-happy map, radically smooth out the gameplay. Nevertheless I feel obliged to write something by way of comment on the most Brobdingnagian game of this, or, perhaps, any Comp, but you might want to take it with even more salt than usual.
Right, with that distressingly on-point intro out of the way, let’s talk about tarof, which is the Persian practice of hospitality. So far as I’ve experienced it (I have an Iranian-American wife and in-laws), the thing that’s distinctive about tarof is its extravagant generosity. The quintessential example is that you’ll be invited over for lunch, and on your way in you’ll maybe mutter some compliment about the nice rug they have in their living room, at which point your host will beam at you and say “oh, it’s a terrible old thing, I hate it, but I’m so glad you like it, let me give it to you!” At which point you might protest a) you weren’t dropping a hint or anything like that; and b) actually you’re no expert on rugs but now that you look at it it sure seems very nice and actually probably quite expensive. But they’ll say it’s kind of you but no need to be polite, actually you’d be doing me a favor if you take it. And as you try to think of what to say, your host will gently shove you out of the way, get down on their hands and knees, and start rolling the thing up for you. The thing is, this is obviously incredibly nice. But it’s also super overbearing – it’s too much, and even leaving that aside, how the hell are you supposed to get that giant rug home?
And so we come again to Prince Quisborne, which combines the vast scope of a mainframe game with the intricate depth of implementation of a short one-room one, and presents its epic story in a prose style that’s prolix to a fault. In some ways this is the dream that animated the early amateur IF scene: a whole world rendered in jewel-like detail, where you could equally well traipse from one side of a kingdom to the other, and pause anywhere along the way to take in a pagelong random event tied to your exact progression through the plot, or stop off at a blacksmith’s shop to futz around with a fully functional forge, or visit a mini area with fiendishly complex logic and word puzzles that could be a whole game in its own right.
I’m not sure I’ve come across anything else that incarnates this vision nearly as well – Cragne Manor is the only plausible contender, and as a game with 84 authors and all the incoherence that implies, it’s not really a close comparison – and the thing is, having experienced it, it’s not obvious that this was such a good idea. Prince Quisborne is a lot; the prologue is manageable, though already shows off the author’s facility with jokey high-fantasy-ish language and love of multiple puzzle solutions, but once past that lagniappe, the full game unfolds and I can only imagine that most players will issue a gulp, much like I did, once they realize exactly what they’re in for: sure, an incredible voyage of discovery where your eponymous protégé will learn to be a grown-up under your tutelage as you unlock ancient secrets, but also puzzles that rely on having searched an unobtrusive bit of scenery halfway around the world, or remembering an incidental detail from a lore dump ten hours ago; or finding the thingabob you suddenly realize you need means remembering whether you first saw it in Chelkwibble or Chedderwicket; and when you hit the big plot-progressing cutscenes to hand, I sure hope you have a drink and snack handy.
As with tarof, it’s easy to look at all of this and just think “it’s too much”, especially in the press of the Comp. But unlike with tarof, which is embedded in complex systems of power, class, and reciprocity that need to be navigated to maintain politeness, there’s really no downside or ulterior motive here: Prince Quisborne is precisely as generous as it appears to be. If a player tries to rush through it in one go, I suspect they’ll resent it, but if instead it’s played over weeks or months, I suspect it’d deservedly be one of the greatest IF experiences you’ve ever had. It’s extraordinarily rich, and the more I played it, the more I appreciated touches like Prince Quisborne’s facility for having a limerick for every situation, or the way his character subtly changes over the course of the journey as experience leads him from callow youth to surprisingly-touching heroism. In fact, I’m not ashamed to admit that the ending sequence made me tear up – while PQ starts out as a comedy character, he achieves real depth by the finish, and the way the game acknowledges his growth is at once a total blindsiding and completely, necessarily obvious. It’s one of the most impressive climaxes to a piece of IF I’ve ever experienced, so if you’re wondering whether pressing through to the end is worth it, I can say that it emphatically is.
