Thanks for the head-ups ! that the controversial last IFComp entry of mine ends cited in another IFComp entry is definitively poetic Justice. Kudos to Kozalek, who I guess has also noted the anagram of Anfistel…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
WATT, by Joan, Ces, and Humikun
One of the weirder experiences of my reading life was a couple years ago, when I wound up spending most of the night at the ER with my wife – she wound up being fine, but it was stressful and there was a lot of that hurry-up-and-wait that always happens in hospitals, so I wound up reading all the way through the short book I’d thrown into the go-bag since it was next on my to-read pile: The Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, this is already a bit of an odd duck of a book; it’s an allegory from the late 17th century depicting a soul’s progress towards salvation, taking much of its surface incident from the stuff of chivalric romance but its structure, and deeper meaning, from the radical strains of Protestant theology that briefly flourished during the chaos of the English Civil War before being inevitably quashed as order was restored. I’m reasonably well versed in the milieu for a layperson, but it definitely still feels like an alien text to me – and that’s before accounting for the fact that I read it in one sitting, in the middle of the night, trying to distract myself from anxiety.
It’s not just a critique and not just a compliment that playing WATT reminded me of that experience: just as the eponymous Pilgrim is called to abandon his family to seek salvation, the eponymous WATT hears a voice ordering him to leave his home in order to save it; just as Pilgrim undergoes allegorical trials as he struggles with despair, fear, and other sins, WATT visits seven houses that each host a challenge focusing on aging, anxiety, or the difficulty of making a human connection; just as the locations in the Progress have excessively-literal names, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Doubting Castle, WATT’s journey sets from a town that’s just “Penance” spelled backwards; just as I sometimes found the early-modern text alternately uncommonly lyrical rough going, some of the prose in WATT is really good and some verges on doggerel; and just as I felt flipping to the end of the book in the ER, I finished WATT rather unmoored and unsure of what had just went down.
There are two ways you can assess an allegorical journey like this, I think – the first is how well the overall arc functions, and the second is weighing up the individual steps in the path. The former is where WATT is unfortunately least successful. Not to extend the Pilgrim’s Progress comparisons past the point of reason, but while the opening there is similarly abrupt and disorienting, it’s drawing on centuries of Christian teaching; we know what salvation is, we know roughly what is needed to attain it, and we know that, at least within that worldview, it’s the most important thing there is. The Pilgrim, who’s actually called Christian, is an intentional everyman figure, from his generic name to his lack of backstory beyond a consciousness of sin. In WATT, we’re not given much to understand who this voice is or how credible it is, and what if any metaphysical significance the task it gives to the protagonist – finding seven keys to unlock and activate a lighthouse – is meant to have, which makes the game’s feints towards religious issues unsatisfying: there’s just not much substance here to engage with. And while WATT initially seems to be a blank slate, down to an opening “character creation” section that aborts, telling you that you don’t have the power to make such choices, he eventually develops a very specific history that might have impacted how I understood the first half of the game. And the ending exacerbates this lack of coherence, both by introducing an unnecessary twist that further undermined my investment in the overall arc, and concluding the story in a way that I didn’t think tied off the various threads of the plot.
The other side of that criticism, though, is that there were threads of that plot that I was invested in, because some of those individual steps are quite good. Oh, there are some clunkers, especially in the first half – there’s a contextless school quiz, a dialogue with a naïve woman that moves too quickly to establish a forced emotional connection, a workplace simulator that doesn’t have much to say about capitalism – but they’re all over relatively quickly and, except for that second one, work fine for what they are. But the latter set of vignettes boast less standard setups: there’s more about WATT’s regret at having never met his mother, a miserabilist flash-forward to a failing marriage, and a long slog of a climb that uses timed text to defensible purposes. But the real standout is a section where you’re playing the role of the emperor in a classical Chinese opera, choosing how to govern your nation and your household but always aware of the audience’s expectations, and the way they push you into playing a specific role that holds emotions in reserve and never commits to anything (that the audience might only exist in your head is a nice grace-note). The writing here also gets more lyrical:
She enters the front yard of your chambers, perfumed in jasmine and rogue. Her silk trails behind her like a serpent, the colour of dusk after rain – deep, warm and aching.
The momentum the game builds through the back half of its journey was strong enough that even the disappointing ending I mentioned above wasn’t enough to blunt my enjoyment – and after all, Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t memorable for where it ends up (one vision of heaven is much like another, and Christian’s redemption is pretty much guaranteed from the get-go) but for the vividness of the obstacles in the path, and how they relate to moments of moral struggle we’ve all experienced. So on that front, WATT is in good company.
(Just to mention the back and forth about thread moving that may not be comprehensible to folks coming to the thread late, Kozelek posted a response to my Just Two Wishes review, including some additional detail on the politics that provide the context for the game; I thought it was all reasonable but understand that it might have gotten a little detailed for the Comp’s norms about the right level of reviewer/author engagement. I wrote back to him via PM, and while I won’t go into detail since it was longish, I’ll flag that I did make one small change to the review based on his feedback, tweaking a sentence that previously said that characters were “two dimensional villains or heroic victims according to their nationality”; that was an overstatement so I amended the language to be more specific).
Mr. Beaver, by Stefan Hoffmann
The comedy parser puzzler is a nigh-infinitely-extensible format, capable of incorporating the wildest of premises and set-pieces with nary a crack in the suspension of disbelief: we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept puzzles based on logical absurdities and high-concept setups that wouldn’t pass muster as two-minute improv sketches, and in return, players are promised gags with a reasonable hit-to-miss ratio and the opportunity to participate in a farce. Polymorphed pigs, idiot knights, gentleman thieves, harried chefs – any protagonist you can think of can confront any mad-libs combination of wacky aliens, bumbling cultists, blithering aristocrats, or misunderstood monsters imaginable, and the critical inventory item could equally well be a piece of chewing gum, a leaky jar of battery acid, a toy sheriff’s badge, or an authentic death ray. For the most part Mr. Beaver fits seamlessly into this tradition – here, it’s a diligent mailman rescuing a shrunken shopkeeper using a patched-together diving suit – but by making the protagonist’s degree of desperation a critical game mechanic, it also tries something I don’t recall seeing before. In some ways it’s a not a perfect fit for this extremely-plastic genre, but it does add a critical touch of novelty.
