Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian
The evolution of parser games towards friendliness and better play experiences has led to many changes, but in particular there are two strategies that authors use to avoid ‘guess the verb’ issues. One is the meticulous implementation of everything that a player could reasonably try. The other is the clear limitation of the space of possibilities, so that players will try fewer things. These two strategies are almost always used in conjunction – every game needs to provide responses to actions that are not strictly necessary, and every game needs to teach the player how it is to be played – but some games lean more on one strategy than another. Pacian is well known as a pioneer and adept of the second strategy. By limiting the kinds of actions that the player can take, play becomes more constrained, but also more streamlined. While not being in a strict sense a ‘limited parser’ game, Forsaken Denizen uses such heavy hinting about the actions one can take that there is never any doubt about what one might conceivably try. As a result, one is thinking about what one can achieve with one’s limited expressive resources in an environment with limited affordances.
‘Affordances’ is a technical term meaning ‘the characteristics or properties of an object that suggest how it can be used.’ I don’t think we’ve talked about it a lot in IF criticism and theory, but we clearly should! A chair has the affordance of being sat on. A gun has the affordance of being picked up, dropped, shot, perhaps loaded or reloaded. Games do not only teach verbs and strategies, but also affordances. In Forsaken Denizen, for instance, one quickly learns to recognise that the various kinds of ‘locks’ have only one affordance: being opened by an easily recognisable key. There are other games where a barrier might have affordances like being set on fire, being talked through, allowing a robot mouse to move through its gaps, and so on. In Forsaken Denizen, it is clearly there to remain in place until the right key has been obtained – and so one doesn’t even try to interact with it.
Forsaken Denizen seems, at first, like a survival horror game. The absurd blurb of the game is: “THIS GAME CONTAINS SCENES OF IMPLICIT VIOLENCE AND GORE.” There’s nothing implicit about the violence; it took me all of three minutes to horribly die. For the first ten minutes or so, the horror vibes remained. But then, once past the bridge, I found that all the monsters could be easily avoided. There’s a few places where you work under a time limit and might die – e.g., the first time you try to make one of the guard robots work – but this is rare and easily recognised. You don’t even care about the monsters as you cross the map, since you are invulnerable as long as you keep moving. I liked it; I’m not a big fan of horror. But the PC is pretty bad-ass and this is more a game of heroism than of survival.
Thematically, the game is about our relation to the super-rich. In Forsaken Denizen, these take the form of out-of-time space aristocrats, bizarre alien monsters that were once human but now use humans as literal sources of energy. (The game tells us that these people didn’t become monsters through their wealth; rather, they were always like this.) The game’s narrator is one of these aristocrats, but she’s redeemed through her love for the protagonist, who once tried to kill her. ‘Kind-of-evil princess love interest’ might suggest a connection to Turandot, but really Pacian’s princess and my princess couldn’t be more different. Turandot towers over the game and the PC; Cath, even though she has the powers of being the narrator and immense wealth, is a smaller, more vulnerable being, one who needs her lover in order to have any authentic spirit and personality at all. This is not criticism; it is perfect for this game.
Gameplay is smooth. There’s just enough danger and complexity that you have to keep paying attention, but it’s more or less impossible to get stuck. The prose is lovely, building up a bizarre world without setting you adrift, and without large chunks of exposition. The tight inventory limit is… not so useful, actually, but handled graciously through a save-point system that doubles as a place to hold your inventory.
There’s a lot more to say about how this game talks about wealth and capitalism – the entire scenario is a space horror expression of the truth that failed investments don’t hurt the capitalists but the workers; and it’s more than a little disconcerting that only the unemployed aren’t being eaten – but I might leave that for another occasion.
Forsaken Denizen is a great game, my favourite in the competition so far.