PQ also goes out of its way to be friendly to the player, without watering itself down in the slightest: there are all those convenient commands I mentioned at the beginning, as well as an always-on inventory window, exhaustive hints, and a lovely, inviting presentation (for the love of god, play this in QTADS to get the full experience). One doesn’t need to meet PQ halfway, only a quarter of the way at most.
This is still a commitment, let me reiterate! I’d guess this is at least a 20 hour game. But each of those hours will show you something worthwhile, and the accumulation of them accomplishes things very few other games have done. Now that the Comp is winding down, it’s the perfect time to approach PQ as it deserves to be approached: dedicate some time. Let go of the idea that you need to race through it (or that you should have any shame about consulting hints or the walkthrough!) And get ready to experience something extraordinary.
13 Likes
LAKE Adventure, by B.J. Best
(I beta tested this game. Spoilers).
I regret not having a stronger grounding in literary theory pretty much any day ending in y, but that lack feels especially excruciating as I turn to LAKE Adventure, because it’s operating within a movement that I’d love to be able to name definitively. Instead, I’m going to have to wildcat this thing and call the game part of the New Sincerity. Like, we all know that modernism happened, right, and dramatized the way that conventional narrative forms and naïve realism were no longer tenable in an increasingly polycentric and polyvalent world, right? And then came post-modernism, which responded to the anxiety that forms might be empty by turning a microscope onto said forms, exalting self-conscious exploration of structure above superficial considerations of plot and character.
But after post-modernism exhausted itself (er, to the extent it has – again, I am mostly groping blindly here) something had to come next, and for many, that something had to respond to the ongoing felt need for old-fashioned emotional engagement and catharsis. But how to manage that in a world where a genre-savvy audience goes into a work knowing all the tricks? Paradoxically, the author needs to meet them where they’re at, and move outwards into ironic distance to create the preconditions necessary to eventually move inwards to identification. Thus the New Sincerity; think of House of Leaves, which for all its metafictional flourishes has as its engine the failing marriage between the two leads. Or of the Sandman comics, which move into an epic register to chronicle the exploits of the Prince of Stories, but ultimately are largely concerned with how he’s a shitty boyfriend. Or – to tip my hand – think of And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, B.J. Best’s Comp-winning game from 2021; a coming-of-age story about the pre-teenaged angst of moving away from your best friend, it could have been saccharine-sweet but for the way its narrative was ramified through text adventures within text adventures (with bonus parallel text adventures as an Easter Egg).
LAKE Adventure is doing something similar, I think, but there’s no risk that anyone will find this game cloying. It’s also part of what I’ve called a confessional turn in recent parser IF (think of this year’s Repeat the Ending and Hand Me Down; also, I really need to stop trying to name things, I’m bad at it), positioning the game the player experiences as a diegetically-created work whose origins are themselves elements of the game’s story. The premise is that the game’s central character, Eddie Hughes, has dug up an old text adventure he wrote when he was 13 (and later revised when he was an older teenager) and, facing the doldrums of the first months of 2020’s lockdowns, is watching on Zoom and commenting along as a friend plays it for the first time.
This is an excruciatingly painful framing device. Like, I am one of the few (maybe only?) people in the world who’s experienced something like this: I presented Sting, my memoir game, to a meeting of the Seattle IF Meetup in 2021, and while they were completely lovely about it, sharing scenes from my actual life as rendered into parser form – in real time – was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done. And that was just a game that emulated how I was when I was a young teenager, rather than one actually reflecting my 13-year-old sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, Eddie is diffident in the extreme, repeatedly asking the player whether they want to stop playing, apologizing for the overly-faithful implementation of his childhood home, and audibly squirming when his younger self-insults the player for turning on the TV by calling them a “vidiot.” No wonder that self-deprecating phrase “I guess” is by far Eddie’s most common verbal tic as he attempts to narrate his lost youth.
