Victor's IFComp 2022 reviews

Thank you for the review!

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Oh geez you’re right, haha! I’d forgotten the mimosas (in fairness, I believe they’re nonalcoholic in the game, right?)

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They settle for orange juice, yes. :wink:

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I was thinking a small round drawing of the table with pictures of the available foods on it, updated for food that is added or eaten. Easy overview of the items while still keeping with the drawing style.
Somewhere to the right in the bottom corner.

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I agree completely. Now, pomosas are a different story. The bubbly goes so well with a little sour pomegranate juice.

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An Alien’s Mistaken Impressions of Humanity’s Pockets by Andrew Howe

The credits tell us this was a class project, and since the aim was no doubt to get some experience with Twine, it can be counted as a success. There are several locations, there’s a simple but clear puzzle structure, and everything seems to work as intended, including a colour mixing puzzle that must have required some programming skill to implement. (I did run into one game-breaking bug when I entered a name for the key-chain and pressed enter. This is so early in the game that it hardly matters, but it will still be nice to fix.) On the other hand, the game is absolutely rife with misspellings, omitted capitals, strange amounts of white space, and other problems with the basic presentation of the text. This made it feel very sloppily executed even where the underlying programming was solid.

The game’s basic premise is that two alien investigators misinterpret the human artefacts found at archaeological dig sites. This is a nice idea that could have been worked out better; as it is, it disappears from view very early on in the game. All in all, a good step in the learning process, but not really ready for the limelight yet.

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One Final Pitbull Song (at the End of the World) by Paige Morgan

Here is Harold Bloom on Nathanael West’s wonderful 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts :

Bloom distinguishes between satire, which hopes to improve us, and parody, which does not. This seems to me a rather idiosyncratic use of these terms, which in addition risks concealing from view the fact that satire is best thought of as a spectrum. What is crucial, I would say, is the relation of the author to those whom they satirise. On one end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a We, a community that the author takes themselves to be part of. Such satire can be gentle or sharp, but in identifying with those who are satirised, the author is inviting us all to laugh at ourselves and thereby improve ourselves. On the other end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a They, a community that they see themselves as completely cut off from. Such satire can be bitter or more good-humoured, but its essential nature is that it sees those who are satirised as beyond redemption. It does not and cannot understand itself as a medium of self-improvement. Rather, its business is coping with the existence of the Others by laughing at them.

Most satire sits somewhere between these two extremes. The author of satire usually feels some distance from the exact groups or tendencies that they satirise, but also appeals to values that those whom they satirise are expected to share. For instance, Mark Twain’s The War Prayer is a satire of religious jingoism. Twain certainly doesn’t consider himself under the spell of religious jingoism, so in that sense he is satirising a Them; but he hopes that the reader, who may be under this spell to a certain extent, can be made to see how ludicrous such a position is, so in that sense he is satirising an Us. It is possible to laugh at someone in a way that invites them to join in.

What does this mean for satire in the current United States of America? I am not making a statement either controversial or new when I observe that American society is being torn apart into opposing camps that can no longer even contemplate working together. We are at the point where one can build a political career out of being nasty towards those on the other side: for people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, saying nasty things about trans men and women – to take an example that is, in the context of this review, not entirely random – is a way of generating political popularity. One doesn’t vote for such politicians because one wants certain beneficial policies enacted; one votes to ‘own the libs’. Causing pain is the point. In such an environment, being grotesque is a benefit, not a disadvantage. When politicians are willing to say and do anything, no matter how extreme, it is impossible for satire to hold up a mirror to them, as Bloom correctly observes.

In such a society, satire is effectively reduced to its two extremes, with the entire middle of the spectrum falling away. There is, on the one hand, the satire of the strict We, where we are urging our own group to see in what respects we are being ridiculous and where we can therefore improve. There is, on the other hand, the satire of the strict Them, where we have no hope of reaching or influencing those whom we satirise, but where the satire is a way for our group to let off steam and at least get a laugh out of the foolishness and evil that confronts us. We can of course have both types of satire in a single work, but if we do this will be a major source of tonal tension; and only in the hands of a deft artist can such a juxtaposition work. Bringing these two types of satire together is exactly what One Final Pitbull Song is doing.

