Wild Ride to Earth, by Cavaris
There was a moment towards the end of Wild Ride to Earth’s introductory sequence where I heaved a heavy sigh. See, I’d read through a couple passages laying out how my lottery-winner protagonist got abducted by aliens (well, one alien, at least) before they could cash in on their winnings, and, finding themselves deposited on a faraway space station and being taken under the wing of a helpful informational kiosk (the kiosk is a robot. It’s named Kiosk), girded their loins to work for passage back to the galactic backwater that is our corner of the Milky Way. But before jumping into the adventure, the game paused for a vibe check: how did we feel about all of this? Psyched to explore the galaxy, scared of what might be coming at us, focused on getting back in time to receive our winnings, hell-bent on revenge against the schmuck who hoovered us up into space and caused this predicament? Ah, I though, I know how this works, I’ll pick one, it’ll bump up my curiosity or vengefulness or one of my dozen-odd stats, and then whenever I face a challenge I’ll just always pick “inquisitive” or whatever so I can beat the rolls.
Except that’s not what happened at all! Despite being a ChoiceScript game and throwing in what seems like a very deliberate head-fake, Wild Ride to Earth in no way adheres to the Choice of Games style guide, which made for a pleasant surprise. I don’t think the CoG approach is inherently bad or anything, don’t get me wrong – a bit of ribbing about that game a couple years ago where you could pick the color of your favorite mug aside – but in a shorter, Comp-length game, there’s often not space to allow players to dabble in a bunch of different approaches instead of just spamming their one best attribute, and the effort of customizing a player-analogue with detail after detail feels wasted when the story will be over relatively soon after finishing the process. So yeah, I was happy that Wild Ride does none of this: you’re out in space, you need to do a bunch of jobs to earn credits so you can travel from station to station and buy the equipment you need for tougher jobs, and your success or failure is entirely up to your wits.
That’s pretty fun! The game has a lightly satiric streak, leveling broad parodies at reality TV, art snobs, foodies, tech bros, politicians, game developers, and greedy corporations, with none of them coming in for especially more bile than any other. Each of the half-dozen stations you can visit has a job or two available, which acts as a self-contained storylet. Some are over in the course of a paragraph or so, others take a dozen or more passages to work through, but each spits you out at the other and having spent a chunk of time (there’s a clock on the game, since if you don’t redeem the lottery victory within a year, it goes to someone else), earned a number of credits, and perhaps seen your prestige boosted – sometimes the most important reward, as the most lucrative and interesting jobs are gated with a prestige requirement. You can also increase your prestige by buying useless stuff, as there’s nothing more stylish than conspicuous consumption, but going on too much of a spree can leave you with too little money to travel to the next job. Eventually, you’ll have accumulated enough of a bankroll to hire a ship to take you back to earth, at which point the game ends and you get a little achievement-style recap of your accomplishments.
It’s a solid structure, but admittedly this is no Elite: there’s nothing to do on the stations outside of the jobs save read a paragraph or two of flavor text lightly differentiating the politician station from the art one, and there’s not much of an economy either – I found there’s more than enough status to be had from succeeding at jobs (and if you fail at them, you probably don’t have spare money to throw at that stuff), and the only other things you can buy are health recovery items, except I didn’t take any damage in two full runs. And as for the overall difficulty, it’s very swingy – my first time out I got stiffed on a couple of jobs, never accumulated enough prestige to qualify for better ones, and soon ran out of cash. In my second, I did so well on my first two jobs (out of a dozen or so total) that I already had more than enough money to stop my explorations and just head immediately back to earth.
So with the macro side of things being relatively underdeveloped, the game really lives or dies on the micro scale, in the jobs. Thankfully, they’re a pretty lighthearted bunch. As mentioned, they’re comedic riffs on one aspect or another of modern society, without much in the way of barbs. It’s more or less a picaresque: everybody’s got a silly name, all the characters have cheerfully venal motives that never actually lead to anyone being permanently hurt, and it’s all good for a chuckle before you (hopefully) get your payday and move on to the next adventure. It’s pleasant, I enjoyed it, but even still I felt like the game was pulling its punches, with writing that’s content to play to the cheap seats. Like, here’s a bit where you volunteer to be an exhibit in an alien zoo:
The moat setup makes you feel like you’re in the primate section of an Earth zoo, but your enclosure could be a typical office back on Earth. You’ve got a roller chair with one broken wheel, an ugly metal desk with a laptop and a picture of what could be a distorted human. You eagerly check to see if you have any connection. The laptop doesn’t respond at all. Also, it’s not plugged in. Also, there are no outlets. You’re frustrated, but at least you seem to be delighting the paying guests. “Look at it play with its toy!” “Have you ever seen anything like it?” “It says here that it comes from a planet no one really cares much about. It must be thrilled to be here.”
That raises a smile but not much else. Still, this late in the Comp I can hardly object to a game that’s a low-key, friendly hang, and actually my only solid complaint goes in the other direction: as mentioned, Wild Ride doesn’t really adhere to the traditional ChoiceScript approach to gameplay, but as is the case for I think all games written in the language, there are no saves and no undo function. That’s too bad, because the game doesn’t seem especially interested in being difficult or punishing the player for exploring too recklessly, but the absence of an ability to peek into a new branch and then quickly revert back to the main branch meant that when I saw choices like the one that would have let me peace out of this epic space journey to go be a reality TV star for a while, I didn’t actually check out what that ending was like since it would have meant replaying everything from scratch. Wild Ride, despite its name, is actually a much more low-key experience, and a system supporting that vibe might have been a better fit after all.