Mike Russo's IF Comp 2023 Reviews

Competitions IFComp
,
27

Eat the Eldritch, by Olaf Nowacki

Well, it’s finally happened. Even a casual perusal of this year’s Comp roster reveals that games with boats are way, way overrepresented, and I for one couldn’t be happier – big boats, little boats, sail boats, paddle-wheelers, motorboats, house boats, inflatable boats; yawls, yachts, ketches, clippers, men o’ war, brigantines, sloops, catamarans, schooners, container ships, dinghies, triremes, hovercraft, barges, scows; even airships, zeppelins, sauce boats – I love ‘em all, and I’m excited to finally be able to embark (eh? Eh?) on the nautical portion of my Comp explorations.

Eat the Eldritch is a great way to inaugurate the trend, too, because it’s both very boat-y (the whole thing takes place on board a giant fishing boat) and very good, leavening an effective Lovecraftian vibe with good-natured gross-out humor and some satisfying parser puzzling – call it The Terrible Old Man and the Sea. You play the captain, who’s had a bad run of luck that means he hasn’t managed to catch any fish to feed into the floating fish-stick-making plant belowdecks; you’ll get right on that, as soon as you get the suspicious “Rudolf Carter” fellow you just hired on as cook to fix you some lunch… As that potted summary as well as the title suggest, Eat the Eldritch presents a horror of consumption, where everything exists to eat and be eaten, with the latter stages of the game containing revolting, stomach-churning images by the score.

This would be a little much for my poor vegetarian self, but fortunately, the game’s also wickedly funny, and the occasional chortle really helps the offal go down. Here’s a bit of the description of the aforementioned cook, focusing on his fingers:

They are thick and swollen and their skin looks like brittle scabs. The comparison may be disgusting, but they actually look like fried fish sticks and when he uses them, you’re afraid they’ll crumble.

It’s a ridiculous image, but very gross, and works very well. The game does swerve into more straightforward horror territory from time to time – the description of the inevitable Cthulhoid monstrosity is a uniquely messed-up phantasmagoria, and there’s a lovely disorienting bit where you see some ceiling-lamps swaying with the waves, and you imagine yourself upside-down and underwater, looking down at colossal sea-grasses. But there are also some extended jaunts of wackiness, maintaining the overall balance and keeping proceedings from getting too grim.

Eat the Eldritch is also impressively balanced when it comes to gameplay. It uses shipboard directions for verisimilitude, for example, but smartly keeps the size of each individual deck small, and provides handy ASCII-art maps for each, so these aren’t as disorienting as they can sometimes be. There are also regular prods towards your immediate goal to keep you on track, and a handy THINK verb in case you need a reminder (though attempting to THINK in a particular extra-dimensional space threw off a run-time error). And the downloadable version of the game comes with a nicely put-together Infocom-style manual that should make this easy for folks newer to parser games to get into. Oh, and while there is definitely peril of both the physical and existential varieties, Eat the Eldritch will politely rewind if you reach a bad end, taking the sting out of failure (you’ll also often get an optional achievement for your trouble – I though I was pretty thorough, but I only got about a dozen of the 27 on offer!)

The puzzles are similarly player friendly; there’s nothing too head-scratching here, but they’re satisfying to solve, especially the climactic set piece, which had me giggling and gaggling in equal measure. But beyond its visceral appeal, it’s a clever bit of design – it’s got multiple steps and requires some clever leaps of logic, but it’s all quite well clued and I was able to put all the pieces together without any hints. There is one potentially misleading reference that could lead folks less-familiar with maritime matters astray – protip, if you’re ever in a major storm, you emphatically do not want to go perpendicular to the waves, you want to steer your bow directly into them – but other than that, they’re uniformly well-clued.

It’s a real pleasure to come upon something as horribly lovely as Eat the Eldritch; as I said, I may be slightly partial to maritime tales, but this one floats on its own ballast, and sets a high-water mark for the other games in the Comp.

…there are like a dozen more games with boats in them still to go, y’all are in for a lot more nautical puns FYI.

Eat Eldritch mr.txt (148.7 KB)

15 Likes
28

I’m flattered to the point of speechlessness (almost :wink:).
Thank you so much for playing EtE and your very kind review!