We can say at the outset (if this still counts as the outset) that One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game, made more complicated by the fact that it consists of three wildly different – though connected – lines of plot development. The longest and most detailed of these, and the one that the game itself suggests is the first, is the line that takes us to prison and then drops us into the underground caves. Here we have, on the one hand, a harsh satire of what the game itself calls the prison-industrial complex. This is the satire of an enemy, an enemy that is known to be beyond reason and morality, since anyone, anyone, can see the wrongness of these social institutions simply by looking. On the other hand, there is the much more gentle satire of the anxieties that plague the protagonist and her cell mates. All of them are well-meaning people; all of them know the others to be well-meaning people; and yet they are constantly afraid of hurting or embarrassing each other, far beyond what is useful in structuring their social interactions. One Final Pitbull Song rather masterfully mixes these two types of satire together. An absolutely cold-blooded murderer in service to a cruel and inhumane system may, a few seconds after shooting someone through the head, get flustered and apologetic when they find out they have perhaps misgendered that person. Characters that are running away from devouring monsters through dark caves may spend minutes apologising over an insensitive comment they made about someone’s body. Now I suppose one could write these scenes in such a way that they suggest that sensitivity is unimportant compared to the real macho value of survival. But that’s not at all what is going on here. That is only what someone on the other side might take away from it. If anything, we are shown in a grotesque and absurd way the difficult realities of being decent and sensitive in a society that promotes egotism and cruelty.

The two types of satire reach an apotheosis in the person of the Cracked Visor Enforcer, an apparently sensitive soul who is absurdly easy to embarrass even when they have done nothing wrong, but who nevertheless wholeheartedly embraces a cruel societal system even after it has been revealed as completely indifferent to their well-being. Of all the character story arcs in the game, Kyle’s arc in the first narrative line is the one that seemed most thematically consistent and consequential. O, Cracked Visor Enforcey! O, Kyle! You’re a horrible piece of shit, but you’re also the authentic (anti)hero of this post-satirical satire.

As I said, One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game. It is impossible to get through even one of the longer narrative lines in the two hours set aside for the Interactive Fiction Competition, and you haven’t really experienced the game until you’ve seen all three of them. Clearly, one satirical target of the author is the notion of choice. Large parts of the game are entirely non-interactive, in the sense that we just read a page of prose (often a very long page of prose) and then click the single link that is available to us. In fact, there are only two choices in the game that make a real difference. First, there is a the choice in the beginning about whether or not to leave the car; a choice that you, the protagonist, make only because you feel you have to show you can make a choice. Second, there is the choice of whether to eat beans or potatoes in the prison canteen. Both choices completely change how the rest of the game plays out; and change it in ways that not only could not have been foreseen by either player or character, but that also make no causal sense. This suggests that, yes, we can influence the stories of our lives, but no, not in a way that gives us agency. Furthermore, the game at many points tells us that the best choices are those you make without thinking about the fact that you are making a choice; the best choices are not experienced as choices. But – and here we see an example of how the ironies of One Final Pitbull Song keep destabilising any easy lesson we might want to draw from it – the structure of the game as a whole suggests that our true self is only achieved when we identify with all the choices we had, both those we made and those we did not make. And it suggests that real happiness can only be achieved when divine powers set up a ‘perfect divergence’ for us, where we just happen to make all the right choices. And it suggests that this happiness consists in us taking responsibility for ourselves and our own lives. One Final Pitbull Song revels in the tensions all of this generates.

Let us look at another example of the game’s irony. As we go through the three narrative lines of the game – in order or out of order – we are subjected to approximately every gross and horrible event one can think of. At various points the protagonist is covered in piss, in vomit, in blood, in cum, and probably in other substances I’ve forgotten about. People die in an astonishing variety of terrible and extremely graphic ways. And yet we finally arrive at what we are tempted to understand as a happy ending: the reunion of Bal, his wife Pae, and their child PeeBee. It’s almost a Hollywood movie! Until we start thinking about it, and realise the terrible irony of ending a game that is centrally concerned with gay and trans people and with the many ways that relatives can be harmful to you, of ending a game like that with a literal reconstitution of the traditional family. A traditional family that moreover literally consists of murderous monsters. It’s not that we are supposed to understand that this is not a happy ending; the monsters are no less humane than some of the humans. It’s that the game’s ironies cut so deep that they make all simple evaluations impossible. This definitely extends to the various interjections made by the supposed author of the piece, interjections that claim, among other things, to apologise (or not) for certain difficulties in understanding the game (even to the point of referring to one potential reviewer by name and suggesting that they probably won’t understand or like it). It would be absolutely impossible to take any of these statements at face value, which means that they only serve to further undermine our attempts to boil the game down to a simple message.

