An extremely short puzzle game, at least in terms of moves needed and objects implemented – perhaps not so much in terms of time needed to solve it. The basic conceit is that the objects in the room you’re in are not named; you have to find out what they are by interacting with them. I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen this before in a more traditional text adventure when you find yourself in darkness, but I can’t remember where exactly, so perhaps I’m wrong.
It’s not too hard to get a basic idea of what the objects are, and after a fairly short time I was sitting on other thing with something in my hands and the thought of making other thing move. But I got completely stuck on the right command. ‘go’, ‘push other thing’, ‘hit other thing’, ‘press heels’, none of that worked. I needed the walkthrough to tell me to ‘ride’. A bit of an anticlimax, naturally.
There’s different endings depending on whether you take the cat, which is a nice touch.
Yay, excited that you’re on this side of the author’s forum this year! And funny that you had the same first game I did. Is the similar game starting in darkness that you’re thinking of perhaps Suveh Nux? I think that’s the opening sequence, and while the language puzzle there is different from the one here, they’re certainly kissing cousins.
Hm… I’m not sure! Is there a scene like this in All Roads? Possibly not.
This was actually neither the first game in my personalised list nor the first game I played (that’s Imprimatura, which I want to replay again before writing a review). But just now it popped up on top when I opened the comp page, and it seems a good way to get started reviewing.
Perhaps! But from my own review of the game, it sounds like it didn’t do much justice to the premise:
And of course here doing justice to the premise and having the premise in the first place, are pretty much the same thing. Therefore Where Nothing is Ever Named does something that Aayela certainly doesn’t do. Do you have thoughts about whether this game idea could also work for a much more substantial piece?
(Jimmy Maher and I once started planning a game set more or less entirely in darkness, where making light was the great goal. We got distracted and this game was never made. There is a choice-based game that does something a bit like this – spoiler, it is Lux (and I’m adding a few words to not show that it’s a super short title) – but if I recall correctly it doesn’t lean too much into the difficulty of identifying things.)
P.S. I’m starting to see the logic of creating by-game threads. I’m half tempted to ask a mod to turn this sequence of posts into a thread about your game, @Sobol. What would your preference be?
Probably not. Even having, say, one room and four objects and starting with “You can see the first thing, the second thing, the third thing and the fourth thing here” seems really boring to me. I knew from the start that there will be only two objects - and tried to choose them wisely.
There are almost no nouns in the game text until the ending - the exceptions are “thing”, the most generic one, and a certain nonsense word popular in IF used as a noun. That’s the reason the PC can’t continue the song after the first two lines when SINGing: the next lines have nouns in them.
But there are two (nounless) Shakespearean quotes - when the player tries X NOTHING (King Lear) and UNDO (Lady Macbeth).
Someone has died: our father, mother, grandmother or grandfather. The choice ‘grandmother’ feels canonical, since the author dedicates the game to Elizabeth Walton Williams who I think is their grandmother. But as far as I know the choice makes no difference to the game.
The deceased was a famous painter, and as part of their will they have left us seven paintings – though not seven specific painting. It is up to us to choose seven pieces from among those that are left in their atelier. This is where play starts. We are given brief descriptions of paintings, often though not always accompanied by a sentence indicating its emotional mood. Then we choose whether to take it or leave it. If we take it, the painting triggers a memory of our interactions with the deceased. These memories are somewhat randomised, although they are chosen to fit the painting at least a little. Both the chosen painting and memories are saved for the player’s perusal. Once seven paintings have been chosen, a non-interactive scene follows in which the player character finishes an unfinished painting, taking inspiration from the colours, subjects and moods of the chosen paintings. This final painting and the stages of its completion are shown as pictures in the game itself – the first and only time that the game uses visuals.
The game is highly polished, both when it comes to details such as the Twine customisation and the music that plays in the background, and when it comes to what is most important, the writing. The paintings are diverse and described as well as it is possible to describe a painting in a few sentences. And the memories, which are the most important parts of the prose, are interesting, vivid, and well-written. Some feel slightly more generic – a burst of anger after the child ruined a canvas – but others manage to generate a real sense of individuality – such as the one about the bakery.
