Oh, I kickstarted To Be or Not To Be (the first one of these) and have a copy signed by him! I also have Romeo and/or Juliet but haven’t read it at all…
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The good news is that Blue Prince is much better constructed than the Maze book. The puzzles are all clued in what I would call a fair way.
Except for the guest puzzles contributed by Chris Manson himself!
Over-analyzed, I would say. The “into the abyss” people describe the intended solution to Maze, but I think that along the way, they read in a lot of extra “clues” that were not intended at all.
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Yes, Robbe-Grillet, definitely!
I apologize for the self-promotion, but this might be of interest to some: A few years back I tried to learn Inform by translating the descriptions in Jealousy into a kind of parser game. The result–both the inform code and the “playable” game–sounded very “new novel”-ish. I also tried plopping a few pages of the novel’s text into Inform verbatim, which resulted in some interesting error messages. Here is the write up I did for my blog.
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This is great, thanks for sharing! I have often wondered whether Robbe-Grillet’s novels, and La Jalousie in particular, might translate well into parser IF so this was a really interesting read! I must rewatch Last Year at Marienbad. It was required viewing at film school and I loved it, but I haven’t seen it for nearly 25 years. I imagine that I will see it very differently through modern eyes!
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When I read La Jalousie I got really excited about the idea of an IF that never mentions the player character directly. I’d forgotten that until now!
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I think “fair” almost undersells it.
I think it’s a little difficult to talk about, because I don’t think Blue Prince is a game for everyone. But I think that if it’s your jam, it will be very much your jam. And for that kind of player, the kind that won’t bounce off the whole “roguelike puzzle game” thing, most of the puzzles feel aggressively clued. In the sense that I think that most of the people who keep at it will probably solve most puzzles and figure out most strategies before they’ve uncovered all the in-game hinting for them.
Maybe it’s just where my head happened to be when I picked it up, but I can’t think of many games that do the this-leads-to-that-leads-to-the-other-thing bit as well, without it feeling linear. I don’t know if there’s a term of art of that—not just strictly a puzzle dependency graph, but more in terms of abstract rule acquisition, building an understanding of how the gameworld works—but Blue Prince really, really did that for me, tapering off only in the I guess you’d call it late-late post-game.
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I think Philip José Farmers books about the Riverworld, a world where every living person ever are resurrected along a very big river, offers plenty of possibilities for IF.
People already mentioned “Invisible Cities” and “House of Leaves” but I want to add Piranesi and Gray House (The House That…) to the classic “men in weird houses” genre. There’s also a short nonfiction book “Imaginary Cities“ about real architecture.
I also recommend The Luminous Dead because it’s practically an adventure in linear book form. (So much backtracking.)
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I always loved Edward Packard’s Escape from Tenopia series and the way it deviates from a lot of the common choice-based structures.
Each book only has one ending, and you get sent around in circles until you find it.
There are already so many great suggestions on this list. I’d add Aaron Reed’s Subcutanean–it’s a print book but every copy is different. I taught it last fall and we’d begin each day with students comparing the different versions of what they had read. There are many minor variations but also some quite significant variations that affect your interpretation of the novel.
Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts has some ludic qualities as well as some ARG elements. It’s from 2007 but holds up pretty well.
Another forgotten favorite is Marisha Pessi’s Night Film, which included puzzle-like and ARG elements. There was an app that went along with it—think of digital feelies—but I don’t think it works on newer phones, and you can enjoy the book just fine without it.
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I was just thinking of this book the other day! Her first book, Special Topic in Calamity Physics, is maybe fun to think about in this context too since the climax is a test, with multiple choice and essay questions and such.
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I recently read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a novel set in Victorian England and written in 1969. It has three different endings, which made it a bit experimental at the time (but otherwise doesn’t have IF elements).
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The book shark? That was an interesting way of telling a story
A genre known as “Bangsian Fantasy” after John Kendrick Bangs, an unjustly forgotten American humourist who kick-started the genre in 1895 with A Houseboat on the Styx, followed by The Pursuit of the Houseboat (1897), The Enchanted Typewriter (1899) and Mr Munchausen (1901).
Itself a sub-genre of imagined dialogues between famous dead people. I don’t know if there’s any evidence to suggest a direct connection, but the popularity of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (completed in the 1820s; A House-Boat on the Styx was first published in 1895) seems like it might have been an influence. But Landor’s work was in turn just an emminent example of a literary genre going back at least to classical antiquity.
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This is getting further afield from IF specifically, but Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association is one of my favorites under the bigger umbrella of novels about games. The protagonist of the novel runs his own simulated card and dice baseball league…and things get weird.
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Oh, that reminds me, John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van is about someone who runs an old play-by-post game (like, by mail, not email). It’s pretty great!
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I bought a copy of Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van having been a longtime fan of his music, but have yet to read it. I’ll have to put it on my reading list.
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There’s also Ulysses and its endlessly spiraling schemes which the reader must puzzle out as best they can, but that’s a genuine beast of a novel to comprehend. It is much like a certain type of IF game in needing a walkthrough to really get it. Or a college course.
Anyhow, there’s a lot more Nabokov that fits here besides just Pale Fire: I would venture Signs and Symbols for anybody who doesn’t have the time to fill out a notebook of mildly deranged thoughts trying to connect everything to everything about Pale Fire (though it’s a fun thing to do!). As a short story, it’s a much more straightforward “puzzle”-piece, if somewhat cruel.
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Ulysses is still in my unsolved pile. The first half of my copy has been read several times over the last 40 years. The last half, not so much. I’ll get there one day. I’m not so sure about Finnegans Wake though.
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