Thank you! I haven’t played yours yet, but as a fan of Wry, I’ve been looking forward to it…
Oddly enough - originally I meant for Assembly’s gods to be whatever the builders of Scandinavia’s megaliths would have believed in, but it turns out very little is known about it. I also tried a version with more Norse-flavored gods, but that ended up being an awkward fit for various reasons too. So I ended up with the current mishmash of Lovecraft and solar cult and spacetime weirdness… a bit syncretic but seems to hang together!
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head by The Hungry Reader
After finishing this game, I learned that the title Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head comes from a song by a band called ‘They Might Be Giants’, which was also the subject of an entire interactive fiction collaboration project called Apollo 18+20: The IF Tribute Album. I wonder what the connection is between this band and interactive fiction, given that I have never heard anyone mention it in any other context? Nor can I recall ever hearing their music. I’ve quickly skimmed the band’s Wikipedia page, but it doesn’t answer this question for me. Perhaps it is just a coincidence.
Anyway, that is incidental to this review! Because what we are going to do is put our hands in puppet heads. But maybe we should first talk about puppets, because it took me a while to get into the same puppet headspace as the game. When I think of puppets, especially puppets that you put your hand in, I think of classic puppet theatre. It’s Jan Klaassen en Katrijn, Punch and Judy, the Italian commedia dell’arte character cast. Or maybe princes and princesses, dragons and wolves, your classic fairy tale stuff. Now those are not the puppets we will meet in Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head. They are much more elaborate and idiosyncratic. So for a while I was thinking of some of the greatest works of visual art that I know: the puppets Paul Klee made for his son. The first time I was in Bern, visiting the Zentrum Paul Klee, I was blown away by his paintings; but perhaps even more by these incredible puppets. However, I didn’t have an easy time understanding how artistic puppets like these could be the subjects of television series and movies, and a sort of theme park. And then, at one point, the game mentioned the Muppets, and I was like… ah, wait, that’s the kind of puppet I’m supposed to think of. I don’t know the Muppets very well. I know the Swedish Chef Meat Balls sketch, I know there’s a weird muppet called Animal who plays the drums, I know the memes of the two old men who always complain, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen The Muppets Take Manhattan as a kid. The only muppet I know really well is Kermit the Frog, because he’s a recurring character in Sesame Street – or at least he is in the Dutch version of Sesame Street. And then maybe characters like Bert and Ernie also count, even if they’re probably not from The Muppets? I slept under Bert and Ernie bed sheets when I was a kid, and I could totally see myself as a kid going to a little theme park dedicated to them. Anyway, that seems to be the kind of puppet we are to imagine in this game. It took me about an hour to understand that.
Which didn’t really matter! The strong suit of Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head are the loving and detailed descriptions of the puppets, the conversations you can have with them, and an entire history of how they came to be, who played them, what they were used for, and so on. The author has poured a lot of love into this fictional world, and one easily gets caught up in the enthusiasm. I’m kind of eager to see one of these puppet shows, which is a great sign. Perhaps the number of characters was a little too high; I found that I could keep the seven main puppets straight, but during the epilogue so many people were introduced that I lost my bearings. But that’s a minor complaint. The idea of setting a piece of interactive fiction at an abandoned puppet show is very original, and to execute it with so much care and detail and inventiveness is simply great.
Unfortunately, my experience of this invented world was made far less enjoyable by basic design decisions in the gameplay. The idea is that we explore four buildings in search of puppets. This search is not very engaging: one simply moves through all the rooms and clicks ‘search’ in every room. After a while, we collect a few puppets that can help us solve puzzles, but I believe that only two puppets are actually used this way – one to open certain locks, and one to fix certain machines. This makes the puzzle element extremely trivial: broken machine? Check. Unable to find the right key? Check. There’s no sense of achievement here.
That by itself wouldn’t be so bad, but three other things about the game make exploration and puzzle solving an enormous chore. First, navigation through the world is cumbersome. I haven’t counted it, but going from a room to your van, taking off one puppet, putting on another, and then going back to that room, could easily take you twenty clicks. Not fun. Second, there is an extremely harsh inventory limit of two items (or actually one item, because if you have two puppets you won’t be able to pick up any new ones), which means that you have to move back and forth between your van and the rooms lots and lots of times. Third, all the buildings are haunted by horrifying security puppets which randomly grab you and steal your puppet.