This already extremely long review has only scratched the surface of the game’s contents. I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre premise of an entire culture built around the music of Pitbull. This is a game that at every point seems to burst at the seams. There are always more characters, more gory scenes, more ideas, more ironies, more mindless cruelty, more romance, more dialogue going over more of the same things – and so on. I can’t do justice to all of that. But perhaps I can do justice to there being all of that, to there being so much and to there being the kinds of things there are. To do so, I want to put forward an interpretative hypothesis.

What One Final Pitbull Song is fundamentally about is the deeply exhausting experience of living in a hostile world. It is a world where your hesitant attempts to be yourself – hesitant because they are made after a long history of animosity – are constantly interrupted by outside threats. It is a world where your attempts to find a modus vivendi with your friends can always be aborted by the stressful attack of a monster; although in real life, the monster could be, say, Ron DeSantis, and thus a metaphorical rather than a literal spawn of Baäl. It is a world where you don’t feel in control, because things can always suddenly change for the worse. It is far too often the world of the trans person, of the gay or the lesbian, of the member of a racial minority.

Some other reviewers who are astute and discerning readers of interactive fiction have complained about the long, sometimes tedious prose passages, the length of the game, the seemingly never-ending sequence of events. Well, yes. Absolutely. But how could this have been a neatly trimmed story, nicely designed to be just right for the human reader, when it wants to acquaint us with the exhaustion of living in a world that was designed to be against you rather than for you? This game wants to acquaint us with that, but it also wants to show us how one deals with it – through inexhaustible energy, creativity, perseverance; through a will to life that is stronger than the forces of darkness; but, since such energy and such a will are rather too much to ask of us at almost every moment of our lives, at least through this: the ability to laugh; to still, after all the horror and cruelty, be able to muster a sardonic smile at the absurdity of it all.

And so I salute Paige Morgan, the demonic parodist, as she provides an endless string of Pitbull covers to celebrate our march down into hell. Read her for her prophecy, and for the unsettling laughter she will bring you, as you too approach the monster-filled pit prepared for the American soul by the American religion.

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Wow! Thank you for this review and for the time you took to understand my work. It really seems like you got what I was going for, and I appreciate that so much!

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It was my pleasure! (Well, I also lost some sleep trying to wrap my head around the game, so I suppose it wasn’t all pleasure. But that’s fine!)

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Zero Chance of Recovery by Andrew Schultz

This is very reminiscent of last year’s Walking Into It by the same author. Both pieces recreate a board game, and both pieces are less interested in winning that game than in exploring the space of possibilities it affords and tying this exploration to a narrative. Walking Into It dealt with tic-tac-toe. Zero Chance of Recovery deals with chess, or rather, with one particular end game study, the so-called Réti problem (named after Richard Réti, 1889-1929).

I must have seen the Réti problem before, but didn’t recall it. The idea is interesting. Black can trivially promote his pawn to queen and trivially stop the white pawn from queening. But black cannot trivially do both; and in fact, the point of the problem is that through perfect play, white can ensure that black cannot achieve both objectives. To do this, white must make ‘neutral’ moves that force black to commit to one or another path of action, and then white can react. Pretty neat.

I’m an okay-ish chess player myself. I used to play at a local club for about 15 years, from maybe 7 tot 22 years of age. I still enjoy the game, though I now rarely play it. (I am also kind of lazy as a chess player, in the sense that I never studied opening or end game theory at all thoroughly.) Given this background, Zero Chance of Recovery wasn’t hard for me to move through: I quickly found the paths through the position. Then I got stuck. Turns out that you need to really absorb the opening text in order to solve the ‘puzzle’; but I found the opening text confusing and clicked through it quickly. So that’s a point where the game and I failed to connect.

I had fun with the game for the short space of time it took me to play through it. It didn’t manage to rise to the same level as Walking Into It, which was just such a supremely nice picture of adult/child interaction, but perhaps that was a bit too much to expect.

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To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1 by Anthony O

I was drawn to this game by the title, which seems to hint at the philosophical literature around endurance and persistence. It has absolutely nothing to do with that. Instead, the game is a short piece in Texture about receiving a call from the ‘Agency Of Neverending Happiness and Clearing Out Monsters From Under Your Bed!’ Even though they have called you, they don’t have a clue about how to help you, and in fact only make things worse by raising your hopes for a moment and then locking you in telephone menu Hell.

