The Bat by Chandler Groover

Competitions IFComp
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As promised, I went straight for @CMG’s new game, The Bat, and I just spent a couple of hours laughing until my nose was running. Those of you familiar with Groover’s games will be expecting something strange and funny and tightly constructed, with surprises and twists and a limited parser. I’m here to inform you that you will not be disappointed-- all of that is here.

Without too many spoilers, the basic story is that you’re a valet to a, um, thing. Your master is repulsive and awful and extremely difficult, and you have to do everything for him. It’s the night he’s throwing a big party, and you have to attend to all his guests, and keep him from destroying everything, and solve a mystery.

The limited parser, like all limited parsers, takes a little while to get used to, but it’s quite smooth. You can examine (X) and ATTEND TO SOMEONE/THING (A). I’ll play a choice game next because limited parsers always spoil me for the next parser.

The writing shines as usual-- it’s not overly descriptive and is in fact fairly terse compared to other Groover games, but still manages to be great, zippy as hell and full of delightfully concise descriptions of people and cringeworthy moments.

I really, really enjoyed this and am happy to report that it’s another silly, oddball, fun addition to the Groover oeuvre (which is nice to say aloud). Highly recommend!

There was a weirdness with this in Safari (which I did fix, so click on this if you encounter an issue in Safari): as soon as the dollar amount starts racking up in the game, my saved credit card window kept popping up with every command and I had to disable it to finish playing. So, Chandler, my computer was trying to help me pay that money!

Play time about 3 hours.

Feel free to add reviews or commentary on this game (or to link to your review elsewhere) in this thread!

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I’ve only gotten up to putting on his clothes and glasses, but what I’m feeling right now is that even though he’s fairly horrible, there’s a certain level of … I don’t know how to say it without it sounding weird. Adorable? I don’t know. I certainly don’t hate him yet, weirdly

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He is exasperatingly, annoyingly, horribly adorable all the way through. Just wait until he achieves some elevation.

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I finished the game, and I have to say I’m really pleased! But you know exactly what I think of when I think of this game? Alias the Magpie! With a little Magical Makeover and a little more Superluminal Vagrant Twin. Either way, a game that I personally liked a lot. Though I have to say I wasn’t a fan of the ending. It didn’t feel right. Like, it matched perfectly, and yet it didn’t fit the mood. I think it’s a sort of me problem, though, because it is actually a good ending overall! Just not what I would have wanted…

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I wrote a review of the game here:

Interesting remark on the ending, I also thought that it worked perfectly as an ending (and also serving as a punchline for a joke, with QUIT being the command to stop using the compass) but I didn’t expect it and wouldn’t have thought of it. If there’s ever an updated version I’d love to see a ‘where are they now’ as a ending menu option for the whole cast (unless there was one and I missed it!)

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cross-posting my separate review

As I discuss in there, I’m a bit with @someone2 – I could have liked the ending more. It didn’t fit with how I had been characterizing the PC in my head (and if there’s a specific other characterization we’re supposed to have for the PC, the game doesn’t provide it).

A very fun romp though!

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I liked The Bat! But having just wrapped it up, I can’t help wishing there was more of that trademark Chandler Groover flavour.

The second room in Down, the Serpent and the Sun:

You can see nothing, but the air is fetid, hot. Warm dribblings drizzle from above. The ground is spongy underneath your feet.

The second room in Eat Me:

Blue flambeaux undulate, and in their flames gleam devices galore constructed to pry screams and more from prisoners. Don’t sit down on that judas chair. Steer clear the rack. Give wide berth to the breaking wheel. They’re occupied already by corpses.

And the second room in The Bat:

To the west, you could enter the study; to the east, the master’s bedroom; and the grand staircase leads down to the first floor.

The humour is there, and the increasingly careful attention to craft, and there is of course a good reason for the descriptions to be – restrained. But I do wish there was more description in the description… it’s so much of what these games are made of, and Groover is so frequently exceptional at it.

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Eat Me is probably my favourite parser game ever (and one of my favourite interactive fictions). So it shouldn’t sound dismissive if I say that The Bat is great but falls short of Chandler’s best games.

The Bat is a wonderful set of puzzles that are interesting and not really obvious (and not really hard on the other hand), which is a real feat given that the author has reduced the verb set to a single, perfectly in-character action: attending to, which opens and closes, uses, pushes and pulls, lights, switches, combines, etc.

The story is a madcap comedy with just the minimum touches of weirdness to remind you of other games by Chandler. That weirdness is the main reason I like his games, but I didn’t miss it here too much: the comedy is too demential, the proggression too hilarious, the writing too literate, to miss anything at all. And the puzzles are humorous and demential as hell, a perfect match between the setting, the puzzles you face and the results of the actions you do (and I do mean perfect, as in impossible to improve).

What could be better, then? Well, the blurb seemed to promise a more coherent experience of mechanics and story than the game turned out to be. “But you only have two hands—and far too many duties. (…) juggle hors d’oeuvres, flaming curtains, and radioactive elements.” I anticipated a game where I would have to constantly choose which orders I’d have to neglect under stress. And that would have been a perfect mechanic for this screwball comedy of an underappreciated servant doing the work of three people for a madman. But, as far as I can tell, you can’t really neglect any duty. Characters will just wait for you to do it, and taking very long will not have any actual consequence; at least, that was the game feel for me. I wasn’t juggling.

