The Bat by Chandler Groover
I sometimes listen to the Dutch punk band Hang Youth, whose song titles have a tendency to leave little mystery about the point of the song. There is, for instance, SHELL IS EEN PRIMA BEDRIJF (ALS IK DE WEBSITE MAG GELOVEN), which translates to SHELL IS A FINE COMPANY (IF I CAN BELIEVE THEIR WEBSITE). “Gratis geld / in de grond / geen gezeik / lekker boren” – “free money / in the ground / don’t complain / have fun drilling.”
I’m bringing this up because my 8-year old son has a favourite Hang Youth song, which is called BATMAN IS EEN FASCIST. It’s only the ‘nanananana nananana Batman!’ sound bite, except that they then also say the words ‘is een fascist’, which I don’t think requires translation. The Bat has a guy in it who looks suspiciously like Batman, and even has a suspiciously similar name, but I don’t think he’s a fascist. He’s spending 99% of his in-game time being a cross between a traumatised bat and an especially irritating 2-year old, and there’s the strong suggestion that in more normal circumstances, he is merely an egotistical plutocrat rather than a far-right authoritarian. Though it can be hard to tell the difference, I suppose. Indeed, if we need a Hang Youth song to accompany this game, I think we need to take their favourite song of my 6-year old daughter, the very sing-along-able ditty JE HAAT GEEN MAANDAG, JE HAAT KAPITALISME, translating to YOU DON’T HATE MONDAY, YOU HATE CAPITALISM. That’s the spirit of the game. You don’t hate organising a party. You just hate the ultra-rich dudes and dudesses whose every whim you have to cater for because they belong to a different class, and whose elevated positions in the ranks of the capitalist pantheon make them literally unable to see you as a fellow human being.
There’s one person who treats you as a person, and tells you that they were happy to know and meet you. Turns out they are stealing everyone’s valuables and are just cynically manipulating you to dull your suspicions. Your own heroic tasks will culminate in stopping this thief from absconding with the valuables, so that your ultra rich employers and their friends won’t be losing what I suppose is 0,000001% of their net worth. Such ironies are not lost on Groover or his game, although they are hardly spelled out explicitly.
I said that the main character hates the ultra rich, but this is not apparent throughout the main part of the game. You’re thrown into the role of the extremely competent valet who will make a success out of the very worst situation; and the situation is pretty bad indeed at the beginning of the game, and only gets worse thereafter. The Prologue is a masterclass is generating real player competence to match fictional character competence: the player must visit all the rooms (for a plausible in-game reason), must learn about some of the central puzzle solving mechanisms (using the crank, using the newspaper, using the broom), and will thereby also learn about the game’s central command ‘attend to’. Groover can, of course, be trusted to choose the verb that the game focuses on carefully. ‘Attend to’ is pleasingly vague – slightly too vague, perhaps, since I kept accidentally dropping things until quite late in the game – but works very well in reinforcing the main theme of servitude.
The game felt very stressful to me early on, and since I was tired and had little energy, it actually took me a few days to work up the courage to return to it. The stress is generated by an escalating list of tasks: things go wrong at a faster rate than you can fix them, and it’s strongly implied that there are time limits and you have to optimise your performance. That’s all smoke and mirrors. There are no real time limits. The money you get and lose is completely irrelevant – this becomes clear fairly soon, when the amounts go up and down in fairly ridiculous ways that often have nothing to do with your own performance – and you cannot put the game in an unwinnable, or really even in a suboptimal, state. The tasks also start getting more and more zany. You have to give Master Bryce three different tools that can be used to mutilate the baron’s beard. You have to find five completely stupid ‘clues’ connected to cats and give them to a detective. And you have to, ah, lubricate a social encounter between three women and a moose head. (I have been told by the author that there is no connection between this scene and the infamous antler job from Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, but of course it is hard not to see this coincidence as evidence of a wise and benevolent universal consciousness.)
As it goes along, I found the game getting more and more enjoyable. The puzzles are just varied enough, although there’s perhaps a tad too much hinting. But that’s a very personal balance.
The final fight scene reminded me of the climactic encounter at the end of… Earth and Sky? One of the Earth and Sky’s, at least, and surely Chandler is not going to come out and tell me that he a resemblance to the most famous series of super heroes IF is also a coincidence. And after that, there’s the denouement. It’s fairly dark. Thematically, I think it fits, but it might have hit harder and felt more true if there had been more interiority for the PC earlier on. We never really get to understand why the PC has not left Master Bryce when all the other servants did. So why is this the final straw? I did like how it was mechanically and command-wise tied up to the one mechanism whereby we could actually make the Master do what we wanted; that’s a very nice touch.
I highly recommend this game, and it has given me much food for thought.