With To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1, Anthony O has found a very effective literary form for communicating a certain type – one hopes it is not the only possible type – of experience with mental health care. The frustrating phone menu, which is familiar and easily implemented as a game, is a smart metaphor for the endless chains of referrals and therapists and talk groups and waiting lists and closed doors. The most haunting scene is the one where you are asked to tell your story after the beep; and then, when you’ve told it, you hear that the recording didn’t work and could you please start again? This is what it must be like when you’re seeing your eleventh mental health professional and are asked to explain once again what you’re suffering from… only for them to say, at the end of the 35 minute consultation, that this is not the right clinic for you and they’ll refer you back to your GP.

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A Walk Around the Neighbourhood by Leo Weinreb

You’re trying to go for a walk rather than write a passage of your PhD thesis, and your romantic partner is physically present in the same house, but I still felt strong affinities with Violet here. You’re confined to one room. You’re trying to do what your partner wants. You’re presented with mundane problems requiring mostly mundane solutions. And the best ending sees you reconnect to your partner in a way that wasn’t quite obvious from how the original puzzles was framed. (That does happen in Violet, doesn’t it? I haven’t played it since it came out.) Also, heteronormativity seems to be off by default this time, with the characters having gender ambiguous names.

A Walk Around the Neighbourhood is good, simple fun. It’s a one room puzzler that doesn’t ask much more of you than carefully examining everything, although I did get stuck at one point. (You need to ‘look under door’, which is not an action that seemed very plausible to me. When it turned out I couldn’t open the door to check for the key, I took the door off of my mental list.) There are numerous ‘false’ endings which add to the fun. And there’s the special ending that gets you closer to your partner – though in a low key manner, with no background threat of impending separation. The game is well implemented, well written, and all in all an easy recommendation if you’re looking for some non-taxing parser fun.

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i wish you were dead by Sofía Abarca

They take hours, these conversations. Not because there’s so much say. There may be nothing to say, although you rarely know that at the outset. It’s just that the saying – even if it is a saying of nothing – takes so much time. It’s because the saying, the back and forth of the conversation, long and painful silences very much included, is a process where something, we hope, will be achieved. Some kind of clarity. Some kind of finality. Because nothing can be worse than leaving things as they are and being in the exact same spot two weeks from now, or two months. Or two years, God forbid.

I am a confessed and confirmed hater of timed text. But here it worked, or almost worked. I was anxious to hear what would be said. Also, my mind kept wandering. But that’s what it does in these conversations. Five possible directions you could go in have been thought of and discarded before something wells up that you blurt out without thinking. Silence. She looks off into the middle distance. Has she heard you? Of course she has. Nothing lies hidden. If neither of you is showing the truth about your feelings, it is because there is no truth about your feelings. You thought it’d be easier. But it never is.

It’s all very believable. Realistic. Not sure how I felt about the choice aspect. Having the protagonist tell the truth is the only way that I, the reader, can find out what that truth is, so choosing these options seems to be a no-brainer. It’s not my task to make things easier for these people. But with the choices I made the narrative development was rewarding, natural, and led to a conclusion that was almost satisfying. No thanks, I don’t need to play again. This is no doubt best for these characters. Certainly we’ve been given no reason to believe they can do better.

The dialogue reads well. The non-dialogue prose is another matter. It is frequently overwritten, ungrammatical, distracting. The very first lines of the game are:

That’s not a sentence. Here’s an example where the prose is very purple indeed:

The author has mastered the art of writing pithy, no-nonsense dialogue. Those skills should be applied to the rest of the prose too. Then everything will be good.

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The Lottery Ticket by Dorian Passer and Anton Chekhov

The reviews that I’m most happy with are the ones where I believe I really got what the author was doing. This is not one of those reviews. To be honest, I have no idea what Dorian Passer is trying to do with The Lottery Ticket; and that in spite of the fact that this game tries to explain up front and explicitly what it is trying to do:

I suppose that the difference between story-based agency and narration-based agency is that the first is agency that determines what happens, and the second is agency that determines how what happens gets narrated. So the claim is that The Lottery Ticket doesn’t allow us to steer the story in different directions (this is true), but that it does allow us to direct how the story is told. That latter claim, however, seems to be false. The player gets exactly four choice points where we have to either fill in a happy or a sad adjective; which is then used to change maybe a single sentence of the text, after which the narration goes on regardless of our choice. This hardly counts as having control over the narration. Since the piece doesn’t give us any reasons for preferring one kind of adjective to another, the notion of agency seems out of place anyway. In a choice game, being allowed to choose between going left and going right with no idea where those choices will lead doesn’t count as agency even if the two paths are entirely different. The happy/sad choices in The Lottery Ticket seem to fall in the same category.