5 Likes
29

The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls, by Ryan Veeder

As discussed in my Eat the Eldritch review, boats are clearly the central theme of this year’s Comp. Little Match Girl 4 does OK on this score – there are some shipwrecked pirates, plus an extended sequence on a spaceship – but my experience with the game was largely defined by its membership in two other incipient trends of the Comp, being a sequel (I’ve already reviewed Shanidar, Safe Return, and looking ahead on my list there are a bunch more) and a Metroidvania (joining Vambrance of Destiny and Put Your Hand Into the Puppet’s Head).

Let’s take the sequel part first. I haven’t played any of the three prior Little Match Girl Games, and while I’m dimly familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, any connection to that moralizing fable has long since fallen by the wayside; per a handy recap function, the eponymous protagonist has developed the power to travel through time and space by looking into fires, been adopted by a post-reform Ebenezer Scrooge, and currently works as a freelance sniper-cum-troubleshooter for Queen Victoria (England’s gain is Denmark’s loss; I guess she wasn’t very patriotic?).

The game seemingly isn’t especially fussed about any of this backstory, though, and in fact opens in medias res, with the introductory text not explaining anything about your immediate mission or situation. This kind of beginning can work well, but here I feel like it was misdeployed. It’s not used to skip boring exposition and get the player into the action from the get go, since the opening sequence just involves quiet exploration of a deserted beach. Nor does it do much to heighten player interest in what’s going on, since the actual plot is straightforward – you need to find half a dozen magic pearls as a combined peace offering/christening present to a baby fairy; i.e., it’s a fetch quest – and it’s effectively dropped in your lap ten minutes in without any deeper engagement or piecing together of clues required; you wander into Faerie and come across the infant prince and his caretakers, and everybody acts as though you already know the deal. As a result, the decision to forego a conventional introduction struck me as an odd one: I don’t think the game gains anything by it, but it loses the opportunity to establish stakes and engage the player in the world and the characters.

The Metroidvania aspects of the game also start slow. This is a genre convention, of course – the accretion of powers allowing you to overcome previously-encountered obstacles is a major part of the appeal – but I also found that the absence of minimap like that provided in Vambrance of Destiny, combined with the additional navigation challenge posed by the fire-portals leading to other settings meant it took me a while to wrap my head around the available space for exploration. It doesn’t help that the first few areas are rather straightforward – a ghost town, the age of the dinosaurs, a coast – with the few other people not especially engaging to interact with (LMG4 uses a TALK TO system without any dialogue options, which is probably my least-favorite way to implement character interaction in a parser game).

Fortunately, I found the game picked up by about the halfway point. Gaining a few additional abilities and a clearer sense of the map made the puzzle-solving feel more rewarding, and the environments became more interesting – the dinosaur era actually involves a modern, oddly-bougie civilization; the English coast is home to the actual Pirates of Penzance; and there’s a vampire-haunted Alpine chateau that’s the best of the bunch. The number of sly jokes and clever Easter Eggs also ramps up quickly from the comparatively-straight beginning: it took me a minute to realize that your first two upgrades mirror the ones Samus gets at the beginning of each Metroid game (the fire-bullet is like a missile, and the mouse-transformation is like the morph ball); there’s an extended conference among the vampires that gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes – and it goes a long time; and there’s a disguise bit that I’m pretty sure is directly tweaking the Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle that’s long been decried as having killed graphic adventures all by itself.

Even in this running-downhill part of my experience with the game, though, I still found there were underexplained elements that I think must have been part of earlier games in the series – you seem to have some history with a couple of the specific vampires, you’ve encountered that prehistoric civilization before, and I’d guess that the climax is calling back to the very first game. So while I did eventually very much enjoy my time with LMG4, I can’t help but think that I would have liked it even more if I’d played the earlier games in the series, or even better, if it had done a bit more work to get new players up to speed. I can see how entering a late-series game in the Comp can help draw attention to earlier works, which is all to the good, but it’d be nice for us newbies to be met halfway.

match girl mr.txt (238.4 KB)

10 Likes
30

DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, by Hubert Janus

There are some stories that, when you encounter them, worm their way into your brain and take up permanent occupancy. Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is on that list for me; the piece concerns an eccentric Frenchman who so fashions his life so that he can write, from scratch and without reference to the original, simply from his own mind and direct experiences, a brand-new version of Don Quixote that is exactly the same, textually speaking, as what Cervantes wrote. But even though every character precisely matches, the story’s narrator tells us that the two books are not the same: there are some passages where Menard writes so movingly, and with such fiery, personal inspiration that the corresponding bits of Cervantes pale in comparison.