For all that LAKE Adventure boasts a note-perfect recreation of a late-80s childhood – there’s a birthday party invitation recognizably created via Print Shop, and the in-game narration focuses with hyperspecificity on the material and brand of young Eddie’s swimsuit – it’s not nostalgic, and in fact is anti-nostalgic. While the few glimpses we get of adult Eddie’s life indicate that it’s unremarkable but stable, his youth was anything but. The plot of the game-within-a-game is notionally just about visiting a birthday party for his best friend’s sister, but it’s haunted by numerous specters, from his parents’ shattered marriage to his own sister’s illness to a history of bullying to the sad fate of his friend. Snatches of this dark reality come in extradiegetic Shards of Memory, which take the player out of the idyllic lake-house setting to experience snatches of Eddie’s contemporary reality, or in adult Eddie’s understated acknowledgement of the ways that the game functioned as an escape from an untenable situation, or from the incursion of graphic violence into a heretofore-innocent story. The game mines pathos out of the implications of the smallest detail or slip of the tongue:
Your mother’s clothes are on the floor in piles. Some are dresses. Some are jeans. It’s a good thing you know how to do your own laundry!
Anyway, the bathroom is to the east and my paren—my mom’s—room is west.
And I’m not going to quote it, but there’s nothing in this year’s Comp that hit me as hard as the description of the doll.
The player has work to do along the way; there are puzzles that keep you busy, but mostly what I found myself doing was reflecting on memory. The game is a palimpsest, with some of the darker elements presumably added in by the late-teenage Eddie who knows how some things end up, changes that retroactively reconfigure what’s come before in a way that makes the original forever inaccessible. Of course, that isn’t even a metaphor – to invoke one of my many strange points of bleed-through with this game, my memories of my sister’s last months are already confounded by all the times I’ve remembered them. Later, in the climax, the player’s explicitly confronted with a series of young Eddie’s most traumatic experiences, and has the option to either embrace or reject these memories – but for those seeking comfort in coming full circle will be disappointed to learn that these choices make no difference to the outcome. Then the tragedy of young Eddie’s disillusionment is driven home by a sequence that runs through all his hopes for the future, from romantic conquests to worldly success.
After all this, LAKE Adventure ends with a coda that could be seen as a final, superfluous twist of the knife. The Zoom session is cut short as Eddie’s daughter comes into the room and kicks him off the computer for an early-COVID remote study session for her ancient history class. She’s uninterested in her father’s half-hearted attempts to tell her what he’s been doing, and the game draws the curtain to leave his final, plaintive question unanswered: “I’d like to know if ancient history matters.”
It’s hard to get to this point and not feel beaten down. Again, this is the genius of the New Sincerity: narrate Eddie’s life from front to back, and we’d roll our eyes at the naked emotional manipulation, but let his pain peek out through the multiple overlapping layers of narrative, and it’s heartrending. This final suggestion that all of this was for nothing is almost too much to take. Yet it’s worth being pedantic about what Eddie’s asking: not whether the past matters, but whether history does. We routinely conflate the two, but in fact these are radically different, for the past is what happens, and history is what we write about it, how we try to wrest brute facts into narrative. While we don’t have details, it’s nonetheless pellucidly clear that Eddie’s experiences have shaped his life for good or ill – hell, just about the only thing we know about his daughter is that she’s named after his sister.
The judgment on history, though, is more equivocal; Eddie spends the whole game running away from or apologizing for the story he’s made of his traumatic past. And yet, even in this reticent, half-unspoken way, he does share his embarrassing juvenilia, and if it is possible for history to matter, surely the necessary first step is for someone to read it.
20 Likes
Honk!, by Alex Harby
(I alpha tested this game)
One of the things I worry about, as a critic, is turning into one of those people who says everything under the sun is a liminal space. It’s a cool-sounding phrase, sure, but it’s one of those concepts that can easily become a crutch, allowing one to say something that seems impressive but doesn’t communicate much beyond “this is a place that’s between other places”, which for sufficiently loose values of “place”, “between”, and “other” can be made to fit whatever you like.