Necessarily, a character portrait done in seven brief memories remains impressionistic; or, to use another metaphor from the history of painting, cubist, giving us a few snapshots of the deceased from different directions, which suggest but don’t actually constitute depth. There’s only so much you can do with memories that are brief, few in number, and narratively independent from each other. I would hesitate to call what results a ‘character study’. We remain far too much at the surface for that.
The mechanics of the piece raise questions both mundane and philosophical. One soon finds out that the total number of paintings is not very large; the ‘next’ painting seems to be chosen entirely randomly, so you will start seeing paintings twice, or even see the same painting twice in a row, as if the protagonist is too confused to remember which paintings they’ve already looked at.
More importantly, there is something strange about first choosing whether to keep the painting, and then getting a memory. Shouldn’t we choose based on what the painting reminds us of? Of course the game needs to work the way it actually does, because it would deflate the experience if we could first check out all the memories and then had to choose seven from among them. You want to have seven memories, no more, and no going back. Still, the current set-up doesn’t leave the player with much agency. The main thing one can do to steer the story one way or another is choose paintings with ‘positive’ emotions or paintings with ‘negative’ emotions; this will definitely colour the memories one gets, and it may also colour – literally – the final painting we ourselves make.
Here the philosophical question pops up. There are paintings both negative and positive. If we choose the negative paintings, our memory portrait of the deceased will be emotionally negative; if we choose positive paintings, our memory portrait will be positive. But this is clearly and explicitly a selection effect. We can only end up with negativity by ignoring the positive, and we can only end up with positivity by ignoring the negative. Is Imprimatura trying to tell us that we can form our own relation to the past by choosing what we want to remember? That’s an interesting vision, no doubt, but it would seem to require us to abandon the quest for truth and perhaps authenticity. Given the centrality of these ideas to how Imprimatura works, I would have liked it to engage with such questions more deeply.
At first, there are strong vibes of howling dogs. It’s a Twine game set in a small cell-like environment – though this time it’s a space ship – where we perform boring daily tasks and kill the time, while the environment seems to be decaying around us, and we experience strange dreams at night. A cookie cutter recreation of the original Twine sensation, then? Well, no, not at all.
The first difference that becomes apparent is the vibe. There’s no sense of true alienation here, nor of helplessness, nor of confusion. The protagonist owns this space ship, even if its not much, and they have a measure of control over how they live – if they can arse themselves to do it, they can tidy things up, grow plants, do some exercises. Basic self-care, sure, but there’s a sense of ownership and accomplishment. “I can give you the gift of meaningful labour,” is what a character will say to them later on, or words to that effect; and then too it is the mundane things, mixing a salad dressing and helping clean up a kitchen, that anchor life and self.
Basic self-care, and emails. It’s a good storytelling device, used often because it works: messages coming to us from outside to paint a fuller picture of the world and our life. There’s a father in the background, a friend who would like to meet us but is also willing to support us if we need to absent ourselves for a while, and a surprising amount of information about esotericism, including tarot, but mainly focused on some ancient Greek cultic beliefs which also inform some of the protagonist’s dreams. The juxtaposition of spaceships and Eleusinian Mysteries is surprising, but it works.
It turns out that we are travelling to a cult that made a base under the ground in some small, otherwise uninhabited planet. The cult is not scary at all; in fact, it feels a bit like coming home, seeing some old friends, sleeping in your old bed, having a sense of community. But the protagonist is here with a specific goal: they want to renounce their membership. The want to do undo the rituals, unsee the revelations, return to the state of the uninitiated. It’s not clear whether this is possible, although there’s certainly nobody who tries to stop them. It’s perhaps also not clear what it means.
But, perhaps, if it means anything, it is renouncing dreams of what is beyond this world in order to truly anchor ourselves in meaningful labour. As they are returning to the awfully mundane, we must imagine them happy.
