One Way Ticket by Vitalii Blinov
One Way Ticket is a long game. I played it for around one-and-a-half hour and, judging from the walkthrough, I was not yet halfway through. Since the game mostly eschews a standard narrative development, and since it has a very consistent tone throughout, I expect the part I haven’t played to be much like the part I have played. If that expectation is wrong, this review will of course be less than entirely useful.
What we have here is in many ways a classic adventure set-up. Our unnamed protagonist finds himself stuck in a town where his train has stopped. (The only personal fact we know about the protagonist is his gender, through what I take to be a funny rewrite of the Leather Goddesses gender choice scene.) Everyone in town seems to be expecting him; perhaps not him specifically, but the arrival of a wanderer who has to get his train moving again appears to be a recurring feature of the town’s life.
Playing the game consists of exploring locations, receiving tasks, solving light puzzles which tend to open up new areas with new tasks, and so on. There are usually just one or two tasks one can be working on, and I found the pace at which the game world opens up quite comfortable: you get to know one area well before the next area needs to be explored. It helps that there is a map and a very robust automatic note-taking system.
One thing that I found interesting about the design of One Way Ticket is the clear separation of the main text and the inventory/notes, not just in terms of interface but also in terms of function. In the main text of the game, you can just click on everything, and either the scene will advance in and of itself, or you’ll eventually hit on the option that will take you to the next step. You don’t have to solve anything here. It is only on the occasions where you can access the inventory/notes that your task turns into that of solving puzzles. Vitalii Blinov takes this to the logical extreme of allowing you to change the time of day only by selecting a reason from your inventory/notes for wanting to be at a different time. I think every other game would have implemented the clock manipulation simply as a button you can click whenever you want, but the design choice made in One Way Ticket actually helps us understand that we don’t need to randomly explore the differences between day and night – we’ll know when they matter.
Not every aspect of the interface is equally successful. Navigating the game world is rather tedious, despite the great use of maps. Getting from one location to another often requires clicking ten or more links, since you can only move to adjacent locations and you frequently have to click through some standard opening text for every location. This could be streamlined.
Since there is little story or characterisation, much hinges on the prose and the atmosphere. I’m tempted to call the atmosphere magical realist, although that might mean different things to different people. Everything in this world partakes of both the absurd and the mundane. The characters are one-dimensional fictions, certainly, but they seem to be aware of this and revel in it. The entire world is presented in serious terms, and yet it seems to be a joke that everyone, including the protagonist, is in on. As for the prose… I frequently had the feeling that I was reading sub-optimal translations into English. But I equally frequently had the feeling that the prose was deliberately written to give me that feeling. Verging at times into the awkward, the purple, the repetitive, and the superficial, it was nevertheless so consistent with itself and with the world it described that all this verging seemed deliberate. To give an example, at the beginning of the game I was certain that this was a mistake:
The conductor beckoned me over, and I got off the train. Both were waiting outside.
Because what can ‘both’ refer to other than the conductor and the train? But surely it makes no sense to say that the train was waiting outside? Or does it? I now have the sneaking suspicion that the author is completely in on this joke and did it entirely on purpose. In this way the prose exhibits the same blending of the mundane and the absurd that characterises the world.
All in all quite a unique experience due to the perfectly realised tone and atmosphere. As an adventure game, I found it only mildly engaging, but being an adventure game is only part of the point.