Having written the above paragraph I am now seized with concern that actually I’m already one of those people and just haven’t noticed. …but OK, I just searched my IFDB-posted reviews and only 3 out of 387 use the phrase, referring to trains, bus stops, and public transit, which seems fairly restrained. So I think that means I can burn some of that banked capital and say you know, when you think about it, traveling circuses sure are liminal spaces. At a basic level, they move from place to place, but there’s also a temporal component, because when they’re pitched up somewhere and you visit, you’re sandwiched between its past nonexistence before they came into town and its future nonexistence once they leave. It’s unsurprising, then, that the circus is often positioned as a site of transformation: shuffling through my mental inventory of circus stories at random, you’ve got Big, where Tom Hanks literally enters one a boy and leaves a man; sticking to IF, Ballyhoo sees the player character lunge at the chance to stop being an anonymous punter and take on a new life of adventure.
For the people who work at a circus, though, it certainly can’t function as a one-off engine for change. In reality I’m sure for many it’s just a job like any other, but from a literary point of view, the approach taken by Honk! seems exactly right: the winning cast of this top-notch comedy puzzler are predominantly queer in one way or other, but comfortably so, at peace with an existence that the narrow might say is perennially in-between more conventional alternatives. The main character, a clown named Lola, takes hormone pills; her lover Freda is the circus strongwoman, gigantic and mighty and tender. The magician Adagio changes gender as part of her act, and the goose-trainer, Ken Lawn, clocks as neurodivergent (beyond his questionable decision to spend lots of time with an animal as ill-tempered as a goose as part of his profession, I mean). Against this, the Ringmaster seems a plain-vanilla kind of guy, but hey, he’s nice so we can let him skate by.
Actually pretty much everybody is nice, even initially-prickly Ken – except for the Phantom who’s haunting the circus and sabotaging everyone’s acts. The main business of the game involves assisting the three other main characters in their performances, seeing how the Phantom tries to wreck them, and foiling his plans to keep the shows moving (they’re endlessly repeatable until you succeed, this being a merciful game). This is a lovely structure, since it gives you multiple avenues to work on at once without any interdependences, so if you’re momentarily stymied you’ve almost always got another avenue to switch to. It also makes the player feel more proactive than in many parser games, since in practice you wind up scoping out the carnival grounds, then trying the acts to see what the Phantom’s going to do, then going back to the free-roaming section to hatch your plan and prepare.
Honk! is also among the funniest games in the Comp. The author’s a dab hand with farce – pretty much every scene involving the assholish goose left me giggling, for example:
“Completely asleep!” marvels Lawn. “I don’t believe it! How did yaargh fnaaargh,” he continues as the goose wakes up and bites his nose.
But there are also really good laconic, tossed-off jokes:
“It was your day off, you got back late, maybe you didn’t hear from anyone yet,” says the Ringmaster. “The circus is haunted now."
And the best gags to my mind are the ones that play their hand slow, telegraphing the punch line to the player and then drawing out the windup longer and longer and longer until an initially-good joke becomes sublime; it’s an impressive bit of comedic legerdemain that’s totally appropriate to the setting.
The puzzles themselves are a strong bunch, too. Most aren’t too hard, requiring just enough forethought to feel clever; there’s maybe one puzzle that’s a little too hard because it tips into overly-cartoonish territory –the bit where a helium balloon makes the rabbit float upwards – but even that is mostly delightful and funny. In fact for all that it’s all mostly standard medium-dry-goods manipulation, the puzzles have a very strong thematic focus – the tools of your trade involve pie-throwing, making balloon animals, and playing around with magic tricks – that make Honk! truly feel like a circus game, not just a game taking place at a circus.
That strong theme comes into play in the ending, too; after a deliriously-escalating climactic sequence, the game’s final text ties a surprisingly-affecting bow around everything the game’s played with – queerness, found family, laughter, killjoys using the law to stop people doing stuff they don’t like. While it never lets its message get in the way of the fun, Honk! is the rare silly parser puzzler that actually has something to say, positing that people who live in liminal spaces deserve a place to call home, too.
18 Likes
Not an immediate association to Honk, but the moment you began your explanation of circuses as liminal spaces I thought of Carnivale. On the edge of the middle of nowhere, bridging the gap between physical and mythological.
2 Likes
Thanks so much for this kind review, and thanks for all your help with testing the game. You and every other alpha and beta tester did a ton for this game.
But most of all, thank you for knowing what a liminal space is. All those Twitter accounts which just post pictures of any old backyard or empty classroom have been driving me up the wall for years.