As you can no doubt tell, I liked Metallic Red. I especially admire its understated, subtle approach. There are wild elements here (space ships! cults!) but it handles them in a way that is the exact opposite of pulp, going instead for the quotidian, for the mundane, for the abandonment of grand grand dreams that mean to pull us away from the solid core of our very material life. We need no blind seers to show us the way.
A Death in Hyperspace by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
That’s a lot of authors for what is not a particularly big game, but perhaps they each wrote one of the characters? For this is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters – as suspects. There’s no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it’s your job as the space ship’s AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.
Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it’s asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That’s fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it’s good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it’s a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.
Having said all of that, I’m afraid I must mention that my time with the game was quite horrible. You’re put on a thirty minute real world timer. Really! So I was reading as fast as I could (skipping what seemed to be skippable), manically clicking on links to see if clues had been revealed somewhere, not making notes because I felt I had no time for that, getting utterly confused about the many characters as a result, and being very very frustrated by the fact that clues kept proliferating without pointing in a clear direction. As I said, I appreciate having a murder mystery where the clues proliferate The Crying of Lot 49-style and never get us to some objective truth. But I appreciate this a whole lot less when it’s coupled with a real world time limit and my stress levels keep rising and rising with absolutely no pay-off. When I finally clicked the ‘solve the mystery’ button, at least partly because I wanted the experience of playing the game to just stop, it also turned out that I could not in fact accuse anyone, which added a massive anticlimax to my utter stress. After reading some posts on this forum, I understood that one first has to use the ‘murderboard’ and put one of the characters on ‘high’, but that’s something the game never clearly explains.
I made two more playthroughs after that, but now it just seemed to become an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case. At that point I quickly lost interest.
This, then, is a hard game to judge for me. I appreciate its general aim. The writing is fine. Technically, everything is in order. But three things stand between me and a positive judgement. First, and least importantly, more could have been done with the ethical and judicial questions that are being raised by our ability to make baseless accusations. Second, I’m really unsure about the wisdom of relying on a ‘collect all the endings’ shape for the game and the deep structural symmetries that this requires. Finding ‘the conversation clue’ and ‘the physical clue’ for each suspect is a fairly mechanical exercise, which one does while not even reading the prose any more. Third and most importantly, I had a really bad experience playing A Death in Hyperspace, due entirely to the timer – which, in hindsight, I feel is a completely unnecessary addition to the piece. I engaged with it believing that the authors were in good faith, and that they had designed a challenge which would be more interesting and satisfying when done with a real world timer. But they were not in good faith. There was no challenge; there was only me, producing stress hormones, clicking as fast as I could, being the butt of their joke.
Edited to add: I’m a little sad that I focused so much on my struggles with the game and didn’t really comment on what is perhaps more interesting – and well described by DemonApologist here – , namely the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance.
There is of course something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: that the captain died of natural causes. That’s ultimately the point of the game.
This is a choice-based game about a group of vampire hunters who are different from other vampire hunters – it’s a big business, apparently, with many active firms – in that they also recruit ‘good’ vampires into their ranks. How the business fits into broader society remains extremely vague.
Supposedly, we’re being paid to take down a big crime boss vampire. (The game even says: “But being an academic doesn’t exactly pay the bills. This, on the other hand, does.” Let me tell you from private experience that being an academic does pay the bills. But I digress.) However, we’re never told by whom we are being paid, and at other times the game seems to suggest that we’re just hunting the bad guy because he’s a criminal. But then why doesn’t the police take him on? If he resists arrest, you can always fire some silver bullets. What’s more, we’re told that we’ve been investigating this guy for years but that he’s very careful and that we can’t make our case against him without search warrants and/or inside information… but once we actually get an insider in our team, ‘making a case’ seems to have dropped off the radar and it’s immediately assassination time. But what is the justification for killing this crime boss? It can’t be that he’s a vampire, because (a) so are several of the player characters, and (b) he never bites unwilling people. So it must be that he is a crime boss. But extrajudicial killings of crime bosses are hard to morally justify, or so one hopes, and it’s unclear how the perpetrators of such a flagrantly criminal assassination could think of themselves in the glowing moral terms that the protagonists in fact do. None of it seems to make much sense, to be honest!