We have something slightly different here: instead of two identical works with the same title but different authors, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has one title and one author but two entirely separate texts. I was spoiled on this feature by some of the forum discussion surrounding what’s clearly an entry that wants to be noticed, learning that there’s a random die roll at the beginning that determines which of the two versions a given player will get. I also knew going in that one is linear, full of typos and egregiously offensive, while the other has some actual gameplay and is legit funny.

On the one hand, this is clearly just a play for the Golden Banana of Discord. On the other, that’s a good meta joke, and the combination of title, authorial pseudonym (my money is that this is Graham Nelson’s triumphant return to IF), and blurb was sufficiently funny that I decided I’d play along: I resolved to take whichever version the RNG offered up, and not game things to replay the other one, in order to obtain the intended experience.

Reader, you probably know me well enough by now to know that I was secretly hoping to be stuck with the terrible one, and my hopes were not disappointed. The five-minute vignette I played was entirely linear, moving sentence-by-sentence through a zero-context extravaganza of genital trauma and bodily excreta with cameos by Adolf Hitler (as promised), various 80s movie villains, and a troupe of cancan dancers. There’s only one dramatic element – it’s the one in the title – that plays out in a variety of scenarios, the content set off by a nauseously-oscillating green-and-pink background, rakishly-angled text, and typos that couldn’t be more aggressively awful if they tried.

But there’s the rub, of course they tried; the whole thing is entirely calculated to be bad, rather than naively bad. And I found that knowledge colored my entire experience, and meant that I actually kind of enjoyed something that’s objectively terrible. We’re back in Borges territory here, but legitimately so: like, when I read that Darth Vader shrunk himself down into two mini clones, and one of them kicked DICK MCBUTTS’ right ballsack and the other kicked his right ballsack, I didn’t roll my eyes at the slapdash mistake, but chortled at the skillful trolling. Similarly, the rising-and-falling action – no, not of the kicking, but of the game’s pacing, which hits several fake-out climaxes in its short running time – seemed balletic to me, cruelly playing on the naïve player’s hope that this thing is finally ending. There’ve been troll games in the Comp before, so it’s really not hard to imagine the Cervantes DICK MCBUTTS, which would make me angry about how it wasted my time and how cavalierly it deployed Hitler for cheap laughs; but this is the Menard DICK MCBUTTS, and it is sublime.

I’m still rating it a 1, of course. Anything more would be disrespectful to Mr. Janus.

16 Likes
31

OHHH.

image
image1000×1000 522 KB

8 Likes
32

One Knight Stand Part 1: The Beginning of the End, by A. Hazard

One Knight Stand reminds me of a peacock. This hefty ChoiceScript game is impressive but also absurd, hyperspecialized after taking evolutionary logic way past its logical endpoint. I know, for example, that the Choice of Games audience tends to really like player-customization options, but when it took me four separate choices to establish the length, texture, and color of my character’s hair, I thought something had gone awry; when, five minutes later, I picked out the color of my favorite mug and laid out my habits when shopping for a cell phone, I half suspected this thing was actually a parody or maybe a marketing survey in disguise. Similarly, CoG games tend to use length as a selling point, but having slogged through what I’m pretty sure was a short novel’s worth of prose to get through just four simple scenes and introduce only two significant characters, I can only imagine the fortitude needed to persist through the Middle of the End and the End of the End. There are some promising modern fantasy flourishes here, and I can’t fault the author’s work ethic, but sadly this is one of those games that I suspect will elate its intended audience while leaving those outside that group bewildered.

