A Conversation in a Dark Room (Leigh)
Played on: 1st Sept
How I played it: Online via IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 30mins for two endings
First game of my Comp personal shuffle is a choice-based game of modest scope. You play as a journalist having a strange conversation with a strange man, as they prepare to do something which makes the protagonist uncomfortable. The blurb is tight-lipped about what’s going on here so I’ll avoid spoilers, but the true nature of your conversation partner becomes apparent quite quickly, and a bizarre power dynamic develops between interviewer and interviewee.
I’ll note right off the bat that A Conversation in a Dark Room makes an unfortunate first impression. I don’t blame first-time entrant Leigh for not knowing this, but text that’s delivered on a timer tends to be frowned upon in IFComp, as a lot of regular IFComp judges are fast readers who are trying to burn through as many entries as possible, and they don’t appreciate waiting around for a game to deliver text. I think the opening screens delivering text at a letter-by-letter crawl is going to put off a lot of judges, which is a shame because that timed text only lasts for a couple of screens before the game delivers passages all at once as normal. If you skipped this game because of that, please go back and give it another shot!
The scenario presented here is a very compelling idea. It’s clearly a game of cat-and-mouse on some level, but the player’s initially kept in the dark about who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, and even the stakes are hidden until about halfway through the game. This doesn’t matter too much as the conversation follows a braided linear path to the climax. Perhaps it makes roleplay a little difficult, but the disconcerting effect of this hidden information mirrors the confusion and fear the protagonist feels as the conversation spirals away from him, so I feel it works as an artistic choice.
Within chapters you can explore different topics to learn a bit more about your companion and why they want the player character to do what they’re doing. It’s possible to get sidetracked and dive into a spot of worldbuilding, which maybe disrupts the pace of the second half of the game, but I enjoy this kind of thing anyway – it’s clear that the author has considered the background of this game’s characters and has a good sense of what drives your interviewee. I feel there are some structural issues with the writing itself (chiefly, there’s an ongoing slippage between past and present tense which bugs me: “You study him. Or, at least, you try to. His head was down, so you couldn’t make out the facial features…”), but the concept and characterisation are strong enough to overcome those issues.
A Conversation in a Dark Room tracks three statistics which I think reflect what your companion thinks of you: Empathy, Intrigue and Hatred. I don’t think there’s any way to see what your current stats are other than counting the stat increase notifications you get periodically. That’s a smart move, helping to reinforce the uncertainty the player-character feels about what their companion is actually up to. But it does mean I’m not certain how much your stats influence the ending you get. I played through three times (well, two-and-a-half – I reloaded a save for one) and found two separate endings. Despite one playthrough focusing on what I assumed were Empathy choices and another focusing on Hatred, the ending was near-identical for both, the only change being how drunk the player-character was. In both playthroughs, at the climax, I got one forced choice saying “’Honestly, I don’t think I can go through with this’” followed by another saying “You follow him, eager.” In addition to feeling like an odd mood-swing for the protagonist, in context it looks like this reflects both Empathy and Hatred choices, so I have no idea if it always plays out like this or if my stats did anything.
It’s possible that the whole game is a puzzle and that there are particular outcomes locked behind precise dialogue choices; this would explain the Notes screen, which didn’t seem to track anything helpful, but which might play into a metapuzzle. I’m keen to see what other reviewers end up with. (By the way, the other ending I got was a sort of early end to the night in Chapter 2, achieved by being as uncooperative with the interviewee as possible. That’s a case in which my choices definitely did influence the night, so fair play – I’m happy to accept that this game may have a few more substantially different endings and that I just haven’t found them.)
I think the core of this game is extremely compelling, and I’d love to see the author’s work in future Comps!
One last spoilery note: If this is meant to be riffing on Interview with the Vampire, sorry, it’s gone straight over my head. I haven’t read the book. Also I didn’t mean to make those “right off the bat” and “stakes” puns, I am so sorry.