#ifcomp 26

So maybe the most important thing to say about this game is that it was fun. I’ve been seeing Bitter Karella games in the Comp for a while, and there’s something about the amazing cover art and the snarky blurbs that’s always drawn my attention, and I keep thinking, yeah, if I manage to get through all the parser games in the Comp that aren’t Windows-only, maybe I’ll fire up my emulated Windows 10 environment and play this and a couple of other games. And then I never do, because there’s always plenty in the Comp that’s not Windows-only. And at the end of the Comp, I think, OK, but in a few weeks I’ll fire up that Windows VM and play Gutttersnipe or Basilica de Sangre because that cover art is wonderful and the blurb is really promising. And then I never do, because life is busy, and I have other projects, and there’s always plenty in my to-play folder, and yeesh, I still haven’t gotten to Cragne Manor or City of Secrets. Which is not a complaint, but just an acknowledgement that, when choosing from a plethora of really good stuff, it’s hard to motivate myself to pick something that has a higher frictional cost over something that doesn’t.

But this game by Bitter Karella is written in a system that’s not Windows-only, so I can play it with no real frictional cost. And it is fun.

For starters, the writing is great: the kind-of-ditzy PC is beautiful snarky parody of the positivity crowd; she is in some ways a lot like the duncey prince from The Wizard Sniffer, a few years ago, moved into the game’s central place, with the snide narration taking on the job of not-quite-critique that the PC played in Wizard Sniffer. The writing is snappy and funny, over and over; the basic conceit of the PC who is a magician’s assistant and has to solve puzzles using the basic equipment of the stage magician (a saw for sawing the assistant in half; a dividing cabinet; a rabbit in a hat; a mechanical dove) works really well. Not all of the puzzles fit this pattern—there’s a cooking puzzle, too, and a few others, but the majority do, and the puzzles and their solutions are laugh-out-loud funny. There’s a hint device—it is of course a crystal ball that you can ask for hints—and though it’s sometimes hard to figure out the right phrasing, there are hints for every puzzle I tried to find hints for, and they’re clear enough to point the player back in the right direction. The map is well-thought-out, elegant and consistent; it represents a plausible magician’s residence (a ridiculous place, of course, but the NPC inhabiting it is a ridiculous person, and it works for that reason). The characters, both PC and NPCs, are one-dimensional, but they’re painted so vividly that their one-dimensionality fits right into the snarkiness of the piece as a whole. (And they’re great characters: the mansion’s cook is a mime who has taken a vow of silence; the gardener is an evangelical who turns everything into a metaphor for his faith; the crystal ball is inhabited by a dead witch who’s always [metaphorically] shaking her finger at you.)

The plot is well-structured, and there are usually multiple puzzles open at once, although they’re often interlocked in such a way that one puzzle needs to be solved before progress can be made on any of the others. This is arguably a design problem, but it’s ameliorated pretty effectively by the fact that the puzzles are basically pretty well-clued, and there is of course the crystal ball that gives hints. (And if I spent nearly an hour wandering around not knowing that what I needed to do to unlink the puzzle chain was return the grimoire to where it belongs, that’s my fault: it was clued pretty clearly in about three separate ways.)

The downsides are comparatively small, and mostly relate to what I think of as the density of the game’s design. That is, I would have loved to see objects used as solutions in multiple puzzles; I would have loved to see more overlap between tasks in general. And there are a few places where I wish the author had made just one more editorial pass through the writing to tighten it up; there are a few places that stick out as awkward or have small grammatical problem, though this is a pretty minor issue overall in what is basically very well written. And there’s the set of transitioning-to-a-new-development-system problems, which occasionally stuck out to me as I was playing: default responses that would have benefited from being altered, standard Inform verbs that aren’t anticipated by the author. But all of these downsides are comparatively small, rough spots that could use polishing but don’t mar the work itself.

And, yanno, it was fun. Did I mention that?

Overall score: 8/10.

There’s some good ideas at the core of this small game: the basic conceit, that Isaac Newton is brought forward in time to solve a scientific crisis in 2020, is funny and engaging. Newton, who is tricked into coming forward in time to resolve the anomalous timeline, has to interact with modern-day London and then return to 1673. Newton as a PC is developed decently well, leaning on the basic history-of-science legend that’s broadly familiar. There are no serious bugs or errors of implementation. The writing is clear, and mostly free of real grammatical problems, even if it is rather formal. (Though this kind of works too, along with the unusual voicing choices of past-tense and third-person narration, as a way of emphasizing the strange situation of the historical personage.)

But the implementation is pretty thin when it exists, and the story is pretty strongly on rails, with movement backward or sideways often restricted in what sometimes feels a heavy-handed way. Trying to move laterally or backward in the game often results in a brusque refusal on a thin pretext (often along the lines of “Isaac has no interest in going that way.” or “You’re only interested in [name of object] right now.”). Also troublesome is the question of how the events in the story actually solve the problem: the story’s conceit is that scientists and engineers and technical people of all types have lost all of the knowledge they had gained since Einstein. The plot posits that this is resolved when Newton takes a book of Einstein’s back in time, translates it into Latin, and passes it off as his own Principia Mathematica. But this fails to explain how the strange “the present has been altered” crisis occurred in the first place, and how Newton’s actions resolve it.

