I played “Lime Ergot” by @caleb Wilson.
I enjoyed it a lot and found it pretty approachable. One thing that I noticed is that, because you can only handle a few objects, the game really drives home your only choice: compliance or disobedience.
Spoiler
As far as I can tell, there’s only one way to comply — namely by giving the General her desired drink. However, I found at least two ways to disobey: One is to drink the mixture yourself, and the other is to give her an empty glass. Both of those actions end with you dead. The game also understood but rejected my attempt to throw the glass at the general.
Your inability do to much else lends real weight to the few actions you can perform. It makes the endings stronger and gives them a sort of finality — even the endings where you lose. In a more complex game, the losses would feel like “gotchas”, and the sort-of win would feel like an anti-climax, at least in my opinion. But in this context, it works well.
The writing is strong. Again, it has dramatic weight, but it’s also a sort of a black comedy. (The game actually has no genre listed on IFDB even though it was entered into the horror-themed ECTOCOMP.)
I think the closest thing “Lime Ergot” has to a joke — and it’s a good one — is the fact that the changing placard on the drink machine always stays the same: the only ingredient you need is limes. It’s a bit of light humor in an otherwise bleak game.
I guess this could be taken to Monty Python Cheese Shop levels of repetition, but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. You only need three limes.
The Weight of Action
I missed that this game was an influence on Toby’s Nose by @CMG when I played the latter game months ago. “Lime Ergot” is a lot shorter and simpler to play than Toby’s Nose, but both games benefit in the same sort of way from the concept.
In Toby’s Nose, barking at the suspect feels like a weighty action after you’ve been smelling things for most of the game — although you can do some fun, but inconsequential, dog-like actions throughout the game as well.
I think it’s interesting that both games, which are probably the best known examples of parser-based nesting or concept linking games, were released around 2014-2015. This is around the time that Twine and other choice-based engines were becoming popular, and the simplest Twine games often take a similar concept-linking approach because it emerges from the use of hyperlinks.
That said, complex Twine games that make full use of game states now exist, and they probably account for many of the highest-righted games at this point. In a way, free bird. by Passerine (@malacostraca) — a very strong game with an average 4.5 IFDB rating, versus “Lime Ergot’s” almost equally strong 4.0 — is the opposite of this sort of nested concept game.
Both “Lime Ergot” and free bird. are “playing against type” in terms of what players might expect from the engine. free bird. offers pure object manipulation in a way that parser games can’t, while “Lime Ergot” tries to make concept exploration tangible in a way that choice-based games usually can’t.
Other Similar Games
There are other games in the nested concept/nested object genre. CMG has apparently said “Castle of the Red Prince” is also similar to Toby’s Nose, according to another review.
@Mathbrush’s textbook also mentions his own 2017 IF Comp entry, presumably “Absence of Law”, as a similar game.
It also mentions “Out of the Study” by Anssi Räisänen in 2002 as another similar example, so someone clearly thought of this long before Twine.
On top of that, any hypertext fiction that relies heavily on concept association is probably a distant relative to this, even including Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where you’ll deduce the identity, or rather lack of identity, of the narrator early if you use the index properly. That’s kind of similar to “Toby’s Nose” apart from Pale Fire being completely static text.
I’ve taken an interest in this genre because I have an idea for my own nested object game, with true nested objects rather than concepts.
I’m planning to play some more of these as I work on it, both for inspiration and to make sure my idea isn’t close to anything that’s been done. Any thoughts or other recommendations?