Tableaux Vivants, by Lamp Post Projects
I have a lot of admiration for IF authors who come to the scene via one of its two main branches – choice-based and parser – and then make the leap to the other. In the abstract, I think mussing up the easy-to-make dichotomy between the two styles helps keep the community unified and can lead to fertile cross-pollination, but in the specific, it’s also pretty cool to see a particular author’s strengths, thematic preoccupations, and approach refracted through the lens of a different set of interface assumptions. Sometimes, admittedly, the shift makes clear that an author should stick to what they know. More often, though, it’s a chance to encounter a familiar voice as if for the first time.
Heading into Tableaux Vivants, I was reasonably confident that this would be one of the positive examples. I’ve played four previous games by Lamp Post Projects, all choice-based games with a specific style: character-forward stories set in a DnD-style fantasy world advanced to the early Modern era, usually with a central mystery or plot that you slowly work away at while getting to know (and perhaps lightly flirting with) an engaging set of supporting characters. There’s a lot about this that doesn’t easily translate into the traditional parser format – not least, the drawings and lush audiovisual presentation – but there’s a lot that I thought would: all those games did a good job of telling stories through their physical settings, with an emphasis on architecture and art, which is a good fit for parser IF, and all of them boasted solidly-designed puzzles that likewise bode well for working in this typically-more-puzzley medium.
Having now played the game, I’m pleased that those assumptions were right – Tableaux Vivants is definitely part of the author’s broader oeuvre, while feeling like a natural fit for the parser medium. Admittedly, I believe they did a short parser game for this year’s TALP, though I haven’t played that one, so this isn’t their very first time dabbling in these waters, but it’s still an assured transition. I think it helps that this game, like so many of their others, focuses on art. As the title indicates, the main action of Tableaux Vivants turns on the amnesiac protagonist investigating a series of paintings that have unaccountably come to life in her elegant country manor (the setting appears to be an alternate version of early-20th-Century Britain, no orcs or dragonborn around). The forgetful main character is a hoary trope, admittedly, but so many authors have gone to that well because it’s a good fit for a parser game, allowing the player and protagonist alike to learn as they go, and providing an internal mirror for external exploration as solving puzzles unlocks the keys of memory.
So it goes here, and while the story doesn’t go in too many unexpected directions, I thought the ultimate explanation for what’s going on to be thematically sound, while the pace of remembering new information is fast enough that I never got frustrated. By virtue of a compact map and including only a few, well-chosen objects in each location, the game is able to quickly transition from the initial round of seeing what and who is around the house to actually resolving its main puzzles, which all turn on finding and delivering a missing element in each of the quartet of paintings.
The first step is identifying what you need to track down, which is generally fairly simple, though it did make me feel smart when a basic familiarity with the particular real-world work of art provided a bit of a shortcut. The second step, though, often involves working with a unique magic system that enables you to transform certain categories of objects into representations of them (or vice versa). It’s generally well designed and well-clued, despite one element of it being potentially very open-ended, as puzzles sometimes hinge on typing in a specific topic to look up in the manor’s library. There’s a real risk that systems like this can go awry if the clueing is inadequate, and admittedly there is one puzzle here where I did find myself having to look up a hint (I thought I just wasn’t coming up with the right topic to try to find Napoleon’s saddle, and after coming empty with HORSE and RIDING and HUNTING I was at a loss; if the side-saddle flower was more familiar, possibly looking up PLANTS would have occurred to me, though), but other than that it worked well, and the multi-step solution to helping the woman in the upstairs bedroom was very satisfying to work through.
Throughout, the sense of specific place with real-world cultural inspirations that animated the author’s previous work again shines through – all the clearer, perhaps, for working with a setting that isn’t strictly fantasy. There are a lot of references to William Morris (and an achievement for finding all the wallpaper patterns, a nice touch) and the Pre-Raphs, all rendered in clear, effective prose that sometimes strays towards the didactic, but perhaps provides a better picture of the main character as a result:
Memories arise as I recover from the outburst. The decades of futile love that I have carried for Eudocia, just as I carry a piece of her golden hair in the locket that I wear. The day I impulsively burned two years’ worth of research notes in a fit of frustration. The tenderness that arose in me when I observed wild boar piglets in a forest. The presence of divinity that was impressed upon my soul when I witnessed a lightning storm over the moor of Twyn Llech.
The details of parser implementation are solid as well – I didn’t experience any notable bugs, and the game handled commands like TAKE ALL FOOD with aplomb.
Am I hoping all Lamp Post Projects games take the parser route from here on out? No, because as I said up top, I prefer it when authors hop back and forth. I think I also missed the warmth and companionship that suffused their previous work: Tableaux Vivants is a cooler game, partially by virtue of the particular psychology of its protagonist, who had grown closed off even before the mishap that sets the plot in motion, but also because the affordances of most parser systems are a better fit for antisocial main characters. Still, I found this a satisfying departure indeed, with nicely-designed puzzles and a unique set of magical metaphors animating the story. So wherever the author decides to go next, I’m glad to follow.