#ifcomp 2020

This was a fun short game (a little over an hour for me): lots of things recalled the Enchanter trilogy, mostly in positive ways: the time-travel puzzles, the sensible magic system, the spare writing all show that they played a role in influencing the game. It’s a fun, snarky romp where you play a druid sent back in time by your order (I myself pictured the Federal Bureau of Druids as something along the lines of an American Ministry of Magic, but it’s never fleshed out) to avert the apocalypse, an event caused by a ritual performed by a group of cultists. Sent partway back in time, you need to find more elements to feed into the time-travel spell so that you can move through time more freely, investigating how the cultists came to bring about the apocalypse, then disrupting the ritual.

It’s a good concept, and it’s pretty well implemented. The small map that changes as you move back and forth between the four seasons gives you an opportunity to see the coming apocalypse from a variety of perspectives throughout the game ... and for a piece of IF with such minimal NPC interaction, the story certainly is person-focused, with many puzzles being of the knowledge/information/persuasion type. The small map repeated (with variations) across all four seasons is well designed, and the overall map for the game as a whole, integrating all four sub-maps, is even elegant. The small space becomes almost transparent to move through as you play (and the graphical map that’s automatically built at the top of the interpreter screen is helpful in achieving this: it’s an attractive but not distracting touch that helps to orient the player, signal where things are, and track which parts of the geography haven’t been explored yet).

The writing is usually rather good, too: spare, and sometimes to the point where that’s a fault, but also indicating player focus on the urgent tasks the PC is performing. Significant moments (the beginning, the endings) are usually still short, but rather punchy, and there’s a wry humor in a lot of them that can be very funny. The few minor grammatical errors are definitely in the “well, there are bound to be a few in any medium-sized interactive work” category and not in the “clearly the author didn’t care about proofreading” category. There was some good slapstick-type humor, here, too, and some snarky observational bits that I quite enjoyed: the chicken and the road, for instance.

The puzzle structure is also elegantly thought out: the early bits of the game have comparatively simple puzzles, largely of the object-manipulation type, that gate access to the ability to travel through time to different seasons; but while solving these puzzles, the player gets background information that’s needed to solve the puzzles later in the game; and once all four seasons are accessible, the puzzles begin to be more focused on the time-travel mechanic itself, first making the device mobile (instead of requiring the player to return to a specific location in the middle of the map), then making it possible to carry objects through time. Each of these changes substantially alters the map for the player, making solutions possible to outstanding puzzles, and each requires that old objects be rethought in new ways. The puzzles themselves are basically fair, and I even found most of them to be too easy; but two—getting past the cow, and moving the quartz forward in time—I found underclued and went to the walkthrough for solutions.

I suppose what I really wanted here was for things to be both tighter and more fleshed out. Tighter, in the sense that I wish the objects were more frequently reused in different ways, and that the time-travel mechanic were made use of more thoroughly throughout the game; and more fleshed out, in the sense that I wish there were not only more implementation depth but also more backstory: we get virtually nothing about the three major religions in the story aside from a few very vague suggestions (solar, military; druidic, planty; cultic, strange). Having some of the cultural and religious depth fleshed out here would have added a lot, I think. But this was a fun game, and it was a good way to spend an hour and a half or so.

Overall rating: 8/10.

In terms of structure, this is a twine story with two types of links which I'll call "digression" and "advancement" links. Each in-text "digression" link is an invocation of the protagonist's cybernetic abilities: hyper-senses, memory lookup, and so on. These links are color-coded by ability. Sometimes these links will reveal new "advancement" links at the bottom of the page. I felt like this was a really cool mechanic, and helped to establish a sense of the character. The interface was also visually really attractive.

Despite only being a prologue to what will hopefully be a much longer story, this game was rather long and felt like a complete story arc. There are some major choices, like whether to accept or reject the client’s request, but the game does not progress to the consequences of these choices.

The writing is excellent, the cybernetic-footnotes especially (I love the hyper-logical language juxtaposed with the emotional). There are the expected modern cyberpunk plot beats: the uberization of the protagonist's company, alienation of all sorts, corporate malfeasance, etc. Everything comes off as believable and realistic, I feel.

As a Chinese-American who is at best semi-literate in Chinese, Mother Tongue kind of spoke to me. I can’t help but compare the protagonist’s relationship with their mother with my own. The child seems to treat the mom more as a friend than a parent (this is not a dynamic I’m used to). At the same time, it seems like the mom doesn’t know anything about the child at all, asking what their hobbies are and what they like and dislike to do (I guess it’s drawing out conversation, but it still feels kind of strange to me, perhaps for the idiosyncratic reason that I am not used to having conversations like this). In addition, the segue into the Big Topics at the end doesn’t feel entirely natural to me.

I felt like I actually learned a bit of Tagalog (which will be soon forgotten; but I will remember that it has VSO word order right). Also I would have preferred a more lengthy game, perhaps with multiple conversations over time. But I really appreciated this game overall.