Playing the game basically goes like this. Go west. Lose a puppet. Undo. Wait. Go west. Lose a puppet. Undo. Wait. Go west. Search. Go north. Lose a puppet. Undo. Wait. Go north. Search. Find and take a puppet. Go south. Go east. Lose a puppet. Undo. Wait. See a description that you can’t go east. Wait. Still see a description that you can’t go east. Wait. Go east. Go south. Go to exit. Go to Quadrangle. Go to van. Manage puppets. Remove puppets. Wear puppet. Re-choose the puppet you were already wearing. Leave puppet management. Leave van. Go back to Quadrangle. Re-choose building. Enter building. Go west. Lose a puppet. Undo. Wait… It’s really Not Fun! And it seemed totally unnecessary. Give me a backpack in which I can store the puppets I found, remove the guard horrors, and I would have enjoyed this game so much more.
So Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head makes me a bit sad. There was so much great content, and yet I spent most of my time being frustrated. Maybe we can get a “no enemies” mode post-comp?
To end on a happy note, let me share you this great puppet scene from Sesame Street. Some friends of mine, knowing how much I loved it, once made me a doorbell that played the sound of this video from around 2:39 when somebody pressed the button. One of the best presents I ever got.
Thanks for the review! I’m sorry the gameplay didn’t work for you, but I had a pretty specific game idiom in mind and it’s really more than just a scavenger hunt!
I’m very glad you liked the characters, even if they’re not your go-to idea of puppetry. I had heard that the Swedish Chef is a huge success in Scandinavia and the Netherlands— it’s very funny to hear it confirmed. Obviously this is all from a very USA-centric perspective, though; Maybe I should have taken more inspiration from Augsberger Puppenkiste?
Anyway, I feel I need to address everyone who has PYHITPH on their list of things to finish and hasn’t done so yet: before you cast your vote, ease up on that undo button! Losing puppets, and getting them back, is a major part of the game! You’re missing out on a lot of content that way!
Maybe, rather than a monster-free edition, I should put out an undo-free edition…
Oh, that was not a problem at all! It would be boring if everything I read used my go-to ideas of things.
Hm… Okay, so let me tell you what would have happened to me if you had made an undo-free edition. I would have played the exact same way, except that I would have used Save-Restore instead of undo, thus only adding to my frustration. I’m not the kind of gamer who can easily bring himself to accept suboptimal outcomes! If I play a shooter, I’m pressing that Quick Save button all the time and restoring immediately if I lose too much health. I probably won’t need all that health. But it’s psychological.
Only two things would get me to explore what happens if I lose puppets. The first is roguelike saving, which makes it impossible to do Save & Restore to get back to earlier situations. But it’s unlikely that that’s what you want for this game. The second is: being shown that losing and regaining puppets is going to be fun. As I experienced Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head, it seemed to hint very very strongly that losing puppets is a bad thing that you need to avoid. You’re told to be careful, the enemies are described as terrifying monsters, on losing a puppet you are not given a hint that it might be possible to regain it… everything suggests that losing a puppet is a bad thing! And so of course I hit undo. Maybe it would be nice if the an early puppet loss is unavoidable, so that the player is always going to experience the search for a lost puppet?
We’re a 12-year old girl getting up real early to go to the forest alone. Our aim is to find good samples for school and make nice photographs. While we’re not exactly forbidden to go into the forest, we also didn’t exactly ask permission, and it’s clear that our parents are wary of the landscape and don’t want us to turn too far.
Tricks of light in the forest has an interesting, ahem, trick when it comes to navigation: instead of using compass directions, we choose between ‘home’ and ‘forest’. This makes a lot of phenomenological sense. Behind us is the known and safe; in front of us, the unknown and potentially dangerous. It’s one of several ways that the games makes us feel apprehensive about the journey. Sure, it’s a nice walk in a lovingly described environment. We get to feel things, make photos, put pieces of moss in our collection, enjoy a drink from the stream, feel the dead leaves with our bare feet… what’s not to like?
But at the same time, the game gives us hints of danger. Impenetrable fog. Narrow tunnels. Bullet shells on the ground. Warnings by our parents. Noises of some large animal. The success of the game depends to a large extent on balancing these two moods: one of enjoyment, one of apprehension, which together make up the mental state of our protagonist. And I think it works. The player is constantly left guessing as to what is coming, as to what the mood of the piece is, is supposed to be, will turn out to be. Is the disaster with the boar a real disaster? Are monitor lizards really dangerous? Is this world more post-apocalyptic or more solarpunk?
And then we get to a torture and murder cabin, strongly hinted to be a left-over from a time when climate change denying conservatives were killing progressives, and we… don’t really understand what is going on, are happy with finding some earrings (who knows, they could be our grandmother’s, maybe our grandmother was murdered here!) and use the bleach to defeat some lizards. There’s a huge gap between us and the protagonist here; shades of Adrian Mole (where the main irony is that we understand things that Adrian is too young to grasp). But the balance remains. Maybe nothing much happened here. We’ll never find out, not in the game, at least.