5 Likes
I think I first learned the word “liminal space” from Cragne Manor.
The word I learned during this years comp is “Metroidvania”
5 Likes
Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates, by Victor Gijsbers
(I beta tested this game).
In the English class I took as a high-school sophomore, in lieu of formal essays the teacher would have us write little weekly papers in response to a quote he’d pull from whatever book we were reading. Usually the quote would clearly invite a specific kind of analysis, like it’d spotlight a key theme or a bit of character development or what have you, but every once in a while he’d mess with us, like when we were reading Updike’s The Centaur: out of that novel’s heady mix of mythological allegory, lyrical landscape-painting, and squalid small-town depression, he extracted for our waiting pens the bare clause “…a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
This was, so far as I remember, a totally insignificant quartet of words, brought on by one character drinking coffee on an empty stomach or something like that – a mere incidental detail signifying nothing. The upside was that I felt free to write whatever I felt like, and for whatever reason, I decided what I felt like writing was a three-page narration of Socrates’s last hours. I had him run through a monologue about his devotion to philosophy and the ideal, drink the hemlock in perfect equanimity, and say goodbye to his disciples with no great show of emotion. Yet even as his spirit faced its end with calm, I had his body rebel, guts heaving and roiling against the hemlock, lungs desperate to keep gasping down air. The ending line (I was very proud of the ending line) was “what is Truth? Truth is a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
All of which is to say that even to a teenager whose knowledge of Socrates came mostly from The Cartoon History of the Universe, the idea of using him to dramatize the physical nature of man is irresistible: to levy a critique of pure reason (wait, that’s Kant) by bringing the body into the equation, to juxtapose the phenomenology of spirit (oops, that’s Hegel) with the reality of flesh. This is something Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates does, and does well – we meet an embodied, earthy Socrates, with a big nose and a bigger belly, and with a taste for wine and food and sex – but it’s also, let’s face it, a sophomoric trick that isn’t actually that interesting: ideas come from people, and people exist in the world, film at 11.
No, what’s interesting in this game isn’t so much what’s done with Socrates qua Socrates, as what’s done with his wife Xanthippe, and therefore with him in relation to her. Xanthippe has come down through history only as a silent archetype, demonized by centuries of male writers as a shrew so vituperative that Socrates turned to harassing passers-by in the agora just to escape her clutches. It would be tempting to flip the tables on this legacy of misogyny by positing a Xanthippe who’s a perfect mate for her husband, someone who’s supportive of his endeavors, an intellectual match for him, and able to create a harmonious home for him as a refuge from the small-minded politics that ultimately killed him. Fortunately, Victor resists this temptation: his Xanthippe is certainly Socrates’s equal, but she’s recognizably someone who gossips would turn into a legendary termagant. She holds a grudge, she knows what buttons to push, she calls him on his BS. It would have been easy to write this game to be about reacting to the great philosopher; instead, he has to react to her.
There’s a lot of skill needed to make this work, though; it’s easier to describe the dynamic between two long-married people than it is to show it, especially when they’re interacting in circumstances as extreme as these (the premise, memorably laid out by the blurb, is that as Xanthippe you’ve bribed your way into his prison cell on the eve of his execution, bent on one last roll in the hay). The game rises to the challenge by slaughtering sacred cows left and right. Almost the first thing out of Xanthippe’s mouth is ”come here, humpty grumpy Socratumpy,” which is a hilarious line but also a statement of intent: these characters aren’t going to be mere figures mouthing stentorian dialogue, but human beings who demand to be understood as such. This does mean that there’s more than a bit of anachronism in the dialogue (there’s a reference to a cuckold’s horns, for example, though I’m pretty sure that figure didn’t exist in antiquity) but the game is more than worth the candle: freed of the need to hew to some imagined Merchant-Ivory portrait, the game has full rein to be funny and sincere.