So there are some good ideas in here: Newton is an interesting choice for PC, though he’s not really fleshed out enough, or given specific motivations besides scholarly curiosity and a general desire to right a cosmological wrong. The basic plot setup—find information needed in the past and take it there—is a good idea, though the implementation leaves a fair amount to be desired. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired in some important ways.

Overall score: 4/10.

“It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize humans” is a really good opening line. For one thing, it sets the tone that the PC uses throughout the game—cynical, worldly, experienced, a little superior, just a little didactic. Completely appropriate for a "memoir of a demonic spy in the Cold War between Heaven and Hell,” as the description has it. For another thing, it sets just the right note of “something is different here” with a basic logical disconnect: how can the narrator say one shouldn’t anthropomorphize humans? Aren’t humans already anthropomorphic? By definition, even?

So it’s a clever, fun-to-play, puzzly bit of parser IF that tells a well-controlled story that gradually opens up the scope of the investigation, as a good detective story should: at first, you arrive at the casino seeking only to discover why another demonic operative has abandoned (what you know at or near the beginning of the game to be) a camouflaged outpost for Our Side, but discover, in the course of your investigation, that much more is at stake: there’s a plot afoot by Heaven’s zealots to turn the cold war hot, and it becomes your job to investigate that plot and put a stop to it.

The writing stays wonderful throughout: snarky, weary, knowing, just a little tired; then, after the middle game, increasingly alarmed at what’s happening. The tone is spot-on throughout. The basic puzzle mechanic is clever, too: the conceit is that, since you are a spiritual being, you cannot interact with (most) physical objects and need to manipulate humans into doing so by giving them motivations (verbs, roughly, although things are of course not that simple), and “manners” (adverbs, roughly). This is an unusual form of indirection, and it basically works quite well, although some of the puzzles are rather fiendish, and there are places where I wish they were less fiddly.

For me, it was the puzzle hardness and some small bits of implementation wonkiness that kept this from moving up to being an unqualified ten: the puzzle involving manipulating the diplomats into coming to a peace treaty was difficult, because the motivations for the three of them were opaque; and the usually-excellent built-in hint system almost seemed to be actively misleading in this case: nothing I did based on the hints managed to get the diplomats to come to a deal, and I had to take another tack entirely to solve the problem. (This was the only place where the built-in hint system failed me, though. It also was enough to get through the endgame’s final puzzle, though it was a little vague there, too.)

But all in all, this was wonderful: challenging without being impossible, puzzly without sacrificing narrative, story-based and well-written, with a dozen and a half or so well-implemented NPCs. My biggest complaint, overall, is that there wasn’t more game, and I really hope that Sidewinder the demon shows up in a sequel.

Overall score: 9/10.

This was a fun game. It’s a good story in a well-developed world. The writing is thoughtful and controlled and does a good job of both making the game playable and telling the piece’s story. I quite liked it.

The story itself is well-selected scene from an zombie apocalypse: months after civilization collapses, you’re forced to stop driving because you’re out of gas. There’s a gas station just up the road, though, and it looks like you might be able to get the pump working.

From there, it opens up as you explore the gas station and its surrounding area: the game leads you through a series of puzzles, looking at first as if they’re just targeted at sub-components of that larger goal of turning on the pump in front of the gas station, until you finally wind up in an underground bunker and see that something more is going on. Solving the bunker’s puzzles and getting the backstory then becomes a larger-scale, more important task that, it turns out, resolves the “get the pump working” puzzle almost as an afterthought, but it’s (of course) that larger-scale concern that you discover in the bunker that turns out to be the more interesting and important task after all. The game is tightly woven together and well-executed, with puzzles arising naturally out of the situation. The puzzles were well-executed and fair, requiring objects that would naturally be found in the setting and actions that someone might plausibly take; the next step is often clued in a fairly clear way, though not so much so that the challenge disappears (”OK, I need to find something to stand on. What will it be?”).

The writing, too, is more or less just right: terse but clear, and it sets the mood of looming threat very effectively. The PC is focused on the tasks at hand, figuring out what needs to be done to get his car moving again while continually being aware of his surroundings. I occasionally felt that it was just a little too laconic, but apocalyptic trauma is hard to write well, and Winters generally pulls it off, and hey, haven’t Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood and John Wyndham all theorized in their fiction about what kinds of terse language might emerge when the structures of the world disappear? Similarly, the few grammar errors I noticed would be genuinely nitpicky to point out and didn’t detract from an enjoyment of the story.

