Clickbait, by Reilly Olson
If you were to make a checklist of mistakes first-time parser authors often make, Clickbait would run afoul of a bunch of them. The first puzzle announces its solution in an annoying every-turn rule that spams you with the exact same text every time you do anything, even taking inventory; dialogue uses the ASK X ABOUT Y syntax, with the available topics explicitly listed, but if you mistype or shorten them slightly (e.g. asking about “picture” rather than “his picture”) the command won’t be accepted; there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, and device-fiddling puzzles made frustrating by the fact that you can’t just type TURN ON BLUE to push the blue button, because you’ll get asked to disambiguate between the button and a blue keycard you’re carrying (plus that won’t work because despite the button’s description noting whether it’s switched on or switched off, TURN ON/OFF actually don’t work and you need to PUSH the button instead); and a couple of puzzles even employ the dreaded USE X ON Y syntax.
But! The good news is that definitionally, an author can only be a first-timer once – and most of these irritants are pretty easy to fix for subsequent games. And the better news about Clickbait, specifically, is that it’s got a lot of high points that make me look forward to playing a second and third and fourth game by the author. The conceit here is fun: an urban-exploration photography contest prompts you to check out a long-sealed-off subway station, and when the door accidentally locks behind you, you need to find your way out while still making time for some winning snaps along the way. Most of what you get up to is relatively standard stuff – again, there are keycards, plus a rope, a lost toy you need to retrieve for a little girl – but the generally modest difficulty and pleasant, pacey writing keeps things zippy. Similarly, the characters are out of central casting but are nonetheless appealing: there’s a cop too lazy to be any help, a seemingly-incoherent derelict who gives you a vital clue, the aforementioned moppet who’s lost her bunny.
Alongside the sometimes-zany puzzles, the station is actually sketched out in a reasonably grounded way, with realistic detritus, graffiti, and other points of interest that make it feel like more than just an artificial funhouse to poke around in. And while the game isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more than a few moments raised a smile, none more so than the reason the station was abandoned in the first place (I’m not talking about the “it was all an experiment thing”, I can take or leave that twist, but the metal-can-of-tuna-in-the-microwave gag alternately makes me giggle and blanch).
Clickbait also gets more ambitious than the typical parser debut by having a robustly-implemented camera. You only have a limited number of shots, and you can photograph just about anything you choose; there are a few places where you’re prompted to take a picture to reveal a clue that for whatever reason isn’t visible to the naked eye, but for the most part, you can let the spirit guide you. I had a taste for portraits and urban-decay pictures of graffiti, but it feels like there’s a reasonable amount of room for player expression (now I’m wondering about doing a series on the color-coded doors). While your choice of candids can’t lead you to fail the game, the ending does evaluate your pics, spitting out a customized blurb for each and scoring you based on how well you realized the contest’s theme. It’s a fun way of giving the player more agency while navigating the often-linear process of solving text adventure puzzles, so I’m all for the experiment.
So given the promise on display, it would be churlish to harp on some of the rough edges in Clickbait’s implementation – I’m attaching my transcript since I do think it’s worth figuring out how to smooth them out for next time, but I very much hope there’ll be a next time.
clickbait mr.txt (151.9 KB)