Indeed, while the circumstances of the characters are quite dire, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates made me laugh as much as any game in the Comp. There are of course philosophy jokes sufficiently accessible that I got them (despite the passage of 25 years, I’m still mostly relying on that Cartoon History for my knowledge of Socrates), little Classical in-jokes (“That’s not what Alcibiades told me”/”You shouldn’t believe everything Alcibiades says”), and parodies of Homer, but the humor really proves its worth in the fights between the two spouses – for of course, whatever you choose, the evening quickly goes off the rails and a lifetime of resentment, regret, and suspicions get dredged up for one final look.
Arguing with your spouse is usually not considered fun IF gameplay, but here, it’s both integral to the story and entertaining in its own right. The marital dynamics here are very keenly observed – I swear that I’ve had some of these exact fights with my wife, especially the one about what counts as an apology, and Socrates’s inability to let an opportunity for a little joke slide or refrain from raising tiny, completely insignificant objections had more than a bit of a personal resonance – but among the heart-truths they sling at each other are enough gags and funny moments to make the conflict go down easily. The game’s also careful to manage the power disparities: neither one is wholly right or wholly wrong, the emotions aren’t allowed to go too far out of bounds, and since the game is necessarily framed by the question of when to sacrifice truth for social expedience (with Socrates’s example implicitly suggesting the answer is “very rarely”), it would feel perverse to try to avoid conflict when there are things left unsaid. As a result, despite being the kind of player who’s almost invariably polite when given the option, here I was gleefully picking the choices that maximized the amount of time Socrates was raked over the coals for slipping and calling Xanthippe a cow.
So yeah, this is quite a fun and funny game – I think this is the only time in IF Comp history when a player character has shagged Plato. But as with many of Victor’s games, the comedy is in service of a non-frivolous examination of what we owe each other, what partnership can look like, and how we can imagine saying goodbye to the most important people in our lives. The closing scene is lovely and wraps many of these threads together, positing a domestic origin for the famous Allegory of the Cave that’s sweet and sexy and segues beautifully into the final bout of lovemaking (I know a mid-Comp update added the option to wrap up with cuddling, but that choice feels decidedly non-canonical to me).
For all that it’s set almost 2,500 years ago, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates feels vital and contemporary; just as the questions Socrates grappled with are still ones that haunt us today, there’s nothing in this story that feels like it’s since been solved. Shorn of their dramatic circumstances, these dialogues are ones many of us have, or will have, with our partners – and just as in the game, those conversations proceed a lot of yelling and ill-advised joking that we hope history will fail to record.
13 Likes
Late to the game here, Mike, but just wanted to say thanks for your words about Prince Quisborne. Thanks also for being willing to mention that you teared up at the ending, because that’s the kind of stuff that makes it all feel worthwhile, regardless of what other feedback comes in.
(Small note, I don’t think there are any critical details buried in a lore dump that aren’t included in the player’s REMEMBER menu… at least I hope not.)
Your beta-testing was fantastic, and I so appreciated you coming back to it even after so many months of rough personal times. You’re a great pillar of this community, and I applaud your efforts!
5 Likes
Tricks of light in the forest, by Pseudavid
(I beta tested this game. Spoilers).
I am very much a city kind of person – so much so that when I went to stay with my uncle in semi-rural New Hampshire for a couple of weeks immediately after moving out of Manhattan, the combination of deep silence and unfamiliar wildlife sounds that characterized the local soundscape gave me insomnia for the first time in my life. And actually I just recalled that when I was still living in the city, even just taking the subway to Brooklyn could make me agoraphobic. Despite all that (or maybe because of it), though, I totally get the fantasy Tricks of light in the forest offers: going into the woods, exploring slightly off the beaten trail, looking closely at every rock and flower and tree and bug, syncing into tune with the world… it’s alluring because it’s such a change of pace, sure, but also because it feels like returning to nature is an antidote to the poisonous distractions and superficial conflicts of civilized life.
My experience is actually not that far off from that of Lara, this Gruescript game’s 12-year-old protagonist; while she embarks on her unsupervised trip into the woods with the insouciance of a born ranger, actually she’d also lived in a city until just the previous year. And for her, getting in touch with nature is even more important than it is for us, as hints in the game’s narration indicate that it takes place after climate-change disasters have wrecked much of the earth, displacing people and animals alike. Not that she’s very concerned with any of that; monitor lizards have always roamed Europe in her lifetime, so she’s just focused on having a fun time exploring, taking some pictures of interesting plants or bugs, and finding something to collect for a classroom exercise.