The purported aim of the technique is ‘to avoid breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief’. Now even assuming that there is a such a thing as suspension of disbelief (which I doubt), it is unclear why it would be especially threatened by story-based agency; or why it would be safeguarded by narration-based agency. I just don’t get what the idea here is, and nothing that I’ve seen in The Lottery Ticket has clarified things for me.

On to the story itself. Our protagonist is anxiously waiting for the results of a lottery draw, and as she is waiting she reads a Chekhov story about a lottery draw. The Chekhov story is very short and not, I believe, among his most famous ones; but it is interesting and as deftly pulled off as one would expect from one of the world’s most famous short story writers. Clearly, Passer is taking a huge risk by inviting direct comparison with Chekhov! Despite some nice details – I liked the concreteness of the recipe for tomato sauce, the way the characters joked about it, and how it also pointed at poverty – the new part of the story doesn’t reach the same level of intensity and psychological insight. The prose also wasn’t quite up to standards.

The first signal of a swell is a rush ahead of a calmness that is ebbing away from a face… you’ve definitely lost me there. And how do you distract yourself ‘back’ from a swell? I also don’t like the repetition of ‘swell of anxiety’, but that might be a more subjective aesthetic judgement.

So, yeah. This is a disappointing review, both for the author (whom I did not understand) and for the other readers (whom I’m not helping to understand the piece). But I just didn’t get much out of The Lottery Ticket, and I think that as a manifesto for an apparently new way of approaching IF, it leaves something to be desired.

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The Staycation by Maggie H

Boy, that escalated quickly. One moment I’m waving goodbye to my friends, and the next I’m scared by a cat, and the next I’m sobbing on the phone, and the next I’m back at my parents’ house having apparently suffered a complete mental breakdown. All this takes maybe five minutes of interaction. There just doesn’t seem to be enough here to get us from one part of the game to the other; it feels like a disjointed series of mini-scenes which we can only look at with some puzzlement. (Finishing in five minutes is extra surprising when the game is billed as being two hours long.)

There’s one thing I liked about The Staycation, and that’s the use of icons. The problem with Texture is that it quite often feels as merely a cumbersome version of Twine: having to drag one text to another is extra work, it slows you down, and therefore it should have some clear benefit over clicking a link. Very often it doesn’t. But here there were some moments where, yes, I could see the benefit. For instance, I loved the place where the text is only

and the icon you have to drag to it is a little person doing a joyful somersault. That’s just fun. And it has the exact right amount of emptiness: the emoticon, being a stereotyped expression of a ready-made emotion, suggests that there’s nothing authentic about the protagonist’s joy. And of course there isn’t.

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A Matter of Heist Urgency by FLACRabbit

A Matter of Heist Urgency is a quick, polished parser game where you play a horse with supernatural powers; even more supernatural, that is, than those of all the other human-intelligence horses in the setting. The crown jewels have been stolen by a bunch of no-good llamas, and you must recover them! What follows is a series of quick scenes, most of them fast-paced action. You hit and kick, and perhaps you come up with a few nice touches like throwing the coconut or kicking the capstan, in which case you’ll be rewarded by appropriate narration. It’s all good fun. We don’t get many action sequences in parser, and it’s nice to see it pulled off so well, although the techniques used by FLACRabbit might not generalise to games that want to be more tense or substantial.

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You May Not Escape! by Charm Cochran

You May Not Escape! bills itself as a parable. The exact meaning of this term can be contested, but one usually thinks of a short, relatively straightforward narrative that teaches a lesson through allegory. Classic examples in the Western traditions are the parables told by Jesus, such as the story of the prodigal son, which conveys a lesson about God by telling a story about a human father. Some of the New Testament stories about Jesus can also be considered parables, like the story of the adulterous woman, which teaches us a universal lesson about punishment and forgiveness. Unlike the stories told by Jesus, the stories told about Jesus are not usually classified as parables, since from the point of view of traditional Christianity they are not supposed to be allegorical; but from the point of view of literary analysis, the adulterous woman and the prodigal son clearly belong to the same genre.