Without that element, the game would still work perfectly well, I think. We’re recognizably in the rescue-the-zany-uncle-from-his-kooky-mansion subgenre, which is a classic for a reason, and Mr. Beaver is a well-realized example of the form; the geography isn’t too expansive, and the locations are fairly dense, making the overstuffed antique shop something more than a bare setting for puzzles, with plenty of opportunity for character-ful details and tiny jokes. The inevitable sci-fi touches are also kept focused and while there are some out-of-left-field elements, like an incongruous coffin, they’re explained by Mr. Beaver’s eclectic taste, so the worst excesses of kitchen-sink aesthetics are avoided. I did find the very ending fluffed the balance slightly and drifted into more slapstick wackiness than I prefer, but save for those last couple paragraphs I enjoyed the vibe; the humor’s more likely to raise a gentle smile than a sudden guffaw, but there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.
As for the puzzles, they’re cleanly in the medium-dry-goods tradition, though similarly a bit more grounded than is typical for the genre: there are secret passages and some devices to fiddle with, but with reasonable diegetic explanations and, usually, enough clueing to help the player understand what they should be trying to do and why. A few of the more esoteric puzzles did require highly-specific phrasing to get the parser to understand what I meant – there were a couple of these, but I’m thinking especially of a puzzle where you have to manhandle a reasonably-large object but PUSHing and MOVing and LIFTing didn’t register, with only TIPing did the business. My frustration was increased by the fact that every time I made an attempt, I had to struggle with a disambiguation prompt because typing the name of the object wound up getting it confused with the similarly-named table it was resting on top of. This is a custom parser system, and while it’s generally solid, this and a few other issues (notably, default responses printing out right after, and contradicting, the results of successful actions) make it a little less smooth sailing than the major platforms.
On these fronts Mr. Beaver is perhaps unexceptional though certainly unexceptionable. But it does have its one unique twist, the desperation-meter. Throughout the game, there are a series of actions that the average comedy-parser protagonist would perform without thinking twice – things like knocking over a shelf to get at a blocked passage, or opening up a sealed sarcophagus – but which here fail, with a pointed note that you’d only resort to such measures it were clear that the situation were especially dire. And as you conduct your investigations, you’re occasionally informed that your worries are increasing, allowing you to go back and try some of those formerly-blocked actions and succeed this time.
Functionally, of course this is just another way of constructing a puzzle dependency chain – you must solve X puzzle before solving Y. But building things this way helps take some of the arbitrariness out of the parser puzzler. I’m sure we can all think of examples where solving a puzzle makes a heretofore-hidden object incongruously reveal itself, or advance time in such a way that a previously-inaccessible area opens up. These contrivances are part of the genre, but too many of them can cause the player to roll their eyes, and also make it harder to make a plan, since you never know what might happen next. So there’s a benefit to having much of the gating depend on the protagonist’s mental state rather than seemingly-random circumstances. Similarly, this also helps mitigate the adventure-game-PC problem of the character who’s meant to be heroic, but nonetheless steals everything that’s not nailed down or engages in motiveless mayhem.
So in concept I’m a fan, but I think the implementation here could be smoother. For one thing, the choice of what actions are verboten can sometimes feel arbitrary – breaking open a coffin requires less disquiet than looking under a doily, for example, and no matter how worried you are that Mr. Beaver’s time is running out, nothing will persuade you to risk disassembling a Jenga tower. For another, there are I think five levels of escalation, which is probably too many to be qualitatively distinguished – it felt like a few times, I ran across information that felt mostly redundant with what I already knew, but was told that his had ratcheted up my desperation another quantum; combined with the previous issue, this wound up requiring a bit too much tedious lawnmowering of previously-forbidden actions to see what had opened up this time. And there are some places where the mismatch between player-knowledge and what the protagonist is willing to do gets sufficiently wide as to cause frustration: any player who glances at the cover art for half a second will realize that the aquarium – and by extension the diving suit and related paraphernalia you find about the shop – will be important to the endgame, which is quicky confirmed by messing about with it, but you’re prevented from doing much to start in on that puzzle chain until very late in the game (since the cover art is AI generated, if you glance at it for more than half a second will note that the crab has seven legs, no claws, and no mouth; for all that the text portrays Crusty as a charismatic little arthropod, as a result I shuddered any time I had to interact with him).
I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices. It’s not the only reason to play Mr. Beaver – as I’ve said, if this is a kind of IF you like, there’s much to enjoy here – but it did give me something more substantive to chew on after the farce was done.
Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla
This is a game that’s impossible to discuss without going into a fair bit of detail on how the mechanics work – and where the surprise of figuring those details out is a big part of the experience – so as a result, if you’re spoiler-averse, this might be a review to come back to once you’ve given it a go yourself.
Though to be brutally honest, this is a review that you might want to skip even if you have played Violent Delight, because while I always strive to come up with some insights or analysis or at least jokes that make reading my takes worthwhile, in this case I’m unconvinced that I have much of interest to say. Not to get all Marxist, but that’s because the material conditions under which I experienced the game were completely mismatched with the mode of production by which it generated that experience. Let me explain!
So this is a game with a series of interlocking gimmicks, and they all revolve around a temporal see-saw: either you’re waiting, desperate to kill time, or you’re desperately clicking around and speed-reading as the clock ticks down. There’s a robust narrative framework around this that we’ll get into in a sec, but in many ways that’s downstream of the experience of being crushed by this chronological trapjaw. Even under best-case circumstances, playing Violent Delight would be stressful, and you’d be inclined to miss stuff.