An intriguing piece; a mood piece; but it takes a lot of cunning to craft a mood like this.
Watching someone else’s holiday photographs is surely one of the most excruciating activities in the world – and I suppose one of the few blessings of social media is that people now simply put such pictures on their Facebook and you can ignore them. But what it makes it so terrible? Sure, those people and places have no meaning to you. But what’s worse, they have no meaning to them. It’s just some stuff they passed through on their 17-day organised trip through Java and Bali. Maybe they have a few nice memories, maybe there are three good anecdotes to tell, but otherwise, these photos are just patches of light.
It’s different if someone shows you their carefully curated photo album, maybe one of long ago, and tells you why these photos matter. It’s still somebody else’s photos. But by having someone explain their meaning, a little of that meaning can rub off on you. The photos becomes little windows into someone else’s life.
And of course all this is very different from watching a photo exhibition in an art gallery, where the photos themselves must carry the meaning. Vivian Maier is not there to explain her street photography to you; and of course there is nothing to explain, in a sense. She’s just an observer, just like you.
With this classification in mind, we can state that My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition belongs squarely in the second category. Its exhibits are not meaningful in themselves, but also not just random pictures of the world. They are meaningful to Bez, and he is going to talk us through them, explaining each piece, and stringing them together in a narrative about his mental health breakdown and his long, long journey through mental healthcare. It’s very personal. And if at the end it’s still somebody else’s photos (notebooks, stickers, toys, and so on), at least they’ve all been made into little windows that show us Bez’s life.
The period that Bez tells us about was really, really tough. It starts with – some reviewers say a suicide attempt, but I think it was – strong suicidal tendencies. of course we know that Bez didn’t commit suicide, since the game exists, but I was nevertheless glad that the game quickly diffuses some of the tension. This piece is not meant to shock us with big emotions or unexpected horrors. It’s talking to us. It doesn’t want to make us uncomfortable, or comfortable, it just wants to talk us through a period of a life. We get to know something about Bez, and something about how transgender people are treated, and something about how the US health care system works (and doesn’t work, but overall the vibe is relatively positive), and something about Bez’s family… but it’s not a didactic or activistic work. It doesn’t have a message. We’re just here, and Bez is talking to us.
I liked it. It wasn’t super powerful as art; but it wasn’t really trying to be art. It was us being there and Bez talking to us. Showing us some stuff. Giving us an update. Being honest. Some parts are more interesting, others are less interesting, but you know, being interesting isn’t really the point. The point is being real. Creating those little windows, and showing us something of that life.
On a personal note, I’m really glad that Bez is doing all right. I saw a little bit of the despair leading up to this period on Twitter, where we were following each other, and I thought more than once the impotent thought: “I really hope there are some people actually there, with Bez, who can take care of him.” Thank God there were.
And talking about God: the most shocking thing in the piece for me were the early passages where one of the reasons that Bez doesn’t commit suicide is a fear of Hell. I mean, I’m really glad they didn’t commit suicide. If the fear of Hell had that effect, thank God for the fear of Hell. But in every other respect: let’s all get rid of this most evil, most depraved, most horrible of all thoughts that human beings have ever had: the idea that a good and loving God would create a place of eternal punishment. It’s an affront to God (and I feel this even though I don’t really believe in God), an affront to man, and an affront to logic. I highly recommend the book That All Shall be Saved by David Bentley Heart, a respected Christian theologian. In the meantime, here is George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, on what a blessed person in Heaven would do if there were still someone in Hell:
Which, shorn of the theology, seems a pretty good message to take from My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition, even if we are all so limited in the performance of this universal duty.
No, I specifically asked the moderators to move my topic to the public part of the forum! (And I announced that I would do this in the first post of this topic.)
From what I’ve seen of the reviews, I would hazard the guess that nobody found out how to get puppets back. There seemed to be two classes of players: ones who (like Victor and I) used undo or save/reload to avoid getting puppets stolen, and ones who lost puppets and never got them back.
As a game design thing, Victor’s already talked about how everything in the game pushed you to view ‘losing puppets’ as a terrible thing that must be avoided. But if you wanted people to lose and regain puppets, I think it would be necessary to put ‘losing and regaining a puppet’ on a critical path through the game. As a random brainstorm: a room that always had a guard in it, who only left you alone to do something in that room if it had stolen a puppet from you. And then, I dunno, a room after that where you needed that puppet again?
