The Missing City Council, by Solarius
Local government is weird. In my career I’ve done advocacy at the federal level as well as the state level in California, working on bills that would raise and spend billions of dollars or make substantial changes to major sectors of the economy. But I’ve also done work in cities, counties, and other local governments, and while a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same, just with smaller numbers, I’ve also come across irruptions of pure chaos that are impossible to explain without just saying “man, this is weird.”
Like, one time I was supporting a community group that was pushing for expanded weekend burial hours in a rural public cemetery district – they were Hmong, and had a tradition of doing Sunday funerals – which seemed pretty straightforward. They’d gone to the district superintendent, who was an old guy who didn’t much like changing the way things were done, and he’d said he wouldn’t do it, so they went to a sympathetic board member who said he’d be willing to push for it if he could get a sense of what it would cost. The superintendent wasn’t going to be helpful, so I worked with a colleague to analyze the district’s budget, made some estimates, and concluded it would cost maybe a couple thousand bucks wouldn’t really impact the bottom line. We were feeling good about things when my colleague went out to one of the district’s board meetings to share the analysis – except instead of greeting her presentation with a “huh, cool, glad this won’t be a big deal after all,” the superintendent freaked out at the idea that someone else was looking at the (publicly available) books. Even more unlikely, it turned out that one of the attendees at the meeting was a woman who’d decided to spend her retirement going to every single cemetery district meeting, and she tracked down my colleague’s phone number so she could leave a rambling three-minute voicemail in which she expressed how upset she was about… something, it was very hard to tell. Everyone got angry at everyone else, the county supervisor had to pull some strings to get people removed from the board, and the superintendent eventually decided this was all too stressful for him and retired. It was an enormous mess that took hours and hours to deal with, a gigantic fight over the smallest imaginable iota of policy. Like I said: weird!
But not as weird as what’s going on in the Missing City Council (ha, managed to get around to it before we hit the 500 word mark!) The premise of this debut parser game is that you’re a Finn at City Hall for a hearing about a zoning dispute, but when you arrive, the building is almost deserted: nobody’s in any of the offices or meeting rooms, except for a pair of British guards inexplicably hanging out in the basement. So your task is to explore the building, get through some locked doors, and solve a multi-step puzzle to find out what’s happened to the misplaced aldermen so they can rule in your favor.
At least, that’s what I think is going on, based on the title and blurb; the game itself doesn’t provide any direct context or motivation, so this is really one of those fumble-around-with-everything-that-looks-like-a-puzzle-until-you-win affairs. And fumble I did, because Missing City Council makes a bunch of idiosyncratic interface decisions, like eschewing compass directions in favor of having you ENTER or go IN various doors and passages. The contents of rooms are also often listed in a jumble at the end of the sparse location descriptions, which lends a bizarre air to proceedings:
You can see a staircase up, a door to the lift, a left guard, a right guard, a door to the toilet, a door to the shelter and a door to the garage here.
There are also a lot of the usual infelicities of a minimally-implemented game that didn’t receive any outside testing – many objects (including the player) have default descriptions, there are locked doors that open only by PUSHING and items mentioned in descriptions that aren’t implemented, and so on. The puzzles also seem like they must only make sense to the author – while I dimly intuited that I needed to make some tea to distract the British guards (points for knowing national stereotypes), the steps required are so Byzantine that I can’t see how a player would make progress without going to the walkthrough. Like, the first step major step is to intuit that an avant-guard art piece described as being made of boiled sweets would dislodge some of its hard candies if you hit it, then hitting it enough times to get a lemon drop to pop off so that you can put it in the tea to make lemon Earl Grey.
Usually try to say at least something nice about authors’ first games, no matter how much I’ve complained about their rookie mistakes, and that’s actually easy to do here: this is a charmingly zany premise, some of the scene-setting, like the art collection crammed into the upstairs sauna, is memorably silly, and the ultimate explanation as to what’s going on made me laugh. So this is an author with a unique comedic angle, and we could always use more farce in parser IF – hopefully their next game will get some more testing, and sand down the weirdness so that it’s quirky rather than completely impenetrable.
(Oh, and there’s a happy ending to the cemetery district story: a new superintendent took over, and confirmed that yeah, they could extend the hours for just a couple thousand bucks, no big deal. I’m not sure whether that lady kept going to the board meetings, but I like to think she does, and finds something new to get incredibly upset about every month).
council mr.txt (23.3 KB)