Murderworld
This game was so much better than I had expected! More importantly, it is also really good – there are some issues, of course, and I’ll talk about them later, but Murderworld is a big, varied, and ambitious parser game that ends up being highly enjoyable. That is a serious achievement. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
But I think it’s relevant to get back to my expectations. See, Murderworld is an X-Men fan fiction. I told @mathbrush over in his thread that I knew nothing about X-Men going into this game, but that’s not quite true. I did in fact once watch an X-Men movie, X2. I hated it. I remember sitting through it in total boredom; otherwise, the only thing I remember is some totally ridiculous scene where someone battles fighter jets with their bare hands (or something like that). I can’t for the life of me remember what the story was about, but here’s the first 10% of Wikipedia’s summary:
That’s certainly a bunch of sentences one behind the other. I have no idea how they fit together to form anything recognisable as a story, and I suspect I didn’t have that idea when I was watching the movie either, and that that is why I remember nothing. Maybe I should have watched the first film first? But, look, I really do not want to watch some hero fighting jets with superpowers.
I just don’t get the attraction of superheroes. The fantasy of someone who has powers beyond those of normal humans is simply not interesting to me, unless this power somehow ties into meaningful themes. But such tying in is the domain of fantasy, not of superheroes. Ged, in A Wizard of Earthsea, has magical powers that other have not; but he uses them to violate the natural order of life and death, and the entire book is about what that means and how to deal with the consequences. The ring in The Lord of the Rings gives the power of invisibility to Frodo, but that’s just so we can delve into temptation and corruption. Batman being super strong and super rich and then using that to beat up some criminals in an alley – give me a break. Of course it then turns out that you can only justify superheroes narratively by also having supervillains, and then we are deeply into cackling evil laugh territory and all I want is to go home. (When I was a kid I watched a Batman movie and if I recall correctly the villain was a bizarre penguin man living inside a sewer or something? I mean, who writes this stuff?)
Unsurprisingly, I usually avoid anything having to with superheroes, and tend to regret it when I don’t. I watched Thor because it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, and his Hamlet is one of my favourite films… but I thought the movie was really boring. I bought and read Batman: The Killing Joke because it was written by Alan Moore, who also wrote Watchmen, which I deeply love (and which is not itself a superheroes comic, I would argue)… but I thought it was really uninteresting. It did not at all make me care about Batman or The Joker, and so why would I care about what they do to each other?
Anyway, I’m writing all of that to explain that I went into Murderworld believing I would not like it at all. Superheroes. X-Men. This was going to be bad… but perhaps there would be a few nice puzzles. And then, dear reader, something unexpected happened. The game totally charmed me! My first task was not beat up some cartoon villain, but to get a cup of coffee for a friend. Nice. Then, I landed at the mansion. Playing as Cyclops, my task was to get through on the phone to the construction firm so that they could schedule repairs as soon as possible. I loved this! I’m a guy who can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and I’m battling a phone menu! And worrying about interior design! And trying not to get puked on! And giving a student advice about her CV! The implementation was smooth, even though there were many moving characters; the difficulty was really comfortable; the writing was fine; there was understated comedy. I loved it. In fact, I was already planning to play through again with the other characters just to see more of this welcoming, nice game. Superhero powers are far less annoying when they are just little puzzle devices, rather than that which sets the exceptional individuals apart from humanity at large, which means that they should be allowed to engage in random acts of violence. I mean, there is no humanity at large present in this game, and nobody to battle. Except phone menus, which are impervious to laser eyes.
It was a rude shock to me when it turned out that the major part of the game was very different. Suddenly, we are abducted by a cackling super villain who has constructed elaborate death traps that we need to escape. I played Cyclops and then Colossus, and I was quickly fed up by the recherché scenarios that I had to escape from while listening to the ranting of the Big Bad. The time limits also felt annoying and stressful (and I think the game would simple be better without them). I almost quit. But I’m glad I played on, because these two death traps turned out to be by far the least interesting. The others start exploring what is possible in parser puzzle design. What can you do with a teleportation power? That’s a great question, and the Nightcrawler sequence does good work with it.
I do think these six sequences are fairly uneven. Some, like those of Cyclops and Colossus, just don’t have a lot of room for exploration and turn into ‘get stuck’ situations fairly easily if you fail to intuit some of the actions. I thought the Storm scenario was weak, with many useless locations and a lot of reading the author’s mind and making utterly illogical leaps (from clothing colour to weather types). On the other hand, Dazzler’s interactions with the robot were very nice; Nightcrawler’s teleportation antics, while often hard to visualise and keep track of, are a good exploration of puzzle space; and Wolverine’s sequence, ah! I needed the walkthrough to understand, among other things, how to proceed in the office – I thinking the hinting is not as clear as the author might believe – but the idea here is so good. You solve a mystery, yes, but as far as I know you can never even explain it to anyone. It’s just you who knows what happened. And what happened is sweet, and such a nice touch in what is supposed to be a murderworld.
And then we get to the kids. This sequence felt easier, more light-hearted, and just plain fun. Exactly befitting the fact that we are playing kids. Excellent design all around (my only problem was that healing the dog didn’t work in one location and than somehow did in the other, for reasons that were unclear to me). Lots of good characterisation. I liked the kids more than the original superheroes! And the final fight has been designed extremely well. Dynamic, intuitive, fluid. In parser, this is much harder than it may look, and Austin Auclair has to be commended for making a scene where it feels like you’re playing six people so smooth.
So, yeah. I’ve picked some nits. Parts of the actual murderworlds where not that great. The verbs command should really only show the special verbs, and not fill my screen with the standard list every time. A bit more hinting here and there would be useful. But in a game of this size and complexity, this is all small beer. Murderworld is an impressive game that just gives a lot of the one thing it wants to give: fun. Even to me, to someone who does not like superheroes. In fact, this might be the most fun I’ve ever had with superheroes!
Perhaps Austin Auclair has a superpower of their own…