It would be tricky, and I actually feel like the game most people played where they assumed stolen puppets were lost forever, was a perfectly fine game! But maybe something to keep in mind for your next game?
It may not have been as unusual as I feared: when I talked to @bitterkarella after she played, she had already used the “hidden” game mechanic without being tipped off! Perhaps this is a demonstration of the subtle difference between playing for a review, when time is money, and playing for yourself, where you have more freedom to explore and reap what you sow?
Now I did consider this notion— in fact, originally the plan was for Ernest to automatically get stolen, forcing the player to enact a rescue plan. The problem there is that rescuing a “starring” Handful requires the sacrifice of their corresponding “co-star”, in this case Dull Thud, and scripting that in would mean you’d never be able to rescue all the puppets you saw! My game testers didn’t like this idea, they got too attached to all of them, so maybe it’s worth missing the cool part to get a perfect game.
Oh, I’m glad that people found it! But I can say at least for me that I never play a game with an eye towards reviewing it and definitely not with an eye on the clock; I just play the game. Afterwards, I use the spur of reviewing to make me think about the game I just played more that I otherwise would.
Trying to think through my thought process a little more…
I think I figured out that if I went to a room at the wrong time and had a puppet, the guard would steal the puppet, but that if I didn’t have a puppet, the guard would kill me. As such, losing a puppet was a way to buy myself a few extra turns wandering around before dying. This was definitely something I was never going to do on my ‘canonical’ run-through of the game: just because I-the-player was bad at figuring out the guard pattern, didn’t mean I was going to sacrifice another person to make things a little easier.
I agree with your testers here ;-). However, it does also mean that even if I had found the way to rescue the puppets, I probably wouldn’t have used it! I had assumed from the discussion earlier that you could lose and then rescue all the puppets, but if that’s not true, that means that undo/restore is still the optimal way to play the game. (Also, I’ll say that unlike Victor, I definitely got the sense early on that the guards weren’t random, but following some pattern. I never actually figured out that pattern, but knowing it was there made the save/restore cycle less annoying for me than it was for Victor.)
Ooh, interesting. I never played on after losing a puppet in the game, but I did have the impression from talking to the van driver that I had the option to play on and get the puppet back. (it just seemed, from my naive perspective, like doing so would be more work without corresponding gain). But learning that that would require sacrificing a different one . . . oof yeah I would view that as a bad outcome.
You made me doubt myself, so I went back to check, and the Commissary guard, at least, definitely kills you. You get a nice obit in the newspaper the next day and everything.
As you watch, your body makes an infinitely soft sound, perhaps a rattle in your breath or a knuckle popping; it doesn’t matter. The creature, if this can be called a creature, senses it. Immediately, with purpose and alacrity, it twists and focuses its orifice on you.
You have no way to defend yourself.
The sleeve of musky fur suddenly ejects its inside, striking you like a soft plush spear, and pulls you off your feet and toward the main body, where the orifice is opening to engulf you.
In its interior darkness, you think you see glittering black eyes.
When I entered the green room, I’d just get one sentence and nothing else, like “What’s the blue thing doing here??” And that’s it. No warning why that’d happen.
Very well-written and interesting thoughts that gave me new insight into several of the games. I always have to fight with myself to not respond too much and basically review people’s review threads (that way lies madness), so I’ll limit myself to two thoughts:
(1) I find the idea of a beat witch variant where you type “beat witch” all the way through very amusing
(2) regarding surely the MOST DISCUSSED game of the comp:
20 Exchange Place
in response to
OK, reading the thoughts on this game has made me think that I have perhaps a greater knowledge of early 2000s Clive Owen movies than the average person in this forum. The game is (unstatedly?) based on 2006 movie Inside Man in which Clive Owen leads a band of robbers in a bank heist slash hostage situation that I think pretty directly inspired a lot of the game. (This also explains why it’s impossible to totally “win” the game by catching the robbers, in that they get away with it in the movie, and also the title of the game, since 20 Exchange Place is the address of the bank in the movie.)
I’m not at all saying that the game should “get credit” or anything for things that are not actually in the game, but for anyone with a mental itch as to how we are supposed to imagine the robbers did it, there are 128 minutes of hollywood product available explaining how they did it and also ate pizza and kept their loot etc etc and I suspect that’s what the author was imagining happens.
(Although it also strikes me as an interesting choice that the author added in the “bad” endings [which are not in the movie] because it’s strongly indicated in the movie that they would NOT in fact blow up the bank or kill a bunch of hostages. But I may have already thought about this too much.)