But I did not manage to achieve those best-case circumstances. See, I’d been spoiled on the first section of the game, which involves bidding on a video-nasty style video game on an eBay-alike and then waiting for an hour of real time for it to ship to you. And since I need to manage my game-playing time pretty aggressively to get through the full Comp, I figured I’d start things up and get the timer running in the background while I finished up my work day, so I could play it in earnest once I was done. Except just as I was about to put in my bid, my boss texted me about something, and while I was writing him back, the auction expired and someone else bought the cartridge, ending the game with nothing having happened (when I told this to the author, I found out this is considered the “good ending”).
Undeterred, I tried again, and managed to get into the meat of Violent Delight – once the cartridge arrives, there’s a gameplay loop of playing the thing – this involves clicking around low-res graphical mazes as occasional people or signs spout some text when you interact with them (it’s implemented in Decker) – before a timer runs down, your console overheats, and you need to wait for another timer to count down allowing you to play again. During these two-minute interregnums you can mess with the age-limiting chip you discover on the cartridge, which initially makes the game seem quite anodyne; as you dial it up, things get unsurprisingly sinister, and the increased intensity makes the console overheat even more rapidly once you get back into the cartridge.
Again, this is all in real time, and even after my work was done, it was very hard for me to play with the extended focus the game requires: my son’s been home sick and was bouncing off the walls, so I was popping up to do Legos with him or otherwise distract him, I had a couple late work emails come in I had to respond to, my wife came into the room and it would have been churlish to completely ignore her… this is kind of how my life goes these days, which is one reason why I play a lot of IF and turn-based games, and basically nothing real-time, since my son was born. As a result, the frantic sections of gameplay got even more frantic, my ability to connect the fractured elements of the intentionally-obscure plot was more or less shot by the constant interruptions, and I completely failed to take adequate notes, much less capture the game’s actual prose to ponder later (there’s a printer function that lets you dump text sections from the cartridge, but it strips them of context and the interface for retrieving them later is unintuitive, so that wound up just confusing matters further). Like, here is the stuff I have at my fingertips as I’m trying to construct a review:
electric volleyball, people not wanting to see attractive people
Ramping up snowstorms, hell to psychological testing vs. dreams of testing while dying (?) to hospital administration. Layers but also age
21 now! Time in each layer decreasing. Age rating?
Code?
Down, base, fall out? All you can say is I’m sorry. Breaks at 31?
This is very disappointing to me, since I think there’s some interesting stuff going on in Violent Delight beyond the mechanics – each time you tweak the age-rating, you unlock another level of the game, which seems to advance things temporally (the earliest stages have characters playing with toys in a park or taking tests in a school, later ones are set in offices or hospitals) as well as dialing up the horrific elements (there’s a hell-layer, terrible experiments are happening in another; people who find highly-abstract pixelated gore upsetting may want to steer clear) and playing with the structure. It’s elusive and downbeat, but there are good jokes too, especially in the time-wasting initial hour, which features some dead-on parodies of the Comp (though you can’t play any of them due to UK geoblocking).
If I can’t trace out all the nuances, though, I can maybe close with one big-picture thought, riffing on Violent Delight’s claim that it is “an experiment in withholding.” See, I think regardless of the semantic content of the game, it may be the alternation of bored waiting with desperate zooming around, with each cycle promising to get you closer to the truth concealed at the heart of all things, that’s the core theme of the game. This dynamic has all sorts of resonances – given the retro nature of the cartridge, it put me in mind of swapping urban legends about video game secrets on the elementary school playground, counting down the hours until I could go home and see what I could discover in the short window my parents let me mess around on the NES between homework and dinner. But you could equally draw similarities with social media, politics, consumerism and capitalism writ large, undergoing medical treatment… and the game touches on some of those themes, too. There’s definitely an element of trolling to the way Violent Delight deploys its interlocking timers, to cruel effect, but I don’t think that’s all it’s doing: I think it’s also lampooning the way we fritter away our lives, convinced that there’s some final point where all the busywork stops, our disparate experiences cohere, and it all makes sense.
Or it could be that’s just a delusive interpretation I dreamed up to try to wrestle my scattered understanding of the game, deformed by the stop-start nature of my distracted attempts to play it, into a plausible shape that retroactively gives meaning to the time I spent with it. If that’s the case, I guess this review is part of the joke too.
Saltwrack, by Antemaion
When I was little, I thought that the most important reason why it might be kinda fun to be rich is that you could hire somebody to be on call so that anytime you had a question about why the world was a certain way, they could run off to the library and do a bunch of research and come back and tell you the answer. The internet sorta scratches that itch, and in that respect I was right, it was awesome, but as far as I can tell from intermittent half-hearted Googles every couple of years over the decade or so I’ve pondered this mystery, no one has posed a robust answer to this question: given that basically every American in their late thirties to mid forties played the Oregon Trail to death in their elementary school computer labs, why are there so few clones, knock-offs, and spiritual sequels? Sure, there were some actual sequels, I’m aware of a series of Android-only fantasy RPGs that take a similar approach, and then more recently some satirical riffs like The Organ Trail have popped up in indie spaces – plus it’s certainly the case that some of the aspects of the game’s design have shown up in the DNA of roguelites like FTL. But given the ubiquity of the original, I’ve always been surprised that it’s inspired so few direct followers, and if I could fund whatever nerdy research projects I wanted, getting to the bottom of this conundrum would be high on the list.
