Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on “Camp” published in 1964, is credited with bringing the term camp into the mainstream. Her essay also inspired the Met Gala theme for 2019.
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Don’t you mean the Boer war?
Also called the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, or Second Freedom War in Afrikaans?
Eventually, British scorched earth policies, and the terrible conditions suffered in concentration camps by Boer women and children who had been displaced by these policies, brought the remaining Boer guerrillas to the negotiating table, ending the war.
Yeah, the Sontag view of camp is I think pretty much the mainstream understanding of it now, though even the 1909 OED gets at the gist of how I intended the term with its first cluster of synonyms (“ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” – though Colonel Flagstaff’s performance of masculine authority maybe is a little drag-y, now that I think about it, to say nothing of his name). To be clear I meant this in a positive way, I am definitely pro-camp!
(Pretty sure that’s the pun!)
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They made that pun in the 40s apparently
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(As an aside, the “sitzkrieg” was definitely the superior name. You know, instead of blitzkrieg because they were all sitting around?)
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We All Fall Together, by Camron Gonzalez
I’ve never had a dream of falling, or at least not that I can remember, and I’m kind of bummed that I’ve missed out. The feeling of flying through the air seems like it must be exhilarating to me, and without the real-life risk of splatting against the ground, wouldn’t that be an amazing sensation to experience? We All Fall Together takes a different view, however, imagining a Limbo of ever-plummeting bodies caught between a terrifying cyclone that claims those who dive too low and shadowy predators who snatch those who try to slow their fall and drift too far up. It’s a situation that can be read to have a number of different real-life analogues, but it’s not so one-note as to be too simple of an allegory, so it’s interesting enough to support the game’s ten-minute runtime – and while my streak of being annoyed by the Texture engine continues with this game, at least it has a better showing than most.
As in medias res openings go, “you’re falling endlessly” is a great one, so the game makes a solid first impression, and throws in enough incident to keep the story moving – after starting to get oriented towards the situation, you get a chance to engage with several other inhabitants of this strange netherworld, most notably a black-clad figure you call “the Rock Star.” They’re a great source of exposition, and the dialogue efficiently sets up the metaphysical stakes, establishing that there’s a risky but rewarding path that may allow you to escape your fate and return to your loved ones.
Granted, it’s not an especially sharp dilemma, but it’s reasonably engaging and the opportunity to give the Rock Star a pep talk is nice; similarly, while the writing occasionally overreaches and has some errors, for the most part it hits a solid balance between action, dialogue, and jokes. What works less well is the attempt to impose a backstory on you and your interlocutor. You each talk about partners who are devoid of names, genders, personalities, or histories, landing at precisely the least-effective position between specific enough to be affecting, and general enough to be archetypal. The ending still feels rewarding, though, and again, this is a very short game so the offending bits only amounted to a minute or so of reading.
As for the Texture-ness of it all, I thought the author did a good job of picking verbs that were clearly distinguished from each other, and signposting what actions would do. Oh, and I played this one on my phone, and good news, the tiny-text-on-buttons bug I’ve experienced in other Texture games went away! …bad news, I experienced a new bug where switching to my Notes app to paste in excepts or jot down thoughts caused the buttons to stop work. Texture, you take delight in vexing me and have no compassion for my poor nerves – but despite that, I’d still say this is my favorite of the games using this engine so far.
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Punwise, the point of the game is to bore the boers to surrender.
(Edit: Oh. Sorry. Posted too quick. Already pointed out by Mike.)
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Gestures Towards Divinity, by Charm Cochran
(Some spoilers in this review, though the concept of spoilers is a little odd as applied to this game!)
If you are the kind of nerd who likes Greek words, poetry, and/or Greek words about poetry, you’ve probably come across the rhetorical device “ekphrasis”, which is piece of writing about a work of (usually visual, I think?) art. It’s a hoary enough trope in poetry and prose, the most famous example probably being Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, though there are more modern practitioners too – A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life talks about Van Gogh’s art in smart, richly-descriptive prose that made me appreciate his work far more than I had before I read the book. I can’t offhand say that I’d applied the label to a piece of IF before coming across the rich, enigmatic Gestures Towards Divinity.
The blurb says that the game isn’t about Francis Bacon but his work – violent and frankly unpleasant – and biography – likewise violent and frankly unpleasant – are certainly the main elements of the piece. As an anonymous museum-goer, you have the opportunity to explore a small exhibition of his paintings, looking at three triptychs exemplifying different eras of his career. You can also enter each of them and carry out deep conversations with their central subjects: an imagined, misshapen Fury; Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer; and Dyer’s corpse, after he’s committed suicide. Or you can go to the café, which is much more pleasant (there’s no gift shop).