There are more points at which the story is fairly unlikely, some of which have been pointed out by other reviewers. I was most turned off by the climactic fight scene, in which the supposedly super strong, smart and careful crime boss allows himself to be isolated from his helpers, then stands still doing mostly nothing while some stuff happens and he is staked with a silver stake. It includes a bizarre moment when his henchman sneaks up on one of the player characters from behind and then gives them a knee in the stomach. I had a lot of trouble visualising any of this, and what should have been the climax of the story felt like anything but.
On the other hand, a fair amount of the smaller scenes are quite nice. There’s some nicely done understated romance; there’s fun shenanigans with other firms; there’s even the grading of essays on Slavic folklore… the piece feels more real and better thought out during the more mundane moment-to-moment writing, and this kept me engaged even as the bigger story failed to work for me.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Redjackets is that you can play it from the perspectives of three different characters: the human vampire hunter, the vampire vampire hunter, and the young vampire who is caught and then decides to become a hunter herself. After playing with one character, you can then play with another while some of the choices you made are remembered. At first I assumed that the game would go full Rashomon mode on us, using the different viewpoint characters to tell incompatible stories. It does not. In fact, it doesn’t even really pursue the idea that people experience things differently, or notice or remember different things. The three characters are used to round out the story; there’s a lot of literally overlapping prose, but some scenes are unique to specific characters. I thought that was fine. I would have liked it more if the story itself had been deeper and more convincing, so that it would reward replay more; but as a gameplay mechanic, it has potential.
The writing is somewhat hit-and-miss. It works most of the time, but one frequently runs into paragraphs like this:
‘She’d saved each other’s lives’ is obviously a mistake, as is the word ‘once’; but I also don’t like the juxtaposition of ‘these days’ and ‘the days’. Or what about this:
This prose meanders without telling us anything, and it confuses more than it informs. But there’s also the occasional nice bit, such as this wonderful analogy:
There are a few bugs that are not confined to jars. I had problems with the pictures, seeing an unloaded picture icon some of the time. There are a fair amount of scenes where the second person and third person fail to be used correctly, because the programme is unaware which character we are currently playing. And when I played for the second time, Declan – who was the PC the first time and chose himself to be the killer, giving the other two roles to the others – was chosen to be both the killer and his own helper. Both the missing picture icon and another strange bug (which I’m almost tempted to believe must be caused by a grammar checking browser extension on my side… but I don’t think I have one, and the mentioned phrases don’t even occur on the page!) can be seen in the following screenshot:
So… I suppose I’ve been listing many bigger and smaller gripes. There’s a lot in Redjackets that doesn’t quite work, and of course the game suffers from that. But it is a sympathetic game made with obvious enthusiasm, and it contained enough little things that do work to ensure that I never lost patience with it.
In the 1996 PC game Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail, the initial main menu offers three choices: “Collect the Grail”, “See the Film”, and “Register Now”. Only the third of these options takes you to the game proper – after having you fill in a series of increasingly absurd questions, of course. Clicking “Collect the Grail”, on the other hand, has you immediately collect the grail. Congratulations! You won!
Since it involves winning rather than losing, this experience is highly recommended over playing Uninteractive Fiction. On the other hand, Uninteractive Fiction runs in a modern browser and requires no intricate DOSBox setup. It’s up to you whether you prefer convenience or victory.
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I think God is bipolar, too.”
After last year’s impressive My Pseudo-Dementia Exhbition, a powerful but also harrowing autobiographical trip through the mental health world, Bez returns this year with The Shyler Project. This piece too is about mental health, and features references to manic depression and suicidal thoughts. But it’s… sweet? Yes, I think that is the right word. This is a sweet little piece, charming and uplifting. It’s nowhere near as impressive as My Pseudo-Dementia Exhbition, but then it isn’t meant to be.