Saltwrack is evidence in favor of my “there’s less Oregon Trail than you’d think” thesis, though that’s one of the less interesting things about it. This medium-length Twine game is working in an identifiable sci-fi tradition, exploring the aftermath of the uncanny ecological transformations wrought by an otherworldly incursion. But where Stalker situates the event in the steppes and Annihilation in the swamps, Saltwrack opts for the more-exotic-still polar salt flats. There’s a straightforward quest narrative, and characters with their own perspectives and backstories – you’ve decided you’re going to venture north until you can find the origin point for the eponymous Saltwrack, traveling in a sort of walking tank with a crusty guide and a psychic navigator – but the environment is the true star here. The post-collapse civilization gets a fair bit of world-building and is interesting enough, but pales in comparison to the restrained, evocative, and ominous descriptions of the changed landscape. Even before the metamorphoses are given free rein, these are a highlight:
You pass through a landscape of short, gritty cliffs. Rectangular segments of rock lie littered in the snow beneath them. Lichens splotch the stone in unexpected colors: brilliant orange, soft green, scabby red.
Things escalate, of course, but the prose retains a slight detachment, a slight flattening, that I found made the weirdness feel more immediate and concrete: not bent on evoking any particular reaction in either the protagonist or the player, content simply to exist, independent of humanity:
In the ice itself you find other wonders. Silicaceous networks and lattices, tubes, vase- and flower-shapes; you wonder if these are some relative of sea sponges or corals, and if so, how they could have made their way onto this land. Cnidarian clumps of tendrils, too, that hang from boulders or slabs of ice. Soft-bodied crawlers cling to these glacial reefs.
The gameplay around all this is structured as a there-and-back-again trek: throughout, a header tracks the time you’ve spent traveling, the number of miles you’ve accumulated, and a qualitative assessment of your supply level. You make some initial decisions about who to bring (you’ve a choice of two guides, and a choice of two “oracles”) and whether to overburden yourself to increase your stock of supplies, and from there you march through the journey day by day, typically facing a binary choice or two around the evening. Some of these are purely narrative – choosing which of your companions to chit-chat with while making camp, say – and others are fairly clearly testing how much the player is interested in dawdling to investigate interesting phenomena at the expense of quick progress to the goal. A few are higher-stakes, like planning how to cross a mountain range in the way of your route, or, once you get close to your destination, how much danger to life and mind to risk in pursuit of knowledge. They’re all reasonably engaging, but like the rest of the game, they tend to be dry and rather diffuse: again, you typically only have two choices (seeing the guide smoking a cigarette, you can only ask to try some or scold them), and the variety of different kinds of scenarios, and the relative scarcity of decisions, meant that it was over a week before I felt like I had even the slightest sense of who the companion characters were.
Contributing to the vague dissociative vibe the game projects is its refusal to go full Oregon Trail. Supplies are kept abstract, and the outcomes of your decisions are stated in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. A few times I pushed on to travel past dusk to avoid a danger, or overruled a companion’s suggestion, or saw some of my food spoiled by environmental contamination, but those displays at the top didn’t budge, and save for the climax, few if any of my decisions felt like they had any consequences past the scene in which I made them. And several elements of the game’s progression feel more tied to narrative considerations than systemic ones – I was told that packing supplies for 40 days should be adequate for a journey of several hundred miles, but it wasn’t until day 24, after going around a thousand miles, that my supplies finally ticked down from “plentiful” to “sufficient” (they finally gave out at a suitably climactic moment that also makes me suspicious of hand-waving in the background). This sense that my decisions weren’t having that much impact was exacerbated by some small bugs I found near the end, where one of my companies appeared to disappear without any direction mention that that’d happened; conversely, back at the beginning of the game the first choice you make is what title you’d like others to refer to you by, with clear social implications stated for the different options, but I only remembered it coming up once or twice, and seeming entirely cosmetic when it did.
I’m not too hung up on how gamey or “interactive” a particular game is, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a weakness that Saltwrack doesn’t track exactly how much food you have down to the pound, or pop up a numerical morale score for the companions that fluctuates according to your choices. But it did feel like a lot of the game was built around the expectation that these things would matter – that header, those go-slow-vs-go-fast dilemmas – so once I started feeling that a lot of it was for show, I got less enthusiastic about going through the motions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since as mentioned just focusing on Saltwrack’s scenery is a compelling experience by itself. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the version of the game that didn’t even feint in this direction, perhaps by communicating to the player that they wouldn’t need to worry about getting to the end, and thereby creating space for decisions about how they explore the world, rather than whether they explore it or simply beaver away at the trek (creating more opportunities to delve into the world’s mystery might also help make the slightly-underwhelming final revelations land with more force). Don’t get me wrong, Saltwrack is a worthwhile experience even in its current form – but it’s certainly consistent with the observation that even when developers lift the wagon train from of Oregon, they frequently leave the mechanics behind.
Space Mission: 2045, by Benjamin Knob
There’s a proud IF tradition of trolling game and subversive ones that cheekily undermine their ostensible premises (let’s pick, oh, 9:05 and Nemesis Macana as respective exemplars), and Space Mission: 2045 is a fitting inheritor to that legacy. There’s perhaps no topic in contemporary IF as contentious as the use of LLMs, so what could be riper for satire? Space Mission: 2045 lures the player in with an earnest-seeming 2,500 word monograph about the weaknesses of previous attempts to use generative AI to write IF, which segues into a manifesto for the virtues of the author’s approach, followed by an extended manual for the RPG-lite system the game uses (a particularly fun gag is that in a game about traveling through space to colonize Mars, “Animal Kinship” is one of the ten skills you can pick), and wrapping up with more details on how you can interact with the AI-driven parser – again, there’s a good piss-take here where the readme implies that the response to EXAMINE [OBJECT] will always be LLM-generated rather than written by a human, but that “doesn’t necessarily mean that the details are useless.” (emphasis added).
It’s all very gung-ho, but when you launch the game, there’s a one-two sucker punch. The first is that this cutting-edge game looks extraordinarily primitive, displaying without paragraph breaks or any left-margin whatsoever – all this makes the prospect of reading reams of LLM-generated text even more terrifying. The first and a half – OK, I should go back and edit the first sentence of this paragraph now that I’ve thought of one more, but it’s late so we’re just going with it – is that we’re going on this Mars mission on behalf of thinly-veiled caricatures of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which I really hope is meant to be a setup for jokes.