There is a fair amount of gameplay here – seventeen achievements are available to mark various accomplishments, surprisingly including some medium-dry-goods stuff that makes for a nice change of pace. There’s also basic information about Bacon and his art available in the museum’s placards, while the written descriptions of the paintings are quite good, conveying more than a flat narration of the objects in view by communicating something of the effects of the piece, without imposing too much of a prejudged interpretation that would crowd out the player’s imaginative faculties. But these are just enough to prime you with questions and a basic orientation towards the Bacon’s themes; the heart of the game is the three set-piece dialogues where you learn about Bacon’s upbringing and evolution as an artist, as well as Dyer’s life and relationship with Bacon.
These conversations are richly-textured, engaging directly with challenging material without sanitizing or dumbing it down in the slightest. Bacon had a domineering, abusive father, and as a gay man, his earliest sexual experiences were inextricably linked with violence and shame. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because he was the way he was, he grew into a man with deep obsessions around religion, death, and suffering, which were reflected in his art – and with a deep masochistic kink that saw him push others, Dyer included, into becoming sadists, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the role.
Each of your interlocutors provides a distinct perspective on these dynamics, and there’s plenty of straight biography and art criticism, but the game isn’t afraid to take on larger questions. There’s an additional swirl of other themes around luck, karma, divinity, and the afterlife – in addition to these being common conversation options that appear for all of the key characters, there are indications that the player is dead, though whether they’re meant to be the ghost of any particular person or character in the story is left open-ended so far as I can tell. And Dyer pinches Jesus’s last words.
These elements didn’t really cohere all that strongly for me, though. The bits of dialogue are interesting enough on their own, but unlike the themes related to relationship dynamics, I felt like they had only a loose connection to the main narrative, and as a result didn’t seem as connected to the main thrust of the game, even if I can see how they’re clearly important elements of Bacon’s art (I mentioned these are all triptychs, right, which is the standard format for altarpieces?). It’s intellectually rich, but it just feels a bit abstract compared to stuff like this:
He grimaces. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, after all. I don’t know. My stomach hurts.” He falls silent for a moment, then says “why do we fall in love with bad men? Why do we stay in love with them? Why do we deny and make excuses and protect them? Who protects us?”
While I very much admire (I can’t really say “enjoy”, given the subject matter) the content and prose style of these conversations, the mechanics can occasionally be slightly awkward. GTD is a parser game, and uses the ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT system with an ever-updating topics list to help keep the dialogue on track. It’s quite well paced too, with new topics being added to the list as they come up in conversation, and whole tranches of new ones being unlocked when you start to exhaust an earlier set. The game also rewards exploration; I found quite a lot of subjects that weren’t listed in the topic catalogue but which led to robust, interesting responses. Unfortunately, the topic names are often quite complex – you can ask the Fury about “its relationship with Bacon” – or seem to overlap – Dyer has different responses when asked about “his life” and “life in general” – and the parser sometimes struggles to keep up unless you type things in exactly as they’re written in the topic list, which detracts from the otherwise-organic give and take of the dialogues.
In these conversations and in the museum sequences, GTD is a game of nearly pure exploration. The player doesn’t have any external goals to accomplish – the names of the achievements are hidden until you get them, and there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the museum’s door without looking at any of the art – and the “puzzles”, such as they are, aren’t especially meaningful in and of themselves. Instead, most of my engagement with the game came from trying to decide what I thought about Bacon, and the vexed question of whether his artistic accomplishments in some sense justify his actions (often quite horrifying, I haven’t come close to mentioning the worst parts).
It’d be understandable for a game so fully engaged with an artist’s work to ultimately take his side, but just as GTD doesn’t impose its interpretation of Bacon’s art on the player, so too it maintains a studied reticence. If anything, in the places where it offers a glimpse of its hand, its sympathies seem to come down against Bacon. There’s an oblique resonance to Dyer’s choice of reading material in the second triptych, for example – it’s a newspaper story about the kidnapping and murder of an ordinary woman who the criminals have mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife. She’s an ordinary person who’s come to great harm by getting mixed up with a rich, famous person, in other words. So if she’s the analogue for Dyer, that means Bacon plays the Murdoch role…
The barista working the museum’s café offers another hint; she’s trans and has a girlfriend, but except for one note about some uncomfortable relationship dynamics before she transitioned, she’s notably trauma free, thinks Bacon’s art is unpleasant and his personal history is worse, and mostly seems to care about cleaning up litter and playing D&D – a regular, functional person with what sounds like a functional relationship, serving as a notable counterpoint to Bacon and Dyer’s tragic queerness. True, the barista is also there to balance out the museum guard, an amateur painter who’s enthusiastic about Bacon’s paintings – but even she is clear-eyed about his human failings, and uses Bacon as fuel for her own work.