In The Shyler Project, we click through three brief dialogues with a mental health AI assistant. There are no doubt people at work today making such technology reality, but whatever hellishly misconceived crap they come up with, I already know that it will not hold a candle to Shyler. This AI is marketed as “Shyler: The Mental Health Bot Who Understands.” This slogan is more true than its creators know; Shyler, having been trained on people’s suicidal internet posts, has severe mental health problems themselves. Instead of giving therapy to their patients, they start off on random tangents about their own fears and insecurities. And that is exactly what makes them relatable. You see, they understand. What’s more, the patient can now in fact take on the role of helper, completely reversing the usual client-therapeutist relationship. This would no doubt be a disaster in most real-world interactions, but here it leads to a happy ending.
As @mathbrushperceptively points out, the end of the game is a bit of a power fantasy where we can simply cure someone of their mental health problems by literally changing their programming. It doesn’t feel very serious as a message. But I understand why Bez wanted to end on a positive note and with full resolution of the protagonist’s problems.
The entire game is voice-acted, and therefore on timed text. Normally, I would find this very irritating, especially because the voice acting is SLOW. But it’s a short piece; the slowness of the voice is asking us for the patience that one needs when listening to people who need help; and the voice actor voicing Shlyer does it really well. (I’m not saying that the other voice actor is not good, but they get almost no lines.) So it worked for me.
All in all, a nice little addition to the Bez corpus.
Immediately, I feel that I’m in the artistic vicinity of porpentine’s 2013 game their angelical understanding. The credits show us that Sarah Mak was more directly influenced by porpentine’s 2014 game With Those We Love Alive, but that comes to much the same thing. We are in a realm of circling Twine links, poetic diction, mere hints of strange harsh and beautiful worlds, no explanations ever, and characters that are less persons than cyphers of emotional-metaphysical ideas. Angel blades kiss in the moonlight while they whisper of death; gods might be born or perhaps die; and no one that you hurt can ever heal, least of all yourself. It’s beautiful. But it’s cold. Real cold.
There’s a sense then in which You Can’t Save Her is somewhat derivative, if we assess it stylistically. I don’t think that Sarah Mak would mind me saying so. She explicitly tells us that the game is based on a scene from With Those We Love Alive, so staying true to the artistic vision of that game is part of the point. And she succeeds wonderfully: the prose is sharp, the images are arresting, the stakes are as high as they should be. There’s also a great ingenuity in playing with different ways that Twine links can be interactive, up to and including repeating previous scenes with and without differences, and using fake choices as a prelude to the protagonist wishing for better choices.
You Can’t Save Her is moonlight falling on a garden of glass statues, each of which will kill you if you look at them the wrong way. Their black eyes show distant galaxies. It is all perfect.
For me, this style is too perfect. I like my characters as characters, whose fates have a meaning that is anchored in concrete experiences rather than Platonic realms of ideas. In 2008, writing an analysis of Metamorphoses, I complained about some of Emily Short’s stories:
Short’s early aesthetics were certainly not identical to porpentine’s early aesthetics; in porpentine, there is no totality of sense, no necessity, and more cracks than all the king’s horses could mend. There is nevertheless some kinship. For here too we are doomed to remain strangers, always at a distance, admiring the poetry from the outside but never invited to live inside it. You Can’t Save Her is a pitch perfect example of this style. I admire the craft that went into it (and will rate it fairly highly). But love it I cannot.
There was already from the beginning another, funnier and earthier, side to porpentine, which I myself preferred, and of which the 2013 game ULTRA BUSINESS TYCOON III is a good example. Here’s about the first thing that game tells you: “You are a prominent businesswoman in the money business.” That’s not a line you could possibly have in their angelical understanding or You Can’t Save Her! It makes you smile.
