Lost Coastlines by William Dooling
As 10CC might say: I didn’t like Skybreak!; I loved it. William Dooling’s 2019 IFComp game let me wander a seemingly endless universe filled with adventures while becoming slowly more powerful. It was so relaxed. Pure sword & sorcery in space, with nothing to worry about except whether it was already time to close the game and go sleep. When I realised that Lost Coastlines followed pretty much the same pattern, I made some tea, relaxed into my comfortable desk chair, and started it up. And then… it somehow fell flat for me. It wasn’t relaxed. It was stressful and punishing, and when I ended up stuck through what seems to be a game breaking bug, it almost felt like relief. Which is too bad, since Lost Coastlines features much of the same creative energy and zany juxtapositions that made Skybreak! so much fun.
What is it that made Lost Coastlines feel unwelcoming and punishing? The first thing is that the game comes with an in-built degradation loop. As you explore the world, you continually lose both food and supplies. In order to keep exploring, you need to buy food and supplies; and in order to do that, you need to find Pleasance. But Pleasance is extremely hard to find. I rarely made more than 1 to 3 Pleasance in an encounter, and a single food item costs upwards of 5 Pleasance. So as I was playing the game, it didn’t feel much like exploring a dreamscape; it felt like a desperate struggle for survival in economic hard times. Which wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were clear ways to gain Pleasance. Sunless Sea had pretty much the same mechanic (with Food and Fuel), but it has easily identified money-making loops that you could go through to stay alive and even make a profit. In Lost Coastlines, you are sailing through mainly empty seas, and I didn’t find a single Pleasance-making loop that would allow me to survive.
The second thing is that while the goal of the game is to gain as much Pleasance as possible while gaining as little Unpleasance as possible, it turns out to be far easier to gain Unpleasance. While the little Pleasance I managed to gain was quickly expended on the bare necessities, I kept accruing more and more Worry, Fury, Madness and Sadness, getting ever deeper into emotional debt. If the point of the game was to generate an atmosphere of mounting despair, it certainly succeeded, and perhaps I should not judge it against what I was hoping it would do. But I really didn’t enjoy this slow descent into an ever deeper pit.
Then I sailed to a location where I had to BRAVE THE STORM, and the storm had an impossible difficulty level, and… my entire ship was gone. I had to start anew with a ‘smaller’ ship. I don’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad. Five minutes later, I failed another encounter and once again lost my ship and crew. By that point I was pretty ready to give up. I persevered, and finally found something that seemed to give me a bit of a chance: a strange unvisited island where I became a God and was awarded 100 Pleasance. Still a lot less than the Unpleasance I had accrued, but it finally allowed me to buy some much-needed items. (The encounter also claimed to give me a crown and a sceptre, but it did not in fact do so.) A little bit later I entered a mysterious library, was unable to tell a character the way to Yian… and then got stuck. There were no keywords. LOOK didn’t work, and neither did any other commands. Having played for about 90 minutes, I decided to call it quits.
So… it looks like another solid piece of work, and I saw glimpses of the trademark Dooling creativity, but I just never got into a mental state where I could enjoy the dreamlike navigation as I suppose I was meant to enjoy it. One further thing that didn’t help the game was the geography and map. The randomly generated location names are sometimes awkward and never very evocative; and they don’t help at all in getting a mental picture of the map or remember where certain events were located. ‘The murderous shallows’ were neither murderous nor, as far as I could tell, a shallows. It also seems very much a lost opportunity to not show on the map the difference between locations where you can do something and locations where you cannot; to have a specific colour for locations where you must BRAVE something before you can sail on; to show the markets; and so on.
I’m really hoping for a post competition release that decreases the punishing difficulty a bit and allows me to explore more of this world in the relaxed way that I crave.