And then there’s the climax that greets the ordinarily-diligent player. If you work through the conversation with the guard, she lets you into her locked office, which contains one final Bacon painting, this one a self-portrait (it also contains a computer with some draft placard text which enables the player to learn exactly which self-portrait this is – thanks to playing Hand Me Down earlier in the Comp, I thought to try MOVE MOUSE to wake up the screen). You can’t enter this one, nor engage it in dialogue, since this representation of Bacon ignores whatever you say, simply spewing out bon mot after bon mot, witty observation after witty observation, a never-ending and exhausting charm offensive from someone convinced (not undeservedly) of his own cleverness.
If you check your topics list, though, you will see that you do have one additional option: you can tell him that you know who he is – and once you do, the urbane litany ends, and Bacon begins to howl, keen, and gibber, giving voice to sheer terror and self-loathing. It’s hard not to interpret this as a judgment; having plumbed his dark secrets by studying his art and talking to the man he victimized and ruined, you have the power to cast aside his self-protecting delusions and expose him. This is a rhetorically neat solution, too; if you go back to the Greek, ekphrasis means to speak out, or more poetically, to call something by its name. So by understanding Bacon, by naming him, you cast him down in act of karmic, retributive justice.
There are only two troubles with this reading. The first is that the player’s action of revealing Bacon to himself is entirely unnecessary. Even if you never decide to use that conversational topic and let him continue his babblelogue uninterrupted, he’ll also eventually begin his unending scream. You aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know, in other words. The second is, well, did we forget that he’s a masochist?
No, the blurb didn’t lie; this game isn’t about Francis Bacon and whether he gets his just or unjust deserts – even in this imagined space, that’s far beyond our power to accomplish. And it’s only incidentally about his art as such, or about the people he loved and hurt along the way, or about whether he’s a monster or an inspiration or just (“just”) a flawed, talented man. No, GTD is a simple game, or at least only as complex as the player wants to make it: all it does is ask how all this makes us feel or think, and, like the best museum pieces, makes us consider whether we’ll take anything away with us when the time inevitably comes to leave the exhibition.
GTD mr.txt (168.0 KB)
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Thank you so much for this incredible review!
I’ve gotta say, this is a first for me. Pretty much everything I intended, you experienced. Spot on, every time. It’s like you’re in my head. You got subtleties that no one else to date has gotten–many thanks.
I tried to streamline the more complex conversation topics as much as possible–having them be understood by individual keywords whenever that wouldn’t result in impossible disambiguation. I have some ideas to make it easier for a post-comp release.
Thank you again–I’m looking forward to reading your transcript!
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Yay, I’m so glad this resonated - I felt like I was maybe going slightly more out on a limb than usual with some of this stuff so that’s especially gratifying! I think you did a really good job of framing things to prompt questions and suggest certain themes without centering your own interpretation, so the game was very engaging to try to come to terms with.
I hear you on the dialogue, and that approach makes sense - I think I often tried to split the difference by putting in multiple words and connecting syntax while still abbreviating things somewhat, which is I’m sure really hard to plan for. Anyway you can see details in the transcript; implementing open-ended dialogue in a parser engine is super hard, film at eleven 
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Bright Brave Knight Knave, by Andrew Schultz
Graham Nelson’s adage about a work of IF being a crossword puzzle at war with a narrative has been rattling around for decades at this point, so it’s perhaps surprising that so few authors have steered into the crossword side of things. By this I don’t mean puzzles at the expense of narrative – there are still plenty of puzzlefests out there, of course – or even literal crosswords – shout-out to 2000’s Letters From Home! – but adopting the crossword puzzle model. Like, most authors (myself included) tend to conceptualize their games as distinct, requiring bespoke narratives and mechanics , or if they’re part of a series, adopting a traditional narrative throughline connecting installments. And yet, for all that, I have cheerfully played the New York Time crossword every day for – [checks statistics on phone] – actually, let’s not get into details, but suffice to say, a whole long time, and the fact that the framework is almost entirely static isn’t at all a barrier to my enjoyment, because the variety in clues and theming is enough to make each one feel unique.
Andrew Schultz is one of the few authors who’s exploring this territory, notably with his series of rhyming wordplay games, of which the present instalment is the sixth. As with a crossword, the basics are the same each time – the player navigates a somewhat-absurdist space, and when prompted with the two-word name of a location or significant object, needs to come up with a rhyming phrase that substitutes a different letter or sound at the beginning, as in the game’s title (we’re miles away from the traditional medium-dry-goods model). The games don’t tend to have very involved narratives, as often-idiosyncratic circumstances required to support the baroque wordplay aren’t really consistent with the Aristotelian unities, but they do have cross-cutting themes that animate some of the more memorable set-pieces and serve to distinguish them from each other. They also all boast incredibly robust quality of life features, from a hint function that tells you whether a guess is partially right and how far off you might be, to a THINK command that memorializes guesses that match the wordplay constraints but require some change in the world model to be effective, to a handy list of the most common English phonemes if you’re reduced to lawnmowering (reader, while I enjoy them, I am not very good at these games and am always reduced to lawnmowering).