How does You May Not Escape! fit in this tradition? The game clearly invites an allegorical reading. To understand a maze as symbolic of the meaningless grind of daily existence is straightforward; when one adds details like the locked exit, the graveyard with victims of oppression, the surveillance cameras and the random messages that sound like typically shallow and unpleasant online interactions, the picture emerges of a tedious, hopeless life lived in a hostile society. To be honest, the game seems to be spreading its nets a little bit too widely – while there may be connections between, say, online hate culture, the surveillance state, and anti-abortion politicians, the game doesn’t do much to connect them. We are supposed to do a lot of the work ourselves, whereas it seems to me that the author of an allegory must at least surprise us with some of the work they do. In the end I took the core allegorical idea to be connected to the song of labour activist Joe Hills (1879-1915) that will resound throughout the labyrinth once you have turned on the jukebox:

This song, which bemoans the fact that the itinerant worker is nowhere accepted as a community member, not even in Heaven, combines neatly with the final image where we break free of the maze by using a large sledgehammer. In fact, I found myself humming The Internationale:

So while there is a clear allegorical component to the game, I hesitate to call it a parable. There is simply not much narrative. Almost all of the game consists of exploring a randomly generated labyrinth. (Mapping is highly recommended. Tip: this is the kind of maze that is mapped most easily by building up a map of the walls on a grid, rather than by drawing a map of interconnected rooms.) I found this quite relaxing, especially because I haven’t been doing a lot of mapping in the IFComp so far. The atmosphere is also well done: everything in our inventory getting wet and dirty was an especially neat touch that sets us apart from the usual impossibly clean adventurer. But as a story there is not much here. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. But I did find the experience to be a bit on the thin side. When we’re going to take a sledgehammer to the injustices of society, I suppose I’d like to have a better idea of what it is that we’re going to destroy and what the results will be like. Or perhaps I just want to hear more of what the author has to tell me.

Implementation was very solid, but I found one semi-bug: the jukebox can be heard based on spatial distance on the grid, but it seems more logical to me if it can be heard based on how many moves in the maze we are away from it. (That is a bit harder to implement, though, so maybe not worth it.)

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I didn’t really look into the song, and I missed some of its connotations! So I’m glad you did so.

I’d think this wouldn’t be bad at all with Inform. I think I’ve done it before (I forget where–I did this for Ailihphilia, but I deliberately gave each room a direction called in-direction, to see the distance from the central entry room, so that’s cheating) and here is pseudocode. This fails if you have any loops in the maze, where in fact you’d need to keep track of each room by minimum distance e.g. set all room distances to -1 except your room. Then repeat through all rooms with min-distance of x: go through all directions, and anything with a current min-distance of -1, set to x+1. Then do this until all rooms have a positive value.

maze distance in Inform
to check-jukebox:
    now all rooms are not jukebox-checked;

to decide which number is min-dist of (r1 - a room) and (r2 - a room):
    if r2 is nowhere, decide on 99; [99 is arbitrary but something too big, given we take a minimum below]
    if r2 is jukebox-checked, decide on 99;
    if r1 is nowhere, decide on 99;
    if r1 is r2, decide on 0;
    now r1 is jukebox-checked;
    let a1 be 1 + min-dist of the room north of r1 and r2;
    let a2 be 1 + min-dist of the room south of r1 and r2;
    let a3 be 1 + min-dist of the room east of r1 and r2;
    let a4 be 1 + min-dist of the room west of r1 and r2;
    decide on (the minimum of these);

Also, I didn’t check to see if it was an open-air maze with super-high walls, where maybe sound would carry, or if it had a ceiling, where then sound wouldn’t. But that’s just semantic.

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You get rained on a bunch, so pretty sure it’s open air – which maybe means spatial distance makes more sense than maze-moves as the measure of audibility after all, as the sound’s bouncing around the air rather than just down the corridors?

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Nice code! I was remembering some struggles I had with getting pathfinding to work in Kerkerkruip’s randomly generated map and in an unpublished work with a very non-standard maze; but of course here we don’t need complete pathfinding.

I got the impression that the walls were very high, and sound doesn’t travel well over high walls. But I’m probably overthinking this rather minor aspect of the game. :smiley:

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