Us Too, by Andrew Schultz
It’s fun to look at old sci-fi and see which of the things they’ve envisioned have become reality, and which are still the stuff of imagination. Take Star Trek: warp drive remains a physical improbability, matter replicators are sorta getting there with 3D printers, ditto with the holodeck given improvements in VR, and we’ve already got a version of the voice-activated computer that responds to whatever you say though there are uh some unanticipated issues with that. The Universal Translator is looking pretty good, thankfully transporters are still pretty far off, and the Vulcan Mind Meld? I’m ready to declare that one checked off. You see, I’ve been playing Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games for about five years now, and while I remember my brains leaking out of my ears when I realized what the first few were demanding of me, I managed to sail through most of Us Too, firmly vibrating on its wavelength. As far as I can tell, playing his games year after year has expanded my consciousness until I see the world the same way he does, decomposing words into their component phonemes if not effortlessly, then at least with an intuitive appreciation for the logic at work. Just as in the show, it’s a disorienting experience as well as an enlightening one – but it does mean I had a thoroughly good time with Us Too.
For those who haven’t played one of these games, a bit of explanation is in order. Every installment in the series hinges on a particular kind of wordplay that transforms a seemingly-nonsensical word or phrase into another, often-similarly-nonsensical one. While there is an inventory and compass navigation, these vestiges of traditional parser games are just there to support the word puzzles (most items are used and collected automatically – or at least, automatically once you’ve solved the appropriate puzzle). The gameplay loop involves going to a new place, noting that it’s got a weird name and maybe one or two other weird objects, and then typing in what you think those names translate to (note for prospective players: I always forget that you don’t need to type SAY first, just type the solution!) As for the nature of the wordplay, it shifts between games – I think most of the ones I’ve played have involved substituting the initial sounds of an alliterative phrase (like, “Chevy chair “becomes “heavy hair”), though memorably and kinda-painfully, there was even a pig Latin one.
Us Too’s distinctive move is admittedly easier to grasp than these somewhat outre pieces of linguistic dexterity: here, you need to move the space in a two-word phrase to make a different two-word phrase, for example THINK WELL can become THIN QUELL (this is an example from the game, but it’s given to you to toggle a help option rather than being an actual puzzle). It can definitely be tricky – there were some puzzles that I stared at for a long time, babbling demented syllables until they finally cohered by trial and error – but it’s a reasonably bounded problem, and I found I got the knack pretty quickly, which made the pacing satisfying: I tended to make good progress, then run into a couple tricky puzzles that slowed things down, before getting unjammed and zooming ahead again. This is especially the case where I’d figured out the later stages in a puzzle-chain before the first: as mentioned, Us Too isn’t just a series of isolated tongue-twisters, there is an inventory and state tracking, so sometimes you need to have the right item or otherwise satisfied a prerequisite before the puzzle can be solved. Helpfully, though, the game remembers if you’ve stumbled across the right phrase before you’re able to deploy it properly, and it’s very satisfying to solve one puzzle and realize in a flash that it’ll let you work through a half-dozen that had been left tormentingly half-solved across the map.
Much like the other games, Us Too in fact is helpful to a fault. There are tutorial messages, cheat items, and diegetic hints a-plenty. A challenge is that these all use the same linguistic tricks as the rest of the game, so they might be tricky for someone coming to the series fresh to figure out – which is too bad, since of course those are the people for whom they’ll be most important, and they’ll need them most at the very beginning, before the player’s figured out the main trick. And sometimes the game provides so much detail that the forest can get lost for the trees (there’s a hint item that looks like a pair of eyes that has something like three different potential uses, all giving slightly different feedback). But there’s also a full walkthrough that talks all the puzzles through, so really, there’s a lot of support to allow players of all experience levels to have fun here, once they get over that first hurdle.
As for the plot – well, Us Too makes an interesting contrast with Monkeys and Car Keys, which I just reviewed and noted that it doesn’t really bother trying to diegetically justify its puzzles. Despite their bizarre nature, Us Too’s puzzles are all integrated into its narrative, which makes the whole thing quite phantasmagoric: in theory, you’re tasked with exploring a mine to satisfy the conditions of an eccentric great-aunt’s will, but while the mine does have some of the stuff you’d expect, there are also restaurants, oceans with boats and islands, plenty of other people to meet, and odder situations still. Oh, and you’re collecting ingredients for a recipe while you’re down there. I admit that I have a hard time correlating all the different strands of the plot; the opening is pretty coherent, presenting the great-aunt as an appealing presence in the protagonist’s life and featuring a rare sighting of lawyers in IF who aren’t jerks, but after that it gets pretty fractured – I did find it funny, but the various jokes I pasted into my notes don’t really work on their own, you kind of needed to be there.
Outside of the narrative, the gameplay also departs from its key mechanic a few times, and while they can provide a welcome change of pace, I did get stuck on one of these because I was expecting to solve everything with wordplay, rather than messing around with items (I’m talking about the bit where you can boost your speed by examining a particular item, and depending on how much gas you’ve got left in the tank, going south at a specific intersection will take you to one of three different destinations). Admittedly, there is a lot of signposting that something weird is happening here, but the challenge just felt very out of context with what the rest of the game had been training me to do. I guess that just means there’s a bit more work required on the mind meld – once Andrew wraps that up, maybe he can start in on the space communism bit of Star Trek next?
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But I take it it wasn’t exactly your favourite genre either.