It’s a unique puzzle system, and it’s still engaging even this far into the series; you’d think the list of rhyming phrases would eventually run dry, but Schultz is able to keep filling his quiver with clever prompts that make for memorable visuals and fun gameplay. Sure, there’s an occasional clunker – HID HUM felt like a reach – but look, you don’t have to do many crosswords before you realize that sometimes some junk in the fill is the price to be paid for a construction that’s elegant overall. The theming on this one is also interesting; it’s more social than the others, with the protagonist suffering a crisis of faith that requires them to find and help other people to reclaim their prior (metaphorical) status as a knight. This idea is present in the introductory text, but also through the gameplay, as several puzzles involve finding different companion characters who can help solve certain puzzles when the right pair are present. I also felt like Bright Brave Knight Knave had a bit more focus on the world model – you’re still not INSERTING X INTO Y, or anything, but there are more puzzles about finding objects which in turn unlock new possibilities elsewhere this time out (BBKK isn’t quite a Metroidvania, but it is a sequel and there’s a boat, so yes, it’s a 2023 Comp entry all right).
I liked these new features, but they did lead to some hiccups, too. In particular, having to decide which pair of followers to bring along when solving specific problems felt like one more axis of complexity than my brain could handle, and exacerbating the challenge, I couldn’t quite get the syntax for swapping them to work (characteristically, there’s a difficulty setting that should automate this process if you don’t want to bother with it, but I likewise had trouble activating it). At about the two hour mark, I hit a point where this meant I got stuck, but I definitely felt satisfied with the portion I was able to play; I’m sure there’s a cool set-piece ending, but I’ll probably wait for the post-Comp release to check it out. In the meantime, it’s almost midnight, so tomorrow’s crossword will be up soon…
bbkk mr.txt (169.9 KB)
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Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando, by Travis Moy
A game with a title like this isn’t exactly crying out for another reference to throw into the mix, but nonetheless, I have to do it: the figure out what the game is doing, we shouldn’t look to Shakespeare or The Godfather, but to Sherlock Holmes. That’s because this multiplayer whodunnit, where the titular couple team up to solve the murder of Raytheon CEO Marlon Brando in an alternate-reality Washington DC, is largely reimplementing the classic board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. This is no bad thing, let me hasten to add! I’ve been obsessed with the game ever since we had a copy of the video-enhanced original from back in the 80s (a part of the VHS-board game boom that is wholly regrettable save for the fact that it brought us Dragonstrike), since it’s such a unique concept in the boardgame arena: unlike other games in the subgenre like Clue, which abstract mystery-solving into abstract logic puzzles or deduction games, the cases in Consulting Detective are actual cases.
A few pages of read-aloud text introduce a crime, and then the players, working together, decide which leads to follow up on, picking suspects to interview, crime scenes to investigate, or contacts to visit. At each, another few paragraphs of text may reveal further clues, or indicate a dead end or red herring. And then, after time’s elapsed, the players are confronted with a quiz laying out the key questions for the mystery, and once they agree on their answers, there’s a final bit of story that tells them the actual solution and allows them to see how they did.
From that description it’s pretty clear that this is a species of analog IF, so it makes all the sense in the world to adapt the model to a digital incarnation. And implementing it as a multiplayer title is similarly a no-brainer: while other recent works of multiplayer IF have set up the players as directly or implicitly antagonistic, or given them asymmetric information to encourage cooperation, the player interaction here is purely about talking through the clues, developing theories of the case, and working together to solve the mystery. As a single player game, the relative mechanical simplicity would risk things getting dull; as a multiplayer game, it sings.
Antony & Cleopatra implements the model faithfully. The main investigative tool you’re given is a calendar that allows you to schedule suspect interviews or visits to key locations, with two slots available for each of the seven days you’ve got to solve the crime (the set of possible leads expands as you go, of course, and there are tools in the sidebar to remind you of who or what each is). Once a scene begins, you may just be given the relevant information or be told there’s nothing much to learn, but more frequently, there’ll be a list of questions or investigative avenues to pursue; these can typically be lawnmowered, but it does break up the wall-of-text issue that the board game sometimes runs into. There doesn’t appear to be state tracking – at one point, we noticed that a character had just told us something that contracted what someone else had said, but there was no option to call them on it – which is a little odd, but does mean that the players, rather than just the characters, need to be alert about the clues they’re gathering.
