Probably my last review for this year - I’m hoping to write a review for The Bat (quick summary: it good) and play a couple more games, but I don’t think I’ll get time this weekend and I’m usually too tired after work. Too bad! Thanks to everyone who entered, and sorry to the many authors I couldn’t get around to.
Where Nothing is Ever Named (Viktor Sobol)
Played on: 30th Sept (playing the 29th Sept update)
How I played it: Downloaded and played via Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 3 mins to reach an ending
I skipped ahead to this one because I really enjoyed Viktor Sobol’s previous comp entry Out. Like Out, Where Nothing Is Ever Named is a bite-sized parser-based game; unlike Out, it’s heavy on brooding atmosphere, with an eerie premise and a setting which feels hostile.
You play as… someone, who is lost… somewhere. There are two other things in the location, a something and an other thing. Your goal is to get away from wherever you are, but since Nothing is Ever Named, you have no idea what the things next to you even are. The blurb says the game’s based on Through the Looking Glass, but I haven’t read it and muddled through fine without knowing anything about the source.
It’s a fascinating off-kilter premise. I’m reminded of Ade McT’s Hard Puzzle, and Ivanr’s review of it on IFDb. Hard Puzzle is a bit more elaborate (and a lot, well, harder), but it similarly needs you to drag information out of it by checking the right things and playing with the right verbs. Ivanr says:
“The idea behind “Hard Puzzle”, as far as I can tell, is to generate both horror and puzzle difficulty through an atmosphere of absolute uncertainty. [… Y]ou’d be shocked at how spooky it can be to have no idea how many objects are in the room, for example. The author has deliberately omitted a lot of the helpful or clarifying responses that modern Inform games typically have, and the result is something like having your eyes stricken out.”
By removing nouns, Where Nothing Is Ever Named has a similar effect. Your imagination might take over, but you can’t really visualise what’s going on. You have no idea what (or who) is there with you. It’s very unsettling, and the game amps up the atmosphere with one or two environmental messages and a couple of interesting responses to wrong answers. (Perhaps the descriptions are over-reliant on telling you how scared you feel, but when you have a gameplay gimmick which puts nouns off-limits, needs must.)
In practice, as you experiment with verbs to see how the objects react, this becomes a lot like those things where you have to stick your hands in a box and feel an object to guess what it is. I think it’s a fun idea – it feels like The Gostak in miniature, and I loved The Gostak. But I feel like more could be done here. Some tiny IFComp games are the perfect size (Out was one!), but I think if this one is going for puzzliness, it needs a couple of extra steps to the solution – there’s much more that could be drawn out of the atmosphere, and out of the tension of having to use objects without knowing what they are. What’s more, one or two of the environmental messages give things away far too easily – if I hadn’t already figured out what the Something was, the message that tells you “Something meows” would have spoiled half of the puzzle.
I don’t think there’s that much else to say, really! I loved the moodiness of this game and I think the puzzle at the core is a good one, but I was left wanting more. Suppose that’s better than wanting less!