You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book by Austin Lim
There are two sides to You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book. On the one hand, it’s a hypertext adventure of a familiar kind. You are a faceless adventure person, you receive a strange quest, and by walking around town you manage to collect some objects and pieces of information that just happen to allow you to solve the problem. It’s more a matter of thorough exploration than of real puzzle solving, and because everything is so disconnected and distant, it is hard to care about what’s going on. As an adventure game, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is competently implemented but ultimately forgettable.
On the other hand, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is a collage made out of locations from other works of literature. So while you are playing the adventure game, you’re also playing a ‘guess the original’ game. This is certainly a more original conceit than the quest itself. However, the lack of interactivity with the surroundings makes it less interesting than it could have been. You get one paragraph of text, and then you either know it or don’t know it; there’s no way to explore further and interact with the environment to get more clues. In some cases, clues are not needed. The violin playing inhabitants of the apartment next to apartment 221 who seem very interested in murders? Check. The farm that is run by the animals themselves? Check. Waking up as a giant insect? Check. It might still have been fun to explore that farm more, say, and find that we’re in the middle of the scene where the horse is being sold off; but at least we don’t need to in order to guess the source. In other cases, the source material seemed a lot harder to guess. And the problem is, if you don’t know it immediately, there’s no way to investigate further. Does this three sentence description of a forest not ring a bell? Tough luck.
What I found very interesting indeed is that in several cases, I immediately recognised what the source material was… and then found out, at the end, that Austin Lim and I had different things in mind. You enter a church and are almost driven to madness by a bell that won’t stop tolling? Obviously this is a reference to Emily Dickinson’s stunning I felt a Funeral, in my Brain; but actually the scene was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells. In another scene, you are walking across a beach and warned against staying out in the sunshine for too long. No clearer reference to Albert Camus’s L’étranger is possible, right? Except that the reference was to Dune. Which just goes to show, one, that our literary heritage is highly overdetermined (as the literary critics like to say; we philosophers would say that the works of literature are underdetermined by the clues, but it means more or less the same thing); and, two, that you really need more space for exploration if you want to implement a puzzle like this! Maybe let me check my inventory to see whether there’s a gun, and then have me discover some… spice? (I’ve never read Dune, so this is stab in the dark.)