The game also departs from its inspiration by offering a few minor multiplayer-specific mechanics. The two players need to agree on which leads to follow, and that they’re finished with an investigative visit, before the game will move on; similarly, you of course need to reach unanimity on the end-of-game questionnaire laying out your ultimate theory of the case. The most game-like mechanic is the dialogue options specific to each character; while it doesn’t matter who clicks on most topics, a few are marked with an A or a C to indicate that it’s available only to Antony or Cleopatra respectively. It appears that these always are offered in analogous pairs, and the choice of which character should take lead seems to roughly correspond to a good cop/bad cop split, with Antony generally taking a more direct approach than Cleo. It also appears this is largely a cosmetic difference rather than one leading to dramatically different clues being revealed, but even if it’s largely superficial, it’s still a pleasant reminder that there are two distinct characters here, not a single blob being jointly piloted by the two players (although since they are always accompanied by an FBI agent sidekick as well as a half-dozen royal bodyguards, actually there is more than a little blobbiness). Impressively, as far as I could tell there’s actually quite a lot of variation between the text the two players see; while key clues seem to show up in both, Cleo tends to be more perceptive about interpersonal dynamics, while Antony (who’s the Vice President of the US, by the way – don’t think I mentioned that!) has a deeper understanding of everyone’s social and political positioning. As a result, comparing notes on impressions and theories is richer than it would otherwise be.
So much for the systems – what about the setting and story? As to the former, it’s a fun mash-up of 50s Hollywood with Ancient Rome, and serves as an enjoyable romp through the sights and sounds of DC, but I couldn’t help but wish it went a little deeper. If there’s some underlying logic connecting these various inspirations, it’s not foregrounded, and while this odd juxtaposition could make for some wackiness, the game generally plays things straight; there are a few good jokes here and there, but when Cleo doesn’t even make a comment about visiting Alexandria, VA, it feels like a missed opportunity. Similarly, it sure seems like a game that puts President-for-Life Julius Caeser in charge of the US and then has a plot hinging on the murder of a defense contractor should have something to say about the military-industrial complex. It also doesn’t really go into the alternate-history aspects; if Napoleon is the French Ambassador to the US in 2021, I’m guessing that the early parts of the Long 19th Century must have been very different in this world, but we don’t get even a whiff of that. I got the sense that the pop-culture stuff was mainly just used to make the names of the characters more memorable – it’s way easier to recall that Audrey Hepburn is the new Raytheon CEO than if it were some rando, to be fair – but the game’s refusal to play out the implications of its choices sometimes frustrated me. The depiction of DC, meanwhile, is generally quite good, though there are a couple details that suggest it wasn’t written by a native (despite being the home of a university, Georgetown sadly doesn’t really have the boho vibe it’s given in the game, and rich neighborhoods not having sidewalks is far more of a California phenomenon than an East Coast one).
As for the mystery itself (he says, a thousand words in), it’s pretty good, neither too simple nor too complex. Industrial espionage, national security, and sordid personal affairs are all in the mix, and while the time limit is relatively forgiving and it’s not too challenging to suss out the basics of what’s going on, the story’s sufficiently twisty to make for fun conversations between the partners. The case is faithful to most of the ones I’ve played from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective by having at least one element of the solution feel like it requires a big leap of intuition to get right, but that’s probably the right balance to strike; getting ¾ of the details right is in some ways more satisfying than either being completely ahead of the game, or floundering.
I’ve been a little down on the game here, as is my wont, but that’s largely because I think this approach has a lot of potential that’s only been partially realized in this particular case. If there is a Case V, I hope it marries the setting more deeply into the mystery, and perhaps takes a bit more advantage of the digital medium to offer some more involved mechanics – I actually missed the vintage newspapers, London map, and telephone directory that in the board game offer some additional avenues of finding leads beyond just picking who to interview next. All that’s forgivable in a first instalment, though; Antony and Cleopatra’s unique and enjoyable, and well deserves a follow-up.
10 Likes
Out of Scope, by Drew Castalia
Out of Scope tells a story of twin siblings brought into deadly conflict. Reared by a prominent military family, their parents try to push them apart for fear of an obsessive love between them that might border on the romantic; the son is trained to be a soldier, despite his disinclination to violence, while the far-more-vicious daughter is shunted into peaceable work. Their domestic psychodrama is soon caught up in great-power politicking, in a world that may differ from ours in the details – all of the country names are imagined – but is otherwise quite similar – there’s colonialism, a military propaganda machine, and Shakespeare has somehow persisted – and the story is all too likely to end in tragedy.
