My IFComp Reviews

More spoilers for Verdeterre’s plunder:

[spoiler]The statuette is on the, uh, whatever the place is called where you get by going up when you’re on the main deck. It’s worth almost nothing, I just picked it up in my solution because I had some spare moves near the end.

Your solution involves several objects I didn’t even know existed! Reading the book, a cabinet that can be shot open, a dagger that comes out at random, the pearls … I didn’t find any of that. And I must admit that I’m not very happy with the conflation of a logic/optimisation puzzle and traditional adventure puzzles. This means that there is no wa you can know whether you have found the optimal solution; you don’t even know whether you possess all the pieces![/spoiler]

For what it’s worth, I disagree.

[spoiler]Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder combines simple adventure gameplay with an optimisation puzzle. From what you say here and on your blog, you seem to have three objections:

  1. Some plunder can only be found by doing things which are non-obvious or poorly motivated. The game isn’t clear about this, and so fails to adequately communicate its own rules.
  2. It’s not possible to know if you’ve reached the optimal solution, because there may be items you haven’t found.
  3. That unless you somehow find every item, you can’t begin ‘solving the real optimisation puzzle, rather than a fake one created by your own lack of knowledge’.

My responses:

  1. It’s not clear from my walkthrough, but I think pretty much every item I found was adequately clued. The cabinet is mentioned in the Galley’s room description; if you examine it you discover it’s locked and you’re told you probably won’t be able to find the key. So why not shoot off the lock? The dagger is in plain sight, and while I didn’t realise at first that extracting it was random (which is a design mistake, certainly), I got it out on maybe the seventh pull. It’s a running joke of sorts that Verdeterre is mostly wrong, so I took his commentary as encouragement, if anything; similarly for the book. You can also discover the bracelet inside the book by opening or searching it, and maybe in other ways. The pearl necklace is more obscure, I agree – I nearly missed it, but treasures are scattered in such absurd places that I felt sure there’d be something there.
  2. There’s probably an optimal Kerkerkruip strategy, too, and no one knows it. I was under the impression that you saw this as a feature. Why is it a good thing in tactical games, but a bad one in optimisation puzzles?
  3. I don’t understand why the optimisation puzzles which exclude some items are ‘fake’. They won’t disintegrate prematurely, as a fake handbag might, and they fulfil the same function as the ‘real’ puzzle, unlike a fake bomb detector. And I’m not sure they’re less interesting or enjoyable. Do you think they are? If so, why? Would the game be better if Veeder increased the complexity by adding more objects?

Having written this, it occurs to me that there may be a fourth objection, which goes something like this: I like optimising things, but I don’t like the traditional gameplay of text adventures; this game failed to signal to me how much it contained of the latter, so when I found out about this after I thought I’d solved it correctly, I felt aggrieved and frustrated. Is that a fair description of your response?

In any case, I was clearly wrong when I said ‘it’s probably not possible to find it frustrating’.[/spoiler]

[size=150]Robin & Orchid by Ryan Veeder and Emily Boegheim[/size]

This is beta-tested parser IF. You play as Robin, one of two high school journalists who spend the night in a local church investigating a rumoured haunting.

The implementation is excellent. You can photograph anything, including NPCs when they’re performing actions. The inventory helpfully aggregates photos into a single stack. I wouldn’t want to bet that this game contains even one typo. I had a few issues with disambiguation: ‘Which do you mean, the orange box or the orange box?’ (Only the former turned out to be acceptable.)

I recommend playing at night.

[spoiler]There’s a lot here to like. The setting’s strong and detailed. You can carry stuff around if you want, but that’s mostly not what it’s for: items are there to be themselves, and to be looked up in the copious notes you’ve been given by a member of the church youth group. Robin, like the player, is an outsider (she came to the youth group a few times, but didn’t stick around), so both mostly learn the history and human significance of rooms and items through the notes.

Then there’s the quality of the craft. This goes well beyond implementation. Characters are drawn quickly and effectively, and content is gated in ways which protect the coherence of the plot without interfering too much with the impression of open exploration. And I appreciated the way you can go to sleep at almost any time and get an ending appropriate to the photos and information you gathered. The contextual walkthrough is pretty neat, too.

All this made me very well disposed towards this game. I felt a little guilty that I only mildly enjoyed it.

One problem is that the game’s about teenagers. Teenagers are hard to write about, both because they’re massively over-represented in fiction and usually rather boring. I wasn’t interested in Orchid or Aiden or, fatally, in Casey, who as author of the notes is the most pervasive character in the game. And I still only know fairly superficial things about Robin.