The second is that, of course, after you get done with the over-complex chargen section, nothing works. All the sophisticated features promised by the readme, like natural-language dialogue with NPCs who could adjudge whether you’d been sufficiently persuasive to convince them, or the smart parser which matches whatever convoluted sentence you care to write to the more limited list of actions that are actually possible In a particular sequence? Yeah, they sound great, and in fairness this is a game that allows you type whatever you want – it’s just that you’ll always get a response telling you there’s something wrong with the API key the game uses to interface with the LLM. It’s not particularly sophisticated, I suppose, but this is an elegant way of puncturing the pretensions of AI evangelists, demonstrating that even leaving aside the substance of what they claim, you can’t trust a chatbot game to even last all the way through a Comp before tech-company shenanigans knock it offline (meanwhile, interpreters mean we can still play forty-five year old classics with a click). It also opens up space for improvisational comedy like this:
What do you want to do? write a witty deconstruction of the folly of overreliance on generative ai
Error during AI interpretation: 401 Client Error: Unauthorized for url: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions
The only thing that could make the satire better is if it were actually intentional – since I glanced at some other reviews, and turns out there once was a playable game here? Sadly, Space Mission: 2045 might be more of a monument to hubris than deconstruction of same; if it ever starts working again, I’ll try to revisit it and update this review accordingly, but in the meantime, it’s one of the most effective bits of inadvertent self-mockery since the literary career of Norman Mailer.
Can you elaborate? I’ve only read Ancient Evenings, but that I really liked!
I admit that that was a superficial joke based on second-hand knowledge, since I’ve never actually read any of his books and am too young to have directly experienced him as a major cultural figure, but I’m thinking of things like the time he got drunk before an appearance on a TV talk show and got into a fight with Gore Vidal (including head-butting him before the cameras went on), bragging about how smart and sophisticated he was all the while. Fairly or not, he’s my go-to for the pompous type whose claims of insight are delivered with such little self-awareness that they wind up refuting themselves.
Hi Mike thanks for the review, for the transcript and for sharing your experience, I’m a big fan of weird hosting’s stories! (Especially the ones with a “not too bad” ending!)
Probably AI is not much of an elephant in the room as you may think this time. I’m also not a fan of generated content, and I think It’s not even much original in ideas, but turned out very efficient in grammar and orthography fixing. At least it is working better than any other corrector and dictionary I tried so far, since this time nobody complained about my writing, which is a great goal for me!
Hello Mike,
thanks for the great and interesting review!
You find a secret passage? Waaah, where is it?
By the way, there isn’t a single action in the game that doesn’t have at least 10 alternative spellings. That’s why I find it a bit frustrating that players are obviously still having “guess the verb” problems. It would be great if you could send me the exact details of where these problems occurred. I’ll be happy to fix them.
I came up with the escalation system after the very first version of “Mr. Beaver” completely derailed in terms of story logic. As much as one may be used to being able to do anything at any time in IF, it didn’t fit with my story at all. The original implementation of the escalation system was even more restrictive, which, to be honest, played out terribly because it was very patronizing. Even with the latest implementation, players still have differing opinions on whether actions should be permitted or prohibited. What I learned for myself: I would use such a system again if it saved the story, but I would do so as sparingly as possible.
I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices.
Thanks for that! I actually really enjoy trying out new gameplay elements, even if they don’t always work out. I’ve now managed to break the parser of some bad habits, but unfortunately it’s no longer compatible with the Mr. Beaver data model, so it’s reserved for new projects.
After playing through twice and then opening up the game in Twine to see what’s going on under the hood, I found that some decisions definitely have long-term consequences (whether or not you camp at the place with the “danger” sigil is a major one), and that the game is actually tracking your rations in detail, subtracting more when you take slower routes, factoring in how many people are currently in your party, etc. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the game should be more transparent about this to the player (displaying “X days of rations remaining” instead of the adjectives?), but I wanted to flag that it is happening!
Re: Oregon Trail.
I think the reason why so few games imitate it is because it’s a very simple game. Winning on your first playthrough is trivial if you have enough money. IIRC you have to choose to give yourself less starting money to make the game harder, and there isn’t any interesting way to manage your other resources better.
You could make these options easy/hard/extreme modes for the player to choose on a list, but that doesn’t really solve the problem.
As for games that take influence from it … one of the best games I’ve played so far this year is Insurmountable. It’s basically Mount Everest Trail on a hex grid, plus inventory tetris for resource management. The narrative events are paper-thin but every step is a delicate balancing act.
Technically it’s a roguelike, but you get multiple characters and a few chances to rescue them. Like with Oregon Trail, I was able to almost win on the first playthrough on easy mode. But I was absolutely breathless from the tension all the way.
It’s not a pure sequel to Oregon Trail, but similar in some ways. You will need a reasonably powerful PC to run it.
The Semantagician’s Assistant, by Lance Nathan
A nice thing about having been around IF-world for some time now, and making an effort to work through all the games in a couple of the major events, is that there are games that wind up sticking in my head as a sort of alternate canon – games that pushed boundaries or nailed a theme or were just really good, but for whatever reason haven’t stuck in the popular consciousness the way other, equally-worthy ones have. I’m not saying this to be more-hipster-than-thou; usually there are understandable reasons for the lower profile, like Fairies of Haelstowne, which was entered into ParserComp, or Constraints, which had a good showing in a twenty-years-gone Comp, or Accelerate, which was overshadowed by its prequel, Spy Intrigue, which I happen not to have played. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, communities glom on to some things and not others, memories are sparked or fade, new games cycle in to replace old ones… But going back to Accelerate, one of its fellow entries in the 2020 Comp is also on my idiosyncratic forgotten-classic list: Electric word, “life”. It’s a Twine 1999-set period piece about Halloween, and life, and death, but not in the way you’d imagine from hearing those themes laid out like that, and I adored it; even though I don’t think I’ve heard it mentioned in the last half-decade, I still think about it sometimes.
