Copper Canyon, by Tony Pisculli
Copper Canyon is a Western story written in ink. You take on the role of a boy on the edge of manhood whose father is killed in a mining accident. In fact, the entire town seems on the verge of economic collapse because of the accident. And to make matters worse, a gang of bullies have decided to take over and make life miserable for the survivors. So it’s up to you and your gang of teenage friends to set things aright. After a series of pranks, murders, ghosts and gold nuggets, things become right again.
It’s a fine story, although I found it tonally a bit inconsistent. The protagonist insists on not using deadly violence, which fits well in a particular type of YA story; but deadly violence has already been used and will be used again very soon, blatantly, and against people who certainly do not deserve it. The narrator is interested in events far more than in personalities, brings in a quick succession of names, then makes the most crucial and formative scene happen when the protagonist is alone; but then wraps everything up by telling us about the beautiful friendships that have been formed. Nothing terrible, but I sometimes felt that the author didn’t quite know what kind of story they were trying to tell.
My more major complaint is about the approach to interaction. There’s not much of it; we’re reading big chunks of text, and most of the time these end up giving us a “Continue” message. There’s an element of taste involved, of course, but in general I find that choice-based narrative works better with more frequent interaction. And the choices that we do have seem rather random in the sense that they certainly don’t appear at all the major choice points for the protagonist! Indeed, many of the most important choices are made without our input, including the entire plan to save the town and the way to escape in the execution scene. This feels inconsistent; it is hard to discern a logic in the author’s decisions about when to offer us a choice. Finally, when we do get a choice, these often immediately reveal themselves to be irrelevant, making no difference – which isn’t a big deal in general, but becomes a bigger deal when choices are so sparse. So while playing Copper Canyon was not quite like reading a non-interactive story, it found it came dangerously close to being so.
I don’t want to end on a negative note, so let me also say what I liked most about the game: the completely unexpected, yet unexpectedly poignant, ghost scene. It surprised me, but it worked. In fact, I think I would have liked to hear a little bit more about my relation to my father earlier on in the game, just to make the pay-off of this scene even higher!