It’s possible that I missed a lot of content. I never learned Robin’s backstory with the church, and I didn’t find a use for the food bank cans. (Many items have no use. But Robin won’t leave items where someone might trip over them; I’m not convinced she’d steal without a reason.) The notes hint at setting an ambush at a certain choke point but I couldn’t make that work, and I never got inside the pastor’s office. I asked a few people and none of them managed to do these things, either.

There aren’t many puzzles. One of them is pretty terrible. Robin sees a gooey container on a high shelf. It may be the source of ectoplasm. Although she can see it, she can’t photograph it – not even by holding the camera above her head while standing on a three-foot-tall locker. There were several sources of frustration here: the puzzle wasn’t as clear as it could have been about explaining that I was trying to photograph rather than, as I assumed, get the container. There’s a model Noah’s Ark in the room, and also a model Ark of the Covenant. One must be placed on the other. The disambiguation was a little vexing. Robin can’t stand on the locker if you anything on top of it to make a higher vantage point.

The basic problem here, though, is that this would be a trivial challenge in real life: the difficulty is an artifact of the interface. This is an excellent recipe for awful puzzles. (I know of only one way to make this work: language puzzles.)

There’s a puzzle I like much better. In the notes Casey tells the story of a Nativity play. It’s broken up into four parts. You read each part by looking up one of the items which appears in the story. You can read the first, second and fourth parts by looking up items in a storage room. But the item corresponding to the third part, which can be guessed from the rest of the story, is missing. By the time the player discovers this, they’ll probably have enough information to figure out that the item is usually kept in the storage room as well as who removed it and for what purpose.

I really liked this, partly because it fits better with the rest of the gameplay, which involves wandering around looking up stuff in the notes. But mostly because it’s a puzzle about piecing things together from your understanding of the environment and the motives of the characters. I find that more compelling than box stacking, and if there’d been more puzzles of this kind I’d probably really love this game.[/spoiler]

[size=150]9Lives by Bill Balistreri, Hal Hinderliter, Sean Klabough, Luke Michalski and Morgan Sokol[/size]

[spoiler]This was written by undergraduates for their project management class. The player controls a soul caught in the cycle of rebirth, guiding them to higher or lower realms of existence by making pivotal choices. The goal is to transcend the limits of the flesh by making approved choices in a series of moral dilemmas; implausibly, right action is rather easier than persistent iniquity, which ends in crawling through cowshit as a beetle.

The opening line is a fabricated Buddha quote, which is appropriate because this game is about as doctrinally accurate as a troop of Gnostic combat nuns. That’s okay. I’d love to play a more sophisticated take on this cosmology, which as I understand it is less about encouraging good behaviour with a promised path to godhood – Buddhist conceptions of the persistent self are too attenuated for that – than suggesting the whole setup is basically unfulfilling, however awesome or fortunate you are. I’m sure a good game could be made with 9Lives’ take on these things, but 9Lives isn’t it.

The game begins on a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic. It’s sinking, and the player must make a choice: they can swim to their friends’ lifeboat, in which there’s an empty seat, or drown in solidarity with the others in their own boat, who cannot swim – apparently because they’re all old or young or, rather oddly, female. What would you do, reader? I hope you won’t rush to a decision. Please take all the milliseconds you need.

Swim? Yeah, me too. The parser probably won’t let you, though, like an annoyingly spunky guardian angel:

You can swim towards the boat, but only if you first go down, unprompted. You won’t get there, though, because you get eaten by a shark.

The implementation is at times rather worse than this but very rarely much better. The PC can be incarnated as a superhero who must FLY between disconnected areas. This command can be used to enter any room in the game, as I discovered when FLY TO TOWER took me somewhere unexpected. To test this I flew to the dung heap, where a cow pissed on me and I drowned.

No testers, as you may have guessed, were pissed on, eaten by sharks, or consulted during the making of this game.

In a game with this structure – a sequence of vignettes built around moral crises, movement up or down according to the player’s choices – I think there are a couple of conditions those choices must meet if it’s going to be successful. First, because the structure judges the player’s choices, the situations must have a sort of moral clarity: most simply, by having uncontroversial right and wrong answers (do you manage the orphans’ trust fund responsibly, or spend it all on beer?); more subtly, by having them conform to a coherent moral outlook the player can understand, but presented in a way which invites them to critique it. Second, there needs to be an element of challenge, something which provides friction. One way would be to lock the approved actions behind puzzles, but much better, I think, would be to make the sanctioned ones tempting to the player.