(I might have the wrong impression; as always, suggesting the size of negative space, the range of the paths not taken, in IF is very, very difficult.)

Of course, I know the game I’m imagining is extremely complex (I should know: I made a game about a party where you can neglect stuff and suffer the consequences). It’s only compared to some of my favourite games ever (Eat Me, and not only it) that if feels one step below. But if feels like one of the year’s best games nonetheless.

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By the end of the game that was the feeling I had too. But I didn’t feel that way while playing. The stress level for me was off the scale! Oh no, the doorbell’s rung again!

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One thing that’s been really interesting to me reading reviews this year: there’s a really wide variation in how much people feel “stressed” by potentially stress-inducing mechanics. (I know I did see people who felt stressed about the drinks in The Bat, although I didn’t. This also came up re: Turn Right, the timer in Death in Hyperspace, etc.)

It must make writing those mechanics challenging.

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There’s a reason for that, which is that both are riffing on P.G. Wodehouse – Magpie leans more heavily on the Blandings stories, while the Bat runs with the Jeeves and Wooster dynamic. And that’s great IMO, Wodehouse is lots of fun and there’s plenty of room to use some of his approaches to make something fresh and new, as both these games have, rather than just a pastiche.

While we’re on the subject of literary references, has anyone figured out all the characters?

I got a bunch of Batman ones: Bruce and Alfred are obvious, of course, as is Catwoman; Emilia Ives must be Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy, and Gunderson is probably Gordon (though I couldn’t decide whether she’s a gender-swapped Commissioner Gordon, or just Barbara Gordon/Oracle). @mathbrush you mentioned a bunch of them are from die Fledermaus, right?

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I think Baron Twombly might have been riffing on two-face. Not only does his name start with “Two,” he has a dual identity (oil baron and regular baron, ie. nobility).

It’s not quite as contradictory as Two-Face being both a district attorney and a criminal, and I don’t remember the baron having a disfiguration, but I think that’s what it was going for? Someone else mentioned Two-Face in their review, I thihk…maybe it was mathbrush.

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This is also interesting, as in one of The Dark Knight movies (which, sure, different but could be riffing off it) the guy who becomes two-face (SPOILER: violence & fire) becomes like that because he lies unconscious in a puddle of burning oil.

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Well, this definitely sounds like a game that I would enjoy. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve played in the competition so far, to be fair, but I’ll move this one to the top of my playlist!

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In my review I reported enjoying the game more after I stopped obsessing about timeliness. My employer was an imbecile, I was the worst butler ever, and I just didn’t care anymore. (Didn’t care about providing efficient service; I cared much more about the story after that point)

I’ve read other reviews which suggested a similar experience, and the story’s ending surely supports the PC’s choice to “quiet quit” during the mid-game.

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I’m definitely guilty of being an anxious mess while playing a lot of the games, and this was one of them. (Linking my review of The Bat here.)

Here, it seems especially tricky to tune the apparent time crunch (the game giving the impression that time is especially consequential with live feedback on the charity donation totals and the swarm of people wandering in through the foyer and demanding various things) vs. the actual time crunch (there seems to be nothing that would actually cause you to be unable to finish this game regardless of how inefficient your turns are, making the “crunch” illusive). A more sensitive player like me might be on the verge of shutting down because of the former; a more confident player might feel a distinct lack of stakes and tension due to the latter.

Personally, I think this game did a great job finding a reasonable balance. Due to how I played a lot of games over such a condensed period of time, in hindsight it seems like my emotions were more heightened than normal and that bled across games, vs. how one might experience playing this game more in isolation. Hard to say, really!

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Re: balancing time crunch with fun, Chandler Groover’s article Behind “The Bloody Wallpaper” discusses a similar problem in a Fallen London Exceptional Story that he wrote…

And @DeusIrae for references, Justin’s Final Arc article about the game points out that Dr. Malatesta is another opera reference, this time to Don Pasquale?

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Oh hey! I’ve never actually seen or read Don Pasquale, but I specifically recognized Dr Malatesta because I learned Bella siccome un’ angelo for an audition once. A beautiful aria that people will think is very sweet and romantic if you don’t tell them the character sings it about his own sister (as part of a scheme to commit inheritance fraud).

Since it approximately means “Doctor Headache” I figured it was more a pun than a specific reference, but also I’m realizing I don’t know enough about Don Pasquale to recognize a specific reference even so.

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This is the cast of Der Fledermaus:

  • Rosalinde von Eisenstein, a Viennese lady (soprano)

  • Gabriel von Eisenstein, her husband (tenor)

  • Adele, a chambermaid (soprano)

  • Alfred, an Italian opera singer (tenor)

  • Dr. Falke, Gabriel von Eisenstein’s friend (baritone)

  • Dr. Blind, a lawyer (tenor)

  • Frank, a prison warden (baritone)

  • Orlofsky, a Russian prince (mezzo-soprano)

  • Frosch (sometimes named Frogg), a jailer (speaking part)

  • Ida (sometimes named Sally), Adele’s sister (soprano)

  • Ivan (Yvan), Orlofsky’s majordomo (speaking part)

  • Party guests, servants, dancers, entertainers

I think only Orlofsky is in The Bat.

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Hmm, Orlofsky’s being gender-swapped makes me thing Gunderson is meant to likewise be Commissioner, rather than Barbara, Gordon (though as always “why not both?” is a valid option too).

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