The only literary precedent this mélange brings to mind is Ada, or Ardor, with its too-close sibling bond, aristocratic milieu, and alternate-history setting of Anti-Terra, and if you are aping Nabokov, you are flying close to the sun. It’s a high-wire act, in other words, but sadly, one that I don’t think succeeds, as the ambition of the premise is let down by a terrible UI, inconsistent writing, weak pacing, and at least one game-stopping bug. For a game that set its sights lower, maybe none of these issues would be fatal, but given that the themes Out of Scope puts on the table are extraordinarily freighted – again, the player is asked to invest in a quasi-incestuous relationship between young twins – these are deadly flaws.
(As a point of disclosure, I should probably acknowledge that since I’m a twin – or rather, was a twin, since my sister passed away a few years ago – the whole twincest angle would at best be facing a steep uphill climb with me. For all that, I did like Ada, or Ardor, but I’m struggling to think of a second story about sibling incest that doesn’t want to make me throw up. Still, I think the problems I experienced with Out of Scope aren’t purely down to personal idiosyncrasy).
I’ll start with the UI, because it’s impossible to ignore. Out of Scope is a Unity game (available in downloadable form as well as a browser option), and it offers a bespoke text-based interface; in each sequence, you’ll see a gray background onto which are scattered several small text boxes. Those with gray outlines just provide a bit of flavor text; those with black borders can be clicked on, which will often lead to further text, or possibly a yes-or-no choice that pops up as a thought balloon below the window. Choosing no might then lead to a different question popping up, allowing you to cycle through different options, though it’s never clear how many you might have, and in some cases considering all of your choices means you forfeit the chance to do anything at all. Oh, and these different boxes are often not visible from the start, requiring you to repeatedly drag around to search them out – sometimes moving to a new scene will lead you to an entirely blank screen, in fact, with the actual interactive bits of the passage scattered to the four winds. At least there are arrows that occasionally show up at the edges of the screen to point you towards boxes you can’t currently see, though I found they sometimes didn’t work. Plus the various buttons aren’t especially responsive, at least on my track pad, requiring double-clicking that sometimes speeds through text before you’re ready.
Oh oh oh, and it’s all animated so there are delays before text loads and the option-bubbles pop up.
Let me be very clear: playing this game was torture. Maybe it’s more manageable on a mouse, but the interface still adds a huge amount of friction to every interaction. In a tight, linear game where this was thematically appropriate, perhaps that would be forgivable, but Out of Scope goes for at least two hours, has long stretches where it wants you to explore a large map, and doesn’t try to create any resonance between the extra-diegetic abuse inflicted by the UI and the diegetic events of the game. There are moments when it is aesthetically pleasing, like a dinner party where each guest’s bit of dialogue shows up on overlapping text boxes that denote their places at the table – but even then, there would have been a million other ways to get a similar effect without inflicting such needless annoyance.
Contrarily, the writing does provide some high points, but doesn’t manage to sustain them throughout the wide-ranging plot. Some of the interactions between the twins have a sort of poetry to them:
When two people are silent together, it’s like a song.
(This reminds me of one more interface complaint – highlighting text isn’t allowed, so I had to manually copy down any passage I wanted to quote).
The house that forms the main backdrop for the game is also often evocatively drawn, alternately imposing and pathetic depending on where you are in the timeline (the game’s chronology jumps around a fair bit). Here’s a bit noting an aftereffect of the fire that ruined the estate:
The fire was intense here, warping and twisting metal cans of fruit and soup into little bombs.
On the other hand, there’s stuff like this:
A south-easterly tor watches and chills and wets you from its prominence, irrespective of yours.
Huh? There are lots of head-scratchers like this, like saying of some fallen leaves “crisp winds divide them. Crisp thoughts too.” The game is full of malapropisms, from a moon likened to a “scrambled egg, white-yolked and runny in the pan” (….have you cooked an egg?) to a reference to “the twisted logic of a rubber sock.” And there are frequent dangling participles, confused pronouns, and verb-noun agreement issues. I feel like a bit of a jerk harping on this stuff, but again, Out of Scope is attempting some seriously challenging things – the stakes are very high for many of its set pieces, especially the highly-charged encounters between the twins, and when the prose gets weak or unclear, everything lurches towards comedy.
As to that relationship, though, the game’s structure does it no favors. The whole logic of the plot depends on there being a preternatural connection between the two siblings, but the game starts with a flash-forward where they’re already trying to kill each other – though the drama of this setup is blunted by requiring the player to explore a large area mostly devoid of points of interest before they can interact – and then flashes back to a sequence where they only have one short interaction before they get separated. By the time the game lets them meet again, as late teenagers, a lot of time has passed both in the plot and for the player – there’s an extended military-training sequence for the brother, then an even longer one where the sister wanders around the house before the aforementioned party – and by that point things are already weird and strained between them. It’s just not enough to establish the bond in any resonant way, all the more so because what the author is trying to set up isn’t just ordinary love between siblings, but something weirder and more intense that might not be incest but isn’t exactly not incest.