The princess’s wedding has been spoiled by an escaped dragon. Our task is to assemble enough pieces of armour and weaponry so that we can take on said dragon, and find enough conveniently dropped notes so that we can write a saucy gossip story about the princess being a closet lesbian and her husband-to-be being the guy who let loose the castle’s pet dragon (?) so that the wedding would be halted (?) and the bride could elope with her girlfriend (?). I’m not sure this makes much sense, but then, the story is only there to justify having a puzzle game.
It’s a very minimalistic and very easy puzzle game, but I don’t mind that. It’s relaxing to just walk through a castle, use the pre-made map the author provides, and tick off the puzzles without ever being stumped. I can’t say I ended up with much of a sense of accomplishment; the only aha moment was the one where I understood the logic of the maze. But as a quick parser snack, A Warm Reception is fine.
It would have been nice to have a slightly more robust implementation. Very few nouns are implemented, which streamlines the puzzle experience, but also leaves the world feeling very bare. You can’t drink the wine or eat the pizza, or even wear the armour you find; trying to press keys on the num pad isn’t even a recognised action; and no explanation is given when you attempt to lock pick a lock that is not supposed to be pickable. These are all minor frustrations, but the full possibilities of parser games are hardly on display here.
Joshua Hetzel seems to be a first time author, and A Warm Reception is a fine beginning. I do hope that their next game will be a little more ambitious in terms of puzzles and/or story and/or setting and/or style.
Redjackets was def a personal project where I was just experimenting with things and writing for myself first and foremost, so I totally understand these notes. I only decided to enter it into IFComp kinda last-second, so I’m fixing bugs as I find them/people report them. I’ll look into all of the things you mentioned!
Dust is a streamlined parser puzzler in the Western genre. Things start out normal enough when you wake up above the local saloon and go out for a walk. But fairly soon you are hit on the head, a damsel is missing, and your cowboy boots will have to function as the shining armour that knights are well-known to wear. Although the damsel in question already has a betrothed, so perhaps all you need is non-shining armour. But I digress.
For the most part, Dust is a friendly and easy game. You get very strong hints about what objects might have to be combined with what other objects, and the availability of said objects follows the order of the puzzles very closely. In fact, I would say too closely. It is obvious that one will need both the parrot and the lamp to enter the mines, but you first have to be stymied in certain ways before you can go to the relevant characters and ask for these items. This happens multiple times. You’re apparently not allowed to see the puzzle solutions before the game decides that it’s time to see them.
Going back to characters and asking them for things is a central mechanic, and one Dust did not convince me is a good one. Again, the game is doing the thinking for me. Instead of me deciding that I need a shovel to solve the problem I’ve met, I have to (a) run into the problem, (b) talk to the shopkeeper… and then the game has the idea that I need a shovel for me. There’s not much for me to do as a puzzle solver, which is a shame.
Not that everything went smoothly. I had a hard time opening the hatch under the gallows. For one, the puzzle doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: there’s only one place for the hatch to be – right under the noose – so why can’t I just locate it that way? But okay, I need to remove the sand. I tried several things, including this:
>sweep platform
Without suitable tools, this is a pointless undertaking.
Going back to Bill after doing this, does not give you the option to buy a shovel. On the other hand, if you try the far less logical action
>take sand
You try to scrape the sand away with your feet, but in this wind that seems to be a pointless endeavor. Perhaps you would have more success with proper tools.
then you can go back to Bill and get a shovel. I would never have found out about this without the walkthrough. This shows again the danger of the game’s approach to puzzles. (I also needed the walkthrough to find ‘drop hankie’, but perhaps that was me being thick-headed or not creative enough, or just not having a good mental picture of the scene.)
That said, Dust is still quite enjoyable. There’s a story here, some action scenes, an implied bigger quest that the character is on, and meticulous programming. But next time, I really think the players ought to be more firmly in charge of solving the puzzles.
Thanks for playing! I’m hoping in the coming years to make something a bit more robust for the comp, but I’m glad for the feedback that I’m on the right track. More description/difficulty/consistent tone is what I’ll be shooting for