In its outlines, the story here is pretty solid. The main character lives in an alternate future where COVID gave way to a series of other plagues and pandemics, though as the game opens they’re more focused on practice with their surprisingly-intense polo club. But the city’s been threatened by a series of gruesome murders, and after seeing some strange things around your apartment, you get swept up in a supernatural world that involves demons, reformed incubi, the reincarnations of the Arthurian Knights, and a best friend who’s harboring some kind of secret…

It’s all fun enough – I could see the setting being a lost World of Darkness RPG from the late 90s – and the bits involving the polo team have some zip to them (I wouldn’t be surprised if the author has a bunch of real-life experience with horses), but the game’s glacial pacing does it no favors. I had to get through half a dozen see-something-weird-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye-but-there’s-nothing-there-when-you-check “scares” before the first sequence was over, so that the creepiness had long since worn off, and the game’s written in an incredibly granular style that completely undermines any sense of pacing; I was similarly bored of most the action scenes by the time I was two-thirds done with them because they just took too long. And the transitional sequences are just as bad, as you’re forced to play through the dull bits between the set pieces at a similarly high level of detail; it’s like reading the first draft of someone’s first novel, before they’ve figured out how to move characters around in time and space.

The other element undermining what could be a fun pop-fantasy romp is the tonal whiplash. While the world is generally fairly grounded, and the game’s blurb says its genre is “dark urban fantasy”, a large portion of the game’s choices have some ZaNy options. Like, here are the player’s choices in one of the action scenes:

-Here goes nothing.
-Easier said than done.
-I don’t get paid enough for this.
-Da da da da da… Batmaaaaaaan!

The monster you’re trying to run away from here is actually kind of creepy, but this kind of thing drastically undercuts any sense of realism or fear the game is trying to convey. And I’ve picked a mild example; there are lots of pop culture quotes and bewilderingly over-the-top choices that seem to show up more and more as time goes on (though even the first sequence suffers from a news broadcast where April O’Neil and Peter Parker are highlighted as featured reporters).

One Knight Stand also gets way too dark sometimes given its omnipresent refusal to take itself seriously. You (of course) have a tragic backstory, and without thinking too much about it I went for the one where my family died in a car-crash (the others are comparably bleak). I was not prepared for how this was narrated (CW for violence and just general terrible things):

Incredibly bleak car-crash description

Your father had turned the car at the last moment so that the driver’s seat took the full brunt of the crash. He’d been killed instantly. At the trial that followed, lawyers had argued that the people in the backseats — your brother, your sister, your mother — could have survived if the car’s side airbags had deployed as they were supposed to.

In the end, both your siblings had died before rescuers could prise them out of the wreckage of the car. You know your little sister, at least, had been alive directly after the crash. She had cried, gurgled, and half-screamed for several minutes afterwards. Your mother in the seat directly behind you had lingered the longest. She never regained consciousness in those last few days and finally passed on after a bloody miscarriage.

What the fuck, game.

I’ve said before that to my mind, the one thing that most amateur IF needs to feel professional is an editor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glaring proof of that. If someone had helped the author smooth out the drastic tonal shifts, cut down 2/3 of the word count to focus on the engaging parts, and highlight places where going deeper really would be helpful (the main romance interest is so bland that even after three and a half hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about his personality), this could be really promising. As it is, while I suspect the hardcore CoG-heads will lap this up, I didn’t get much enjoyment out of One Knight Stand. Which is a shame: peacock feathers may only turn on peahens, but at least they’re still pretty to the rest of us.

12 Likes
33

The Whale’s Keeper, by Ben Parzybok

I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.

This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:

You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response.

The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.

While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.

The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.

These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.

11 Likes
34

Having played all of the Little Match Girl games for the first time in the past two or three months, I think… a lot of stuff just is underexplained and wacky, and the series is an excuse for Veeder to smash together wildly different locales in the same game, in much the same way that A Rope of Chalk does. There are little callbacks but I don’t remember you encountering the vampires (unless it was vampire mafia in LMG3? hmm) or that prehistoric civilization (maaybe that’s an LMG2 reference? but there the civilization is looong dead so I’m not sure how you’d know). But I just assumed both of those are supposed to have happened in between games. The finale is calling back to the first game but it’s also the setting of the Hans Christian Andersen story: the only thing that’s in common between the games is the description of the corner of the alley where you almost froze to death…

Or maybe I’m just missing things. But I didn’t see any real connections between the games beyond sly jokes and references, nothing substantial.

2 Likes
35

I’ve never understood the appeal of this in games. One of the main draws for me of reading books or playing games is that I get to live in a body and personality of the author’s creation. You know, to get out of myself and my preferences and personal fantasies and into someone else’s vision. This whole fad just leaves me cold.