Then there’s the bug I mentioned. After I finished chapter 7 (of 10), I had to step away from my computer for an hour or so. When I came back to the game, the text boxes had all vanished and I was facing a blank yellow screen; scrolling around, or restarting the game and resuming my save, did nothing. I was about at the two hour mark, and the prospect of braving the interface to redo everything I’d done defeated me. Fortunately, the author provides a walkthrough that includes a basic plot summary, so I was able to learn how the game ends. Unfortunately, here’s where I learned that there was a whole additional layer of political intrigue that had been completely lost on me. Admittedly, some of this is stuff that appears to only come into play in the final few chapters, but the political maneuvering that I’d seen felt to me like it was meant to provide a backdrop for the family drama, rather than being robust enough to support major chunks of the narrative on its own. But there’s apparently a major twist that makes the twins’ relationship decidedly secondary to a wide-ranging espionage plot aimed at reconfiguring domestic politics in the family’s home country, which are only lightly sketched in the portions I saw; I suspect this swerve would be pretty unsatisfying to those who experience it. Also, this plot point hinges on understanding that this family, where the patriarch is part of a naval dynasty and keeps trophies of a country he helped conquer in his study and the mother runs a propaganda outlet selling a Thatcherite brew of social conservatism and militarism, are moderates, which is uh not how I experienced them.
Again, I can’t fault Out of Scope’s lofty goals – despite my hesitance about some of its themes, I really wanted it to succeed. But in every way, its reach exceeds its grasp. Reading the plot summary and thematic discussion contained in the walkthrough file, I can see how the game is meant to work in the author’s eyes, but it’s not there yet. With that said, God knows I’d be excited to see more smart, political IF that deals with complex sibling relationships, so I’m really hoping for a robustly-improved post-Comp release for this one.
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A Thing of Wretchedness, by AKheon
Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.
While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).
Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.
The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.
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Thank you for relating your experience in detail, Mike, and my sincere apologies for the torture.
I’d like to reproduce that bug you noticed, since it’s obviously a showstopper. Perhaps you can spare a second to recall when exactly you stepped away for the hour: it sounds like it must have been in Zoe’s bedroom after Joe visits her, but before he leaves again, which means it was during a part of their conversation, right? And this was in browser or downloaded?
I’m humbled by the effort you invested in the game and to write such a thorough report.
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It’s the thing outside Erich Zann’s window!
What thing? You know, the…the indescribable one. The one the reader is never really told about because it’s too horrible to describe. That one.
(I haven’t played this game yet, I just sometimes feel the need to draw obvious parallels. So that maybe someone more versed in Lovecraftian horror beyond Lovecraft himself will comment on this further.)
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Ha, thanks! As I said there were some times when I could see it working fairly well, and I probably should have saved it for a time when I could plug in a mouse in retrospect, but yeah, not my favorite interface Honestly if there’d been keyboard shortcuts so the arrow keys would move you from one text box to the next, that would solve like 99% of the issues, but I’m not sure how viable that would be.
Yes, exactly – he’d made the weird quip about kissing, there’d been a bit of dialogue after that… he was either about to leave or had just left, but the light was still on since the background was yellow, and it was still Chapter 7. And I was playing via my browser. Hope that helps!
It’s a very interesting game, I think – sadly I didn’t always have fun playing it, but I did really enjoy thinking about it!
It’s true, you can certainly get away without describing the monster/baddie and have an effective bit of horror; Lovecraft very much ran the gamut (there are a lot of stories where he takes the kind of apophatic approach of saying that something can’t be described, but also you’ve got stuff like the meticulously-specified anatomy of the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness). But I think when you lose the gross-out horror of describing the monster AND you lose the tension and terror of describing its behavior AND you lose the psychological horror of describing the subjective experience of the protagonist victim, there’s not a lot left (basically just intellectual/cosmic horror? But ToW doesn’t really plumb those waters).
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Yeah, and Erich Zann is one of those Lovecraft stories that just…doesn’t really work for me. It sets up a spooky atmosphere and then you see the narrator get terrified but you never find out why, and to me it really falls flat. It feels like it’s a narrator explaining that he was scared by something, but not giving us enough detail to either feel that way ourselves or really examine his experiences. (I do like the description of the corpse continuing to play, though. That’s the one bit that’s stuck with me.)
I enjoy Lovecraft most when we get both of those things: we get interesting descriptions of what’s happening, and we also get interesting descriptions of how the protagonist is experiencing it. Shadow over Innsmouth is perhaps my favorite example. You get the exploration of this spooky village and its history and its practices, and you also get the story of the narrator’s experience there.
I’ll have to try Thing of Wretchedness and see if it works better than Erich Zann. I don’t actually have any amazing insights to add here; I just like seeing dialogue around reviews so I try to start them when I can.