So I was excited to see that game’s author had written something new! While they still haven’t figured out how to come up with an easy-to-say title, the games couldn’t be more different: this time out we’ve got a wordplay-based parser comedy, and it’s a bit smaller in scope (though that could largely just be down to the difference between how scale works in choice-based and parser game). But it’s once again got great writing and satisfying mechanics; I can’t guarantee the Semtanta… the Semantamagia… the Assistant will wind up grabbing me the same way its predecessor did in years to come, but it’s certainly got a fighting chance of doing so.
Anyone writing a parser game where you solve puzzles by using gadgets to transform words must surely be intimidated by the legacy of Counterfeit Monkey, and to the game’s immense credit, it’s got the chutzpah to pay homage in one early in-joke and get on with things. The premise also helps cut to the chase: you play an underemployed striver looking for a job that’ll let you escape the grind, which has led to you answering a bizarre help-wanted ad and getting sucked into an interactive interview process. To prove you’ve got what it takes to be the magician’s understudy, you’ve got to figure out how to escape the room he’s trapped you in (there are no bones of previous applicants lying around, which is somewhat reassuring, at least?)
Where the plot is admittedly a bit thinner than in other, similar games – as is the number of puzzles, as there are really only three major word transformations in the critical-path chain – the range of tools is broader. There are half a dozen magical tools at your disposal, each performing a different bit of linguistic legerdemain: diegetically they may look typical stage-magician tat like a table where you saw people in half or a wheel with animals drawn on it or whatever, the effects include breaking apart or joining words, duplicating or removing instances of a particular vowel, slapping on a prefix, and so on. The operation of some of them is immediately clear, while the purpose of others is obfuscated, leading to a series of great aha moments when I worked out what they did and why that was useful.
Figuring out the syntax required to employ them can be just as challenging as solving the puzzles themselves, though – there’s a USE [DEVICE] command that’s mentioned in the About text as a way of providing a hint, but for some of them I think it’s more of a required tutorial; regardless, the game does eventually give you a hand. While I’m picking nits, there are a few other places bespeaking a slight lack of polish, like unimplemented scenery items and a super long location description that reprints every time you look. And I had to consult the actual hints after finishing the first major puzzle, since solving it doesn’t give direct feedback that something I’d tried earlier, only to see it end in failure, would now suddenly work.
Beyond those niggles, though, the implementation and design are both very very solid. Puzzle-wise, since this isn’t nearly as big a game as something like Counterfeit Monkey, there’s not that same scope for experimentation and solving puzzles through different solutions – there’s usually only one way to make progress at any time, and that very lack of extraneous options can wind up functioning as a sort of hint system unto itself, as a couple of times I went through some word transformations because I saw that I could perform them, rather than because I saw why I should perform them. But usually the logic clicked before I’d gotten too far down that path, leading to some of those “aha” moments mentioned above (I really enjoyed figuring out what the wheel was for). The downside is that I didn’t engage with the diegetic hint mechanics, which involve chatting with an adorable bunny, as much as might have been fun.
I was sad to miss out on any jokes that might have been lurking there, because the ones in the rest of the game are fun. The game steers clear of the flop-sweat-y patter of comedy games desperate to show you how zany they are, just weaving its gags into the inherent absurdity of the situation, alongside a calculated few flashbacks that quickly characterize your prospective boss:
“Magicians manipulate objects. I manipulate the names of objects. I can turn a cub into a cube; I can turn a tub into a tube—”
This time desperation took a back seat. “Hold on,” you interrupted. “Doesn’t that make you, like, an Orthographician? Spellingagician? Spellspeller…”
It all adds up to a delightful package, and in five years’ time I’d very much look forward to seeing an expanded sequel – or something just as different from this game as it is from Electric word, “life”.
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Fable, by Sophia Zhao
Spoiler alert for this review: there’s an admittedly-telegraphed plot development about midway through Fable’s relatively short run time that I have to address to properly discuss it, and turning the review into a Swiss-cheese of blurry text didn’t seem like a good idea.
I try not to pay too much attention to what a game is called: for me at least, coming up with a name is usually a slow, agonizing process that ends when I can’t stand to think about it anymore, so I try to do unto others as I would have done unto me and glide right past them. That was simple enough for me to do when starting Fable: is there a more generic title imaginable for a fantasy game? But after I finished, I wound up going back to it and worrying at it like a sore tooth: a fable is a simple story leaning heavily on allegory with an instructive moral at the end, perhaps with some anthropomorphized animals along the way, but what we’ve got here is a somewhat-convoluted teen melodrama whose central dilemma appears monstrous if you apply a lens of morality rather than romance to it. Don’t get me wrong, as melodrama it’s effective, albeit breathlessly paced, but I’m not sure that the questions the title invites are to its benefit.
The game introduces a lot of characters, situations, and prophecies in its first few passages, but it quickly becomes clear that much of it is secondary to the romantic obsession of Kel, the primary character: he’s long been in love with his best friend, Ronan, who himself is in love with Kel’s twin sister (I’ll admit that being myself a twin, I found the awkwardness of this setup excruciating, but it’s all fair enough by genre standards, I suppose – there’s nothing here more twisted than what’s in Star Wars). Then Ronan suddenly gets chosen to go on a quest – this is that prophecy, it’s pretty hand-wavey – and when he returns a year later, he’s changed, most notably by seeming to reciprocate Kel’s interest this time, though of course there’s plausible deniability. There are choices through this section, mostly coming down to leaning into the flirtation or playing hard to get, which is an engaging way of playing a romance, but it does suffer somewhat by the dial being immediately jammed to 11 and staying there. Nearly every passage ends in grasping towards big emotions, and yeah, I remember being a teenager, this is pretty much how it was, but the dialogue does sometimes buckle under the load:
“Do you know what it’s like to love you?”