7 Likes
36

I believe in most case, it’s being able to visualise every aspect of a character. The more concrete they are, the easier it is to make decision about what they should do next. It’s like people spending hours creating a character on Skyrim or Mass Effect. You want it to be just right to go through the story.
(There’s also the self-insert thing too… Some want to play out their fantasies…)
It’s a niche that found its audience.

5 Likes
37

This is probably one of those things about being old. I’ve been playing out my own detailed fantasies in my head for 50 years (and I have trouble stopping), and they’re boring. I probably would have gotten this better when I was young.

7 Likes
38

Thanks for clearing that up - I could have sworn there was a more concrete reference to the vampires being recurring, but as you say that could have just been part of Veeder’s approach to worldbuilding. It does have some fun elements, but I do wish it had been a little more coherent (Rope of Chalk did a good job of creating narrative and thematic links between its vignettes, I thought).

I hear this - my major fantasies these days are generally things like “pay the mortgage without getting stressed out.” I suspect the CoG approach works best for folks who do the “original character” role playing thing, where they have one or several made-up characters they bring to different games and venues, and the opportunity to implement them helps them with this aspect of play.

But I don’t have any of those, and it’s hard for me to imagine a lot of the details games like this ask for for a brand new character I know nothing about, so I usually default to putting myself in, and then get slightly annoyed that it’s boring and/or that “I” need to have a weird backstory or behave in strange ways that don’t make sense. And without the kind of visual feedback you get from a graphic RPG it all comes off pointless to me (I do like that sort of thing - I made my guy in Dragon Age look like Obama and it made me giggle for 100+ hours of gameplay). But again, people clearly do love this stuff and more power to em.

10 Likes
39

As someone who falls more so on the side of enjoying character customization than not- it has a lot to do with the genre of games I like to play. They’re usually romance games, where the player is invited to identify strongly with the protagonist/main character, and so making them look like you helps with the immersion (if that’s how you’re deciding to engage with the fantasy, sometimes I play them as an original character of mine and will roleplay that way.)

I also just remember being so thrilled and elated that I could play through a game with a character who actually did look like me for the first time, (as normally in games they default to a white character- to the point it’s jarring to just have ‘your alabaster skin flushed’ slipped into the text, or if they do have an option for skin tone, the range doesn’t really include me, as well as eye colour or shape- it kind of throws me out of the fantasy if your ‘round light eyes widened in surprise,’ or whatever), and it was really nice to be able to comfortably slip into the fantasy you’d been invited into without being kicked randomly with a reminder that it sort of overlooked your inclusion entirely, because you aren’t assumed to be part of the demographic that would play these games.

I do prefer more organic character trait tracking/progression though, where rather than picking certain traits from the start, your choices would be quietly tracked and that adds up to one side or the other of being ‘optimistic/cynical’ or whatever. But I do very much so enjoy a little Barbie doll dress up scene (especially if we get to pick the character’s fashion, I love floofy gowns and corsets and fichus and pearls and necklaces and silk slippers) because it’s fun to play and soak in the ambiance.

I definitely still get a little moment of delight when in a scene later in the work the romantic lead compliments something about your character that actually lines up with what they look like (especially with blushing, since I don’t actually really blush super obviously, especially depending on what time of year it is and if I’ve gotten particularly tanned or not.) It just feels nice to be included, especially in games where it is an explicit invitation to ‘be’ the character.

8 Likes
40

I totally get this-- I still remember the first time I could pick a pixelated warrior character that was female and how I was wowed by that. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that nobody should do this or that it’s a bad thing! There’s another thing about being old… your resting state reads like “You damned kids get your ball off my lawn.”

And now, back to our regularly scheduled Mike show before I interrupted with an Ensure commercial.

5 Likes
41

Besides self-inserting, I also think it lets players feel like they can add details to the story and thus making it feel more realized.

Much of the strangeness of One Knight Stand for some of us comes from the ability to cooperate with the writer in figuring out what the story should look like or even be. The color of the mug and the hair shade aren’t simply self-insert tools; they are collaborative attempts to ground the story. The author may have designed the set-pieces, but you can also color them purple and pink. They might not be your favorite colors; it’s still engaging with the story no matter how much you spin it. You are being brought further into the setting through these cosmetic choices. This co-authorship goes beyond the usual tabletop games since the player-GM feels blurred here.