While eventually a few brushes with danger intrude on this innocent agenda, this is a decidedly low-key game by IF standards, and it sings when it leans into its smallness. There are only a few objects needed to surmount the game’s small set of puzzles, but each of its locations typically boasts at least a few pieces of scenery: a half-dead tree, a heap of trash, a swarm of bees, a cleft in the earth. In addition to examining them, you’re typically also able to take a photo, or touch or smell, or, for portable items, harvest a piece for your sample box. The game tracks all of this, but it isn’t vulgar enough to change the plot based on your actions, much less include anything like an achievement to “reward” you for mechanically clicking on everything. Instead, exploration is worth pursuing for its own sake, or rather for the sake of tiny jewel-like bits of prose:
There are two kinds of moss on the rock here: both are like carpets made up of green strings, but one has longer, thinner and lighter strings, while the others are shorter, thicker, and a less cheerful tone.
I kneel under the highest part of the fallen tree. The underside is different from the top. Cold, a bit damp, softened. Eaten by bugs? Small circles of white and yellow fungus thrive in the shade. Some day, not too far, they will weaken the wood so much that the trunk will finally break.
There’s a neat connection drawn between this external poking about and more internally-focused reflection. Often, engaging with an object will prompt an association whose thread Lara will follow over a few subsequent turns, sometimes sparking a memory of her previous life or prompting her to think about her family members or the bigger world. Similarly, most of the big-picture setting details are established glancingly, through these fine-grained observations: noticing some dead trees will reveal that they were probably killed by climate-induced flooding, or seeing the traces of poachers will make Lara recall a conversation where her dad alluded to the political upheaval that predated the current, more stable time. Notably, while it’s clear that the world has changed in generally bad ways, Tricks of light in the forest posits a future where nature has begun to heal, generally assisted by humans. Both of Lara’s parents work in recovery efforts, and while the woods are wilder and different than they are today, they’re still vibrant and a place of wonder.
This quietly hopeful vibe extends to the moments of genuine threat, where Lara encounters untamed wildlife. These sequences are definitely tense, but I don’t think it’s possible for the player to die, and the way you deal with the animals just involves shooing them off, rather than inflicting lasting harm. And while these are puzzles that involve multiple steps to solve, I didn’t find that they detracted from the meditative mood of the piece; you typically only have one or two usable inventory items at a time, and Lara is a resourceful enough character to take initiative and set up the next action in the chain without requiring too much handholding, so the steps are typically clear. The Gruescript implementation does mean that there’s often a fair bit of clicking to manage – getting an inventory item queued up to use sometimes felt to me like it took one step too many – but it’s not awful, and again, this isn’t the kind of game where you feel lots of urgency.
No, things stay contemplative throughout, never more so than at the end. After finding your way back home, you’re given the chance to look over the mementos you acquired during your trip, and pick which one you want to bring to school. It’s a small, satisfying note to finish on – or it would be if it were the finish, but it’s not. Instead, these enigmatic paragraphs are the last writing in the game:
I’ve been thinking about all I’ve seen: the living things that thrive in the light and the dark, but also the traces of disaster, the secrets of Terror Country, the invading species, the heat.
I have the feeling that I’m missing something. That there is something to be understood in the middle of all this, which I can’t understand, I can’t even guess.
This isn’t, I’m fairly sure, anything so crass as an indication that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock; rather, it’s an invitation to the player to reflect on what the game’s presented and see if there’s something visible to them that Lara – who, remember, is twelve – missed. Here, the game’s repeated theme of depth, and its miniaturist mode, loom large: Lara is continually pushing herself to go deeper into the wild (indeed, the navigation system is nearly linear; most locations offer only “home” and “forest” as travel options), while hyperfocusing on each leaf, twig, and bug. And on the internal side of things, she gives us big-picture statements about the world and very specific recollections of particular incidents in her life.