At once, Ronan falls still.
“It’s finally understanding that this is what the bards sing about.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “So this is how I bleed.”
In the silence that follows, you blink back open your eyes, only to find a peculiar expression spasming across Ronan’s face.
(The emotion, thankfully, is not extreme mortification).
Throughout, though, there are intimations that there’s something off with Ronan, and the first half culminates in the revelation that he’s not really Ronan – which triggers a short flashback to the (much more sedately and evocatively written, I found) quest, where a psychic parasite named Jamie brain-jacked Ronan; it’s Jamie who’s returned and is into you. Barely has he been established as a mind-possessing fiend than he turns to lovestruck idiot, though, because as soon as Kel tumbles to what’s going on, he offers to release his hold (it was unclear to me whether this guaranteed his permanent discorporation) and allow Ronan to take his body back, free and clear. The climax, then, comes down to the choices you have Kel make to navigate this situation – as far as I could see, there’s no direct “keep Ronan’s consciousness shoved down an oubliette forever” path, but you can drag out the process for a while.
Again, as melodrama, this is a solid series of twists, though I think the pacing is a bit too breakneck for each to have as great an impact as it could. The bigger issue goes back to the title: if you don’t think about it too hard, a lovelorn seventeen-year-old torn between doing what he knows is right and finally having someone who desires him is dramatic enough. But if you splash some cold water on yourself first, holy crap: this dude has just about killed your best friend, who you’ve been in love with for years, but because he seems like he’ll put out and he’s wearing your crush like a skin-suit, you’re vacillating about what to do? Unless the moral here is meant to be that the terminally horny are too depraved to think straight, it’s hard to walk away from this feeling especially sympathetic to Kel’s angst. There’s a version of the game that leans into that discomfort – it’d certainly be risky to acknowledge the terrible things he’s contemplating and explore some of the darker aspects of desire. By calling itself a fable, Fable opens the door to that reading, which meant that I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that instead the game glides over these implications. In the final sequence, Ronan and his sister just pat Kel on his back and sympathize with his pain after it’s all over – I’m not sure that he’s learned anything.
(Note: I haven’t played this game yet)
To me at least, the name “Fable” specifically evokes this sort of allegorical reading rather than a literal one—that is, a fable (to me) is exactly the sort of story where everything falls apart if you take it too literally. When Aesop has a woodcutter holding a full conversation with a tree, that’s a setting with some horrifying implications—this man makes his living killing sentient beings en masse, beings he also talks to nonchalantly about the whole process! What kind of sociopathic monster would do that?
But the trees have to talk for the allegory to work, so there are talking trees in this world, and you’re just supposed to think about what they represent rather than the events literally happening. The point is that the trees set themselves up for destruction by collaborating with the woodsman, not that it’s horrific that they’re sentient in the first place.
So in this case, the title makes me think that the allegorical reading is the intended one. The teenager is offered a chance to have their crush actually reciprocate those feelings, but at the cost of losing their best friend. Everything else is just support for that core idea.
Monkeys and Car Keys, by Jim Fisher
One of the trickiest bits of designing a parser puzzle game is fitting the crossword into the narrative. Sometimes everything hums along in perfect harmony, and challenges naturally thrown up by the story have obvious mechanical implementations that are well-suited to the medium-dry-goods model – or, conversely, a great idea for a puzzle turns out to be easy to slot into the plot with minimal complications. But often, the gears grind rather than turn smoothly; you can wind up with long stretches of narrative with no ideas for how to break them up (maybe throw in the Towers of Hanoi?), or more often, a fiendishly clever puzzle idea that one despairs of justifying diegetically. On the horns of this dilemma, many an author has bent over backwards to try to come up with some minimally-plausible justification (if I had a nickel for every time aliens or a wizard ran a test to find out if I was worthy…) Monkeys and Car Keys, though, opts for the bolder path: since trying to reverse-engineer an explanation for these puzzles would itself be disruptive to any sense of narrative coherence, why not steer into the skid and just go with it?
Which is to say, when I pictured the kinds of stuff I’d need to do to retrieve my eponymous car keys when the eponymous monkeys snatched them mid-jungle-safari, I was on target with exactly one of them (though really, I get no points for guessing that at some point I’d need to bribe a monkey with a banana, and now that I think of it even that isn’t played entirely straight).
The range of challenges put before you include a translation puzzle, an action-mirroring one, and a fair bit of hidden-object spotting – none of it exactly explodes the conventional paradigm, but they’re all clever and provide a spark of novelty. And none of them make a lick of sense in any universe resembling our own. I won’t spoil the later places it goes, but the first set of puzzles revolve around figuring out how a trio of magic statues work. It’s satisfying when the pieces click into place, and I found there were just enough clues to move me along to the next step (albeit sometimes these were of the “you’ve been flailing around for an extended number of turns, so here are some increasingly-direct prompts to get you back on track” variety). But logical deduction isn’t enough to solve these puzzles: instead, you need to check your assumptions and the door and experiment.
For all that this represents a total capitulation of narrative in the face of the crossword, this is something parser games are quite good at – and let’s be honest, letting the puzzles dominate a “some monkeys stole my keys, those silly-billies” premise probably doesn’t mean we missed out on War and Peace. There are some places where I found my tired brain wasn’t up to the task – the second major set-piece involves a bunch of different bits of scenery and characters, and I found my mental picture wasn’t quite accurate enough for me to have a handle on what was going on – but Monkeys and Car Keys largely plays fair. It’s also smoothly implemented, with only one or two small exceptions (I had to consult the hints at one point since I’d forgotten that MONKEY wasn’t an acceptable synonym for the STATUE of a monkey). And honestly, given that the last story beat made me kind of feel like a bad person (OK that one monkey was being a jerk, but did he really deserve to get beat down with a tire iron?) there’s something to be said for refusing to allow the player to take matters seriously – and while the game knows its puzzles are the main draw, there are some engaging bits of simian mischief, and a cute sidekick, to lighten proceedings. There’s also an incredibly long setup for a bit of physical comedy illustrating that nothing’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Tricky puzzles and silly jokes is an enduring recipe for success in parser IF; if it lacks a certain balance of form and checks its literary pretensions at the door, well, what else would you expect of monkey business?