I think there’s some interesting possibilities in the approach since this level of customization means the story feels like it’s being designed by the player. There’s something engaging about the illusion of co-authorship here. It’s just that the game suffers from having too many choices at once and the pacing/formula is just terrible.

3 Likes
42

Thanks for the thoughtful review, @DeusIrae!

1 Like
43

(visualising Obama swinging a sword and leading an Inqusition)
ROTFL^ROTFL*LOL^LOL

thanks for these 20 minutes of wild laughing, enough for forgetting for a bit the Israeli mess…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like
44

Please Sign Here, by Road

Please Sign Here is a deceptively complex game. Superficially, it’s a slice of life mystery; as the framing story establishes, the main character, Jackie, has just been in a car crash that’s claimed the life of her best friend Casey. But the police have other things in mind as they interrogate her, since she’s also potentially linked to the murder of a number of delivery drivers whose last stop before their deaths was the coffeeshop where Jackie works. The meat of the story involves flashing back to the events of the last week, when torrential rains and a vacationing boss left her isolated during a series of night shifts, and she repeatedly encountered three customers who each seemed like they could be hiding something…

This moody mystery is more than it appears, however, and that’s not just down to the attractive art. I don’t think it’s fully successful at the tricky moves it pulls – heck, I’m not 100% sure it’s aware of exactly how tricky they are – but I’ve been turning it over and over in my brain ever since I finished it, which I’d certainly count as an accomplishment. Talking about why involves digging into the plot, though, and since this is a mystery it’s poor form to just spoil said plot without warning. So you might want to give the game a play-through before joining me in the blurry-text below – and if you have and aren’t sure what tricky things I’m talking about, let me just say that you might want to replay and remember your Miranda rights.

Hi there! I’ve got to do a little bit more plot summarizing before we can get to the good stuff. So as mentioned after the in-medias-res police-interrogation opening, you flash back to your shifts at the coffeehouse, with the game progressing day-by-day through the week leading up to the opening car crash. Jackie’s the daughter of a cop, but she’s quite jumpy, starting out suspicious of the three recurring customers: Quan, an elderly recent-immigrant from Vietnam; Aaron, a young Black man who’s juggling a job and his studies; and Marta, a Latina mother with a demanding and thankless job. In fairness, this might be because something odd seems to be happening in the shop; even thought Jackie’s supposed to be alone, the back door keeps getting mysteriously unlocked and opened…

Despite the sense of dread the game’s trying to establish, I actually found the meat of the game surprisingly cozy. In part this is down to the art, which has a warm webcomic-y vibe; there are a few illustrations that are creepy, like the one depicting the fateful pre-crash car ride, but the coffeeshop sections seem to depict a warm, dry haven on a stormy day, with the visiting customers looking friendly and appealing. Intentionally or not, the writing also signally fails to establish any of the three “suspects” as remotely threatening; as far as I can tell, the major details that are supposed to make them potentially dangerous are the fact that Quan drives a black car that might be the same as one Jackie’s seen loitering around, Aaron brings in a big package one day, and Marta’s job occasionally requires her to pick up documents from city hall. You can practically hear the duh-duh-DUH when these details are revealed, since the game frames them as significant, but they’re such obvious red herrings that Jackie’s reactions just mark her out as a paranoid fussbudget – she’s also a real stickler for the rules, not even letting a wet and bedraggled Marta wait for her bus inside the near-empty coffeeshop unless she buys something.

The writing is also, bluntly, not that great, which undercuts the game’s attempts to set a mood. Like, here’s Jackie’s reflections on why she’s friends with Casey, who’s kind of the worst:

>[I]f her dad wants to keep his high chances for donations to become Police Chief next year, Jackie has to keep up playing friendly with one of the richest families in town. The Wintons might only be a truck service company, but they’re the reasons semi-trucks even exist in the first place."

That took me a while to parse, and it’s par for course with much of the game’s prose. The choice-based elements of the narrative also aren’t especially engaging, as there aren’t many decision points and not enough effort is put into making them seem meaningful; there’s one moment where you hear something in the back and go to investigation, and you’re given the choice of grabbing either a broom or a “group handle” (?) as a weapon, but after selecting one the next passage begins “It doesn’t matter.” For the love of god, game, I know this is mostly on rails, but you don’t need to draw attention to it!