So what’s in the middle of these two spectrums, at the interface of the personal and the global? There are many concepts one could throw out, and find support for in the game: history, say, society, or politics, and the way they create larger-scale shifts to systems. Appropriately, Lara seems innocent of all this, but the player is given more than enough hints to see what’s elided: that reference to the wilderness being “Terror Country” aligns with Lara’s father mentioning “the time when [bad people] were in power. When they threw your grandad and grandma in jail. The Terror,” for example, and forms a still more menacing constellation when you throw in the tucked-away cabin, with its chair with leather straps and generous supply of bleach. Lara’s relatively-safe, relatively-hopeful existence, that is to say, is one that’s contingent; it took coordinated action to achieve it, and it was opposed by the coordinated action of others who had a different vision. The sum of our decisions, as mediated through our civilization, is the single overriding fact: alone, deep in nature, it may be hard to see the city, but it’s not so easy to escape.
(Okay, having written those last two paragraphs, boy will there be egg on my face if actually it’s just that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock).
16 Likes
…and that is my final review of the Comp, posted some 45 minutes before voting closed, so I’d say I optimized my workflow pretty well! Seventy-four-and-one reviews is far to few to write for such excellent and admirable folks.
As always, major thanks to the organizers and all the authors! I was very partial to this year’s crop of games; the emergent nautical theme was close to my heart, and there were lots of games unafraid to go for big feelings and big ideas, as well as an impressive number of deeply-implemented and attractively-presented games. I just checked some numbers, and my average review this year was just over 1,000 words, which is the highest it’s been in the years I’ve reviewed the Comp; partially that could be because I’m getting more and more enamored of the sound of my own voice as the years go by, but mostly I think it’s a testament to how rich this field was.
Kudos as well to the amazing crop of other reviewers – by the numbers it seems like this will go down as the most reviewed Comp ever, and I think we had quality to go alongside the quantity, too (plus limericks, can’t forget the limericks).
Looking forward to seeing the results, but you’re all winners in my book (even my single 1-rated game, Dick McButts).
Now I suppose I should pull together that table of contents I promised in my first post. And, er, catch up on some housework.
24 Likes
I feel like our expectations put you (and @mathbrush!) at a disadvantage. “*yawn* Of COURSE Mike ran another table, let’s worry about something with a little more uncertainty. How fares the sunrise? It gonna make it today?”
Congrats on an awe-inspiring suite of reviews, and ANOTHER full table run! Your considered, hilarious dives are a highlight of every Comp (and a source of self-satisfaction or existential angst, depending on whether we agree or not!). Keep on keepin’ on, dude!
11 Likes
By the way, the lines in the background of the homeless people are not meant to be stink lines. They are just background, as you maybe can tell, as they dont start from the people, like stink lines would.
3 Likes
Thank you so much for your review Mike! It really means a lot to me read something that not only shows that you got a lot of what I wrote into the game, but also articulates so well many ideas I never considered for a minute!
5 Likes
Thank you so much for this thoughtful review, which also made me laugh with your horrors of breakfast chit-chat (FAIR) and
I did eventually fix the health inspector issue (I think) and I definitely need to think more about making choices meaningful, including calling players on their mistakes.
Would it be okay if I credit you in-game as a reviewer? I really really value the time and effort you put it!
4 Likes
Sorry, just realized I never replied to you about this – of course, feel free, though there’s certainly no need!
(I came back to the thread since I’m finally putting a table of contents in the first post, in case that’s of interest to anyone – hopefully should be up in a bit).
5 Likes
Wait what?!
I just stopped after accusing Martha my first playthrough. Huh.
I did think… Well okay, my thinking about accusing Martha was at least partly: this is a diverse cast, the author seemed to care about that and make it a prominent part of each character, plus at the beginning it said racism was going to be a story theme. It wasn’t going to be the immigrant or the Black student. Martha also didn’t really make sense, but she was at least LESS nice than the other two. I would’ve picked Casey solely off of worse vibes if given the choice.
But that twist I missed? Hmm. You pointed out all the reasons it doesn’t make sense. But points for at least going for something more ambitious than I thought I guess!
5 Likes
I didn’t know you could nest blurs into each other.
6 Likes