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Yeah, solid points that I think I agree with! To try refine what I was trying to say a little more, I think the issue I had was mostly with how that critical decision point was treated: as you say, in a fable, all the setup can sort of be hand-waved away via allegorical readings, but once you get to the crux of the story, the moral weight of the decision the protagonist makes is primary, and very clear (even if some fables, they make the clearly bad decision). In this Fable, though, I felt like the lens of romantic melodrama dominated, rather than the moral implications of the choice.
The Path of Totality, by Lamp Post Projects
I have a four-year-old son who is very sweet. Recently he’s been sick, so he’s been extra cuddly, and when his fever got bad for a bit, he wanted me to sit right next to him and tell him facts about the planets and galaxies to distract him from how crummy he was feeling. But then – thankfully – he started to feel better, and when I asked him if he wanted me to read him one of the science books we’d gotten out of the library, he yelled “poop!” and demanded I flip him upside down.
Which is to say, even the sweetest of us hit a point where they have had too much coziness – this is more or less the major theme of Dosteovsky’s Notes from Underground – and I must confess that Path of Totality had me contemplating just where mine is located. Not that this is a flaw in the game, or that I think I actually wound up tripping over the line! It never pretends to be something it’s not, and it carries off its brief with craft and care. As someone on their way to witness a sacred eclipse in a DnD-but-sanded-down fantasy world, your journey requires you to overcome the kind of obstacles that would get you a PG rating for “mild peril”, but more importantly, to bond with an appealingly-drawn quartet of fellow travelers, each with their own wholesome aspirations and hobbies.
Deepening your relationships with them is really the meat of the game; for the first half, each day on the trail sees you manage a few low-key decisions about how best to proceed along your path to the best spot to view the eclipse, then at night you have a chance for a conversation with one of your companions. After that series of one-on-ones, you have a chance to establish a chaste romance, and as the challenges in your way ramp up slightly, so too do you learn more about some of the (largely low-key) issues bedeviling them, before you reach a happy ending. It’s a simple structure, but it works, largely because the character work is solid. They’re largely fantasy stereotypes, but played just slightly against type: the halfling who loves nature as well as writing stories, the orc twins who work together building furniture, the trans shapeshifting elf princess. I can’t say I was ever deeply surprised by any of the backstory revelations that unpeel as the game progresses, but that’s partially because they feel like coherent people from the moment you meet them. Similarly, none of them are harboring intense conflicts or uncontrollable passions, but as a middle-aged person myself, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a game take an interest in people who are subject to the occasional bit of anxiety but are generally secure in their lives, goals, and work.
The trip itself very much is an excuse to allow you to spend time with your companions, though there are things to do. Beyond the quotidian incidents on the path, like bumping into other travelers to compare notes, or weathering an unexpected rainstorm, there are three more involved set-piece challenges, each of which involve dealing with mischievous fae. While they’re notionally different, in practice I found each was an exercise in trial and error, requiring a lot of clicking but without much in the way of real danger. I don’t want to spoil the latter ones, but the first is a sort of riddle contest that I found easiest to win by simply repeating myself until the fae got bored; the other two were physical traversal challenges, one of which was made trivial by my choice of background (at the beginning of the game, you decide why you want to see the eclipse: are you an adventurer hoping it will help solve a quest, a pilgrim looking for a blessing, or an astronomer seeking scientific knowledge?) They’re fine, but there’s a lot of clicking without much deep thinking required; they pace out the journey, but again, the real focus of the game is chatting with the characters.
So yeah, this is good, and I enjoyed it – but there were times when the coziness threatened to tip over into feeling cloying. Notably, while the romances are generally sweet, they’re aggressively chaste; I wound up getting close to the shapeshifter, whose powers require her to be naked to change her form, but despite this happening a couple of times, the description just matter-of-factly notes her doffing or shrugging on her clothes with no acknowledgment of sexuality whatsoever. I also felt like a late-game sequence where the companions meet a married couple who shelter them right before they reach the eclipse dragged and went back over previously-covered ground: there’s a truth-or-dare-without-dares dice game that gets played out in highly granular detail, but nothing much new comes out of any of the conversations, and everyone’s uniformly supportive of everyone else, so much so that I also wanted to tip the table over and scream “poop!” just for a change of pace.
Except, I had the option to, but I didn’t. For all that what I’ve described above is I think pretty clearly the intended experience of Path of Totality, you can opt out of just about all of it: alongside the positive, encouraging dialogue option, there’s almost always a second saying you’re not interested in hearing any more about woodworking, and what would a halfling know about birds of prey, and you can even make a transphobic comment to the elf lady. Heck, as far as I can tell the companions are optional, and you can decide to make the pilgrimage all by yourself!
I have a hard time understanding the kind of player who, after the game introduces itself via an extended conversation with a relatable, helpful pair of characters who ask to join you, decides to turn them down, mind – and I likewise don’t think many people will take the latter option in the frequent be cool/be an asshole choices. But it’s meaningful that they’re there, because even if I did sometimes chafe at how upbeat and cheerful everything was, if I’d really wanted to I could have peed in the cheerios at any time. By revealed preferences, then, I got exactly the experience I wanted, and it was a good one. I am glad, though, that I’ve got a good number of games before the next Lamp Post Productions game comes up in my queue, since I don’t want to overdose on the positive vibes (though if that’s a danger, I could take my son’s advice and flip myself upside down, I suppose).
I tried it as an experiment after completing the game, but I believe you still end up with the full party, regardless of how much of a jerk you are. That’s how nice all these people are!