Things get much more interesting when the timeline catches up to the framing story, though. After recounting your memories, the cops ask you to pick which of the three “suspects” you think they should prioritize in their investigation. I clammed up and refused to finger any of them, both on general principles – public service announcement, if cops are ever asking you anything, shut up until you’ve got a lawyer present – and because I was quite sure none of them murdered the delivery drivers or was responsible for the car crash. And in that ending, which the epilogue text deemed the “main” ending, the third-person narration shifted from referring to the main character as Jackie to Casey, instead – she’s Jackie’s notional best friend, remember – and mentioned her recent hair-dye job.

The clear implication is that Casey has gone all Single White Female (or Talented Mr. Ripley, if you prefer) and killed Jackie in service of trying to switch identities with her. There are some seeds of foreshadowing throughout the earlier section that point in this direction; Casey seems envious of Jackie’s life in their earlier interactions, and right before the car crash, the flashback sequence ends with Casey asking whether Jackie thinks people deserve second chances – a macabre question when you realize that Jackie is herself the second chance in question. So it could be an inspired twist.

There are two flies in the ointment, though, one more interesting than the other. To get the boring one out of the way: of course this makes no ^%$^ sense. There’s no indication that Casey’s done anything more than the dye-job to make herself look like Jackie, nor that she had much time or expertise post-accident to make Jackie look like her. The twist has nothing to do with the much-belabored deaths of the delivery-men, and in fact Casey killing all of them – as the ending implies – would do nothing but invite further scrutiny of the switcheroo. And did we forget that Jackie’s dad is a cop, and presumably knows what his daughter looks like? So take as read that this is all completely ridiculous.

The more interesting inconsistency in the twist, though, is the fact that you only see it by refusing to try to set the cops on some innocent person to throw them off the scent (this is where the racism/police corruption themes mentioned in the blurb come into play, by the by – the implication is that they’re happy to go after one of the POC “suspects” and ignore the possibility that the white girl is a baddie). You can conceptualize this as a reward for the player – by successfully realizing that none of them is the killer, the player gets a hint of what’s really going on – or as an in-character decision by Jackie, who’s gotten to know these people. But for Casey to make this choice is counterproductive; again, she’s inviting more scrutiny for no reason!

This isn’t a just a plot hole like the ones I mention above, though; it calls into question who exactly is making choices and how those choices are being resolved. Instead of the conventional IF triangle of identities – player, protagonist, and narrator – here we have the traditional player and narrator joined by a competing dyad of protagonists, whose methods and motivations are diametrically opposed, and who, unless you happen to pick just the right options, seamlessly substitute for each other with the player and narrator none the wiser. And now that we think about it some more, the flashback depicts events in Jackie’s life, but it’s being recounted by Casey to the cops as though it’s about her, so this doubling is even more complex than we thought (oh, and this also means the narrator is completely unreliable too and we presumably can’t trust anything we’ve read)! Please Sign Here thus becomes narrative collapse: the game – nothing that comes after the twist makes sense, and it throws into question everything that comes before the twist, too.

I wish I could say the game does something compelling with this move, but per my long-ago, pre-spoiler-text note, I’m unconvinced that it knows how radical it’s being – possibly this is me just being judgmental and overgeneralizing from the weak prose to assuming that the game has weak writing overall, I suppose, but it’s inarguable that the game doesn’t explore the implications of its scenario, seeming satisfied with using it as a noirish capstone to a conventional whodunnit, not one of postmodern dislocation. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even what may seem an often-clumsy mystery can dislocate its player into acute postmodern vertigo.

13 Likes
45

To Sea in a Sieve, by J. J. Guest

I don’t know where a two-year-old picks up these things, but my son has learned that pirates say “yarr!” The other night we were reading a book about animals dressing up for Halloween, and when he saw the chicken with a peg-leg, he swung his arm in a little Pirates-of-the-Caribbean move and said “yarr!” I can’t think of any other book or show he’s seen that involves pirates, so like I said, I’m somewhat at a loss – is there some kid at day care who pontificates about this stuff during outdoor play period, confidently explaining in a toddler’s burble how you pretend to be a pirate? – but I guess the cultural knowledge that this is how pirates talk is just that strong.