The obvious way to do this is by pitting morality against self-interest, but that conflict will always be more compelling for the character than the player, even when not confined to a vignette. There are other ways, though, one of them suggested by the story of Paolo and Francesca:

This is, more or less, one of the ways a character in Fallen London may come to lose her soul: not by deciding to part with it, any more than Francesca decided on adultery, but in a way which flows fairly from the player’s actions, nonetheless.

None of the choices in 9Lives meet both conditions: friction and clarity. The lifeboat scene, for example, fails spectacularly. It lacks clarity, yet isn’t ambiguous: swimming is in the PC’s own interest, but there’s no reason, moral or otherwise, for them to stay in the sinking boat; if the PC has parents, siblings, close friends or a lover, doing so would be callous, feckless, irresponsible. The only obstacle to acting in the approved manner is the player’s conviction that it’s bloody stupid. There is friction from the other direction, making it difficult to swim – but it’s entirely due to broken implementation.

This scene could be made functional, if there were a reason to think someone might benefit from the player’s staying: someone with perhaps a better claim on the empty seat; a chance at keeping the boat afloat.

I was going to give this game two marks out of ten. That was before I managed to get eaten by that shark and found myself controlling Henry, a patient in a psychiatric ward. Henry’s illness isn’t specified, though we know he has a ‘twisted ugly body’ and hates everyone:

Henry also has a nurse who follows him about. She says awful things, spits, and likes to open the bathroom door when he’s shitting.

Henry’s choice? He can give in to his wish to push nurse Wilkinson down an elevator shaft. Or he can swallow his rage, man up, and do the right thing: kill himself.

I rather doubt the makers of this game are sufficiently invested in it to read my view; but just in case, I’m going to explain why this is not okay.

First, it presents mental disability as a punishment, a consequence of bad behaviour in a previous life. I don’t suppose the writers believe this, but given the stigma that has been attached to such conditions – and contemporary public discourse on US healthcare, so much of which insinuates that falling ill is a moral failing – it’s fucking distasteful. Using this premise might be okay, but not without a damn good reason. The makers of this game don’t have one.

Second, mental illnesses of the kind for which people are involuntarily confined almost always compromise a person’s agency. This is why insanity is a defence in criminal law, and is the rationale, rightly or wrongly, for denying people with such conditions their freedom. This makes Henry is a problematic protagonist: we might wonder if he’s equipped to make important choices, or whether it’s fair that he be punished for them; whether his suicide is necessary, and indeed why the game treats it as a moral good. 9Lives shows no awareness of these problems. Instead, it obscures them: if one makes allowances for literary convention, hatefulness and bad writing, Henry’s thought processes are basically neurotypical.

Third – and this is the really essential point, the reason I’m disgusted and angry – this game denies the humanity and the dignity of these characters. We see Henry’s anger, hate, hopelessness, self-loathing, how he regards himself as a ‘filthy animal’ – which is not a thought an animal could have – and is encouraged to kill himself by his nurse. We see the soiled bed where he cries at night, and how he despises another patient, Bob, for being comatose. We never see if his life was ever better, if there was a time when he loved or was loved, or experienced a moment of joy, or pride, or tenderness. We never learn if he has daydreams or implausible secret hopes, if something once made the nurse remember he was human, or whether a patient once left the ward and how maybe Henry missed them, after all.

The word the walkthrough uses for Henry is ‘subhuman’. That is not much used nowadays for members of our species, although its German analogue, Untermensch, used to be – of Poles, Czechs, Roma, Serbs, Jews.

I don’t expect undergraduates to be able to write about mental illness or disability with tact or subtlety, and I’m confident their use of Nazi terminology was not conscious and malign but only stupid and accidental. I’d hope, though, that they might recognise topics they’re not equipped to write about, and treat them with some amount of caution and consideration.[/spoiler]

Dang.

[spoiler]Having failed to guess the action for Evil Swimming, I had been under the impression that they had run a not-ridiculously-problematic filter over the whole wheel-of-samsara thing, taking out (e.g.) the bits about how women are the most degraded you can possibly be while still being technically human (by the cunning expedient of making all the characters male), but GUESS NOT.

Also, y’know, of the mentally disabled. In case things were too ambiguous.[/spoiler]

a troop of Gnostic combat nuns

But that would be awesome!