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The Witch, by Charles Moore Jr.
After having complained that A Thing of Wretchedness lacked in scares, points to The Witch for delivering when it comes to terror – guessing that in an old-school game like this the SCORE command might be useful, I was chilled to read the phrase “the game is winnable from this point” after it duly recited that I’d garnered 0 of 150 points. That positive statement, reassuring on its face, gives rise to what we fancy JDs call a negative inference: it wouldn’t be there unless at some point the game becomes unwinnable.
I don’t necessarily have a philosophical objection to games that are cruel in the Zarfian sense, I don’t think; in some cases, requiring restarts to optimize a puzzle solution or having certain especially significant or bone-headed choices lock a player out of victory might be defensible. No, my issue is a practical one, which is that cruel games, especially those of the old-school persuasion, are often tedious – there’s often a lot of retracing of one’s steps, resolving of puzzles one has tried before, and just generally faffing about in an uninteresting way. Sadly, The Witch already has a tedium problem, with a mostly-generic setting, a yawn-worthy premise, and fiddly features like an inventory limit. Add to this a generally high level of difficulty that seems to require authorial ESP to progress, and hair-trigger failure states that punish the player for the slightest deviation from the walkthrough, and I have to confess I couldn’t motivate myself to finish, even though I only put slightly more than an hour into it.
Let me start out by saying there were some elements I like. The player character is an elf with a mead hangover who missed the titular witch’s abduction of his village-mates because he was off on the aforementioned bender. I like this premise both because it’s implied that these aren’t like Noldor-type elves but rather Keebler ones, and also because I find the mead hangover thing very relatable; I’ve only had mead twice in my life, and each time I woke up the next morning praying for death. So me and this elf were sympatico. And while the prose is generally quite terse as per the usual style for this sort of throwback puzzlefest, there were some neat set-pieces, like an encounter with a giant owl, and some places where the writing went to some extra effort:
“This cottage belongs to Widow Elf, the matriarch of the village. The air is thick and still, smelling vaguely of lavender. Sunlit dust motes dance in the faint light. The cottage is warm, the air oppressive.”
That’s one more clause about the air than is needed, and Gloria Steinem could have a field day on how this lady’s identity is literally subsumed by that of her dead husband, but the passage is still way more lyrical than I expected.
Now that we’ve reached the inevitable pivot, though, I have to rattle off the stuff that wasn’t so nice. For one thing, the implementation is quite thin, with a lot of objects mentioned in location descriptions either not available to interact with, or brushed off with a “you don’t need to refer to the X”. Said locations are also pretty repetitive, with a lot of empty paths and elf cottages with only one or two salient features; combined, these two issues mean that exploration of the reasonably-sized map is a drag. Speaking of, there are at least two mazes; I made my way through one with a bit of trial and error, which wasn’t too bad, but come on, gimmick-less mazes in 2023 – in a game with a time limit – are a hard pill to swallow.
And oh, speaking of hard, the puzzles. Some of them aren’t bad in concept, but seem quite fiddly in implementation (I’d come up with the idea of using the birdseed to get the key from the owl, but he attacked me every time I brought the seed out of the contained I’d hidden it in; from the walkthrough, it seems like you have to make use of Inform’s implicit take function to solve this puzzle, which is a really high bar); others just don’t seem to make any sense (is there a clue anywhere that indicates that you should show the teddy bear to the catatonic elf?). And then, as mentioned above, there are the fail states; there are a couple of traditional puzzles that I would have enjoyed muddling through, one involving finding the correct combination for a series of levers, the other involving using a cart to explore a mine, but for the fact that they actively discourage experimentation. If you try a single incorrect combination for the levers, the machinery permanently stops working (this is especially egregious because the most logical way to read the one clue you get points to the inverse of the correct combination, not the one the game actually accepts), and the mine cart zooms off without you if you neglect a single step in what becomes a rather involved trial-by-error process, plus you need to do the whole sequence before your lamp burns down, which is on a ridiculously short timer.
I know there are folks who like this sort of thing, either out of nostalgia or sheer bloody-mindedness (hey, Francis Bacon, over here! Have I got a game for you!) But I got into IF through Photopia, not Zork or Adventure, and such as they are, my kinks top out at quite liking brunettes. God bless you people who will like The Witch, but I am not one of you (hell, you folks probably like mead, too).
witch mr.txt (97.0 KB)
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As an author in the competition, I don’t want to say too much about other people’s games. But I feel compelled to say that having a command that shows you whether the game is still winnable puts The Witch in a very different category than Zork. You should think of it as a useful hint command! E.g., you could put objects in the mine cart, let is get away from you, check whether the game is still winnable, and thereby find out whether these objects have any further use in the game. I haven’t tried it out, but I think that should work. Pretty powerful, actually!
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