The kicker, of course, is that so far as I understand pirates didn’t talk like that; your stereotypical Golden Age of Piracy buccaneers probably spoke like the 18th Century Englishmen they were, albeit with more lexical flights of fancy than would be typical given their outré experiences and dearth of formal education. They likely sounded, in other words, like Captain Booby, the deuteragonist and comic centerpiece of To Sea in a Sieve:

“That’s it, boy — bail, an’ lively ho!” says the Captain. “’Twill all ha’ been worthwhile when we’m rescued, ye’ll see!”

“Not me snuffbox too,” wails the Captain. “Well, here’s lubberly manners! That snuffbox was o’ great sentimental value to me, I’ll have ’ee know. The man I killed fer it were a dear an’ loyal friend!”

“Arr, not me pineapple!” says the Captain, woefully. “I had me a fancy to make a lovely canapé — pineapple and hunks o’ cheese, served up on the spines of a porpentine. Ye’ve set haute cuisine back centuries, damn ye!”

(Okay, maybe that last one undermines my point, but technically it’s an arr, not a yarr).

There have been some very funny games so far in the Comp, and I know there are more ahead, but I have rarely laughed so hard at anything as I did at Captain Booby. This is fortunate because for the game to work, he has to work, since he’s the only thing standing in the way of this being the shortest parser puzzler ever: you play the cabin-boy he’s dragooned into helping him flee with his ill-gotten plunder when the authorities put an end to his piratical career. But since an errant cannonball has holed the lifeboat, you need to dump the loot before you sink. If the good Captain were capable of balancing risk and reward, he’d obviously stand aside and let you do it – but if he were capable of that, presumably he wouldn’t have gone into piracy, and so he opposes you at every turn, so that you need to outwit, outmaneuver, and outsnuff him in order to commit his treasures to the briny deep.

As a result, in less skillful hands Booby could have become a deeply annoying character, continually frustrating the player and providing handy, punchable characterization for the frustration of failing to solve puzzles in a parser game. But this hardly ever happens, as Booby is as pathetic as he is bombastic: I mean, if you can read the line “’Od’s blood, fire and thunder, my sinuses!” without a) feeling a little bad for the fellow, and b) giggling so hard you almost go into a fit, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Even when I was stymied on a particular challenge, sharing a lifeboat with Booby was never anything less than delightful.

Not that I was stymied that often or that long, since this is a well-designed set of puzzles. A few of the Captain’s treasures can simply be heaved over the side, but most require some work to obtain and drown, and all the while water is seeping into the boat, lending an air of farce to proceedings as you pause in your efforts to desperately bail. To make progress you’ll need to relieve the Captain of some of his effects, match wits with a carnivorous plant, and prevent an overzealous beaver from sending you to Davy Jones’s Locker. Even as the boat’s load lessens, the comedic frenzy heightens, with new complications lending increased energy to the situation and preventing it from getting dull over the game’s one-hour running time.

While many of the puzzles do require relatively specific syntax, I found for the most part that To Sea in a Sieve did an excellent job cueing the appropriate action, which made me feel very clever indeed but is actually just good game design. There were a few challenges towards the end of the game where it felt like this broke down somewhat and some additional clues might not have gone amiss (I’m thinking of looking at the tea caddy through the quizzing-glass, and the precise language required to use the brocade), but it’s got a well-implemented hint system so I can’t complain too much (and I have to admit that I was having so much fun that I stayed up way past my bedtime playing this one, so my brain probably wasn’t working so well by the end).

The only thing better than finishing To Sea in a Sieve was seeing in the ending text that it’s part of a planned trilogy – the middle part, To Hell in a Hamper, was released 20 years ago so this technically checks both the “boaty” and “sequel/prequel” boxes for Comp ’23 bingo – so there’ll be another iteration of the concept to look forward to. And even if it takes another 20 years to get the final instalment, based on the success of To Sea in a Sieve it’ll be worth the wait.

sea in a sieve mr.txt (166.3 KB)

16 Likes
46

The Enigma of Solaris, by Jkj Yuio

I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:

”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”

Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”

(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).

If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.

Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.

While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.

9 Likes