One of the more interesting aspects of the fictional world is just how well it works with three dimensions. The game has twenty-six rooms overall by my count, but occurs on two underground and one above-ground level in addition to the ground level that you start on. I was initially frustrated by this—it made it comparatively difficult to map while playing—but this gave way to being genuinely impressed as the game went on. How many Comp games treat UP and DOWN as directions used to connect rooms almost as frequently as the cardinal directions? There are multiple times when exploring those twenty-six rooms that the player needs to keep track of how the levels stack vertically on top of each other to navigate, demonstrating just how carefully the game world is constructed.

All in all, this was a lot of fun, with few rough edges and no real disappointments. I think it’s a large step forward from Winters’s Comp game last year, which wasn’t so polished or well-structured, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he produces next.

Overall score: 7/10

So Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos is a game about a slacker detective looking for a missing woman, Amanda, in an unnamed town somewhere in the contemporary U.S. (the game refers at one point to the “thirty million recently unemployed”). There’s a lot to like about it, but the game as a whole never came together for me.

First, the good: the writing is generally on point throughout, and the small errors here and there don’t detract from the good stuff. It’s classic Robb Sherwin writing: funny in a dry, understated way; well-controlled in terms of plot and pacing; with a well-developed hipster protagonist whose voice comes through consistently and does a solid job of giving a snarky look at contemporary society, where our twentysomething detective lives in a garage and has to deal with perverts at the library to get at the Internet service he needs to do his job. There are a number of good ideas, like the Pet Machine, which is essentially a Hitchhiker’s Guide-style Babel fish for earth animals. And the NPCs were funny and snarky hipsters, just like the protagonist.

But I felt like everything fell kind of flat, altogether. Yes, there was a consistent voice and the writing was genuinely enjoyable, but the level of interactivity was so low, all in all, that the game really was on rails: there are no real meaningful choices along the way, not even the choice of which task to work on next. It was completely linear, and the player’s only real role was to figure out which task to perform next to make the plot advance. These choices are often not clued as well as I’d like, and there were times where I had to go to the walkthrough or use the (well-developed) built-in hint system to figure out what the magic command was. This worked better, somehow, in Sherwin’s Enceladus, entered into last year’s Comp (part of the reason for that, I think, was the charm of the retro, nearly archaic, interface, and part of that was the music, I think). This is not to fault Sousa, but just to say that this particular combination of elements never mixed together and alchemically transformed into something that delighted me.

But the writing was good, and I’m not sad I spent a few hours on the story. It was fun: but it never rose to the level of delightful. For me.

Overall score: 6/10.

So, surprisingly enough, this is my first Ryan Veeder game, although several of his other games have been on my to-play list for quite a while now. And the upshot, I think, is: it wasn’t really my type of game, but it gently cajoled me into liking it anyway.

I started off hating the characters. Christ, I thought, rolling my eyes, who cares about these art-school narcissists and their hyperbolic drama? Get some perspective, you privileged jerks. (Which is not how I normally react to college students, including art students. Not at all.) Because the disproportion at the beginning of the story between the large-scale import of the events and the way that the students react to them is immense. But it’s intentional, I think: the introductory text sets it up for you, talking about the “events” in general terms as if they had historical significance, then drops the player into the middle of ... a sidewalk-chalking contest. Some of the NPCs are quite engaged with it; others are disengaged and snarky about the whole process. None of them are immediately admirable; all have immediately visible personal flaws. I had to flog myself through the first act (the story is divided into four acts, plus an Afterward), thinking both (a) surely it gets better, and (b) hey, if it doesn’t get better, at least there’s no difficult puzzles preventing the story from moving forward.

But the first act ends with something of a bang, and the second act drops you into another perspective on the same events, slightly later, told from the viewpoint of another character. There’s a new perspective in every act, and Veeder’s quite good at making the differences between perspectives pay off. Everyone’s hyperbolic drama shifts into the actual problems of actual humans who somehow become objects of sympathy. There’s a subtle way that the game has of reminding the player that, after all, everyone is fighting a hard battle, and everyone deserves a little sympathy, including the villain of the piece (if you want to think of Nathalie that way). The multiple overlapping perspectives on the events, their backstory, and the situations that set them up help to drive player interest: there’s a set of mysteries to be solved (not in the puzzly parser sense, but hermeneutically) and an unending set of surprises. There’s an interesting set of ways that the game makes you feel as if Veeder is having a conversation with you: the sophisticated way that the game anticipates your input and responds to it is handled better than it is in most parser games, and the well-developed narrative voices really drew me through the game.

The maps were also well done, simple and navigable in a way that’s transparent to the player and that doesn’t require any real effort to learn. If it were a game about exploring the map, this would be a problem; but as a game about interactions between characters, making the map navigable with no effort lets the actual content of the game shine through. (Same deal with the menu-based conversation system: normally I find that off-putting, but here it just lets the conversation work.) 

Everything about the game was polished. The writing was great, and occasionally moving, but never pretentious, even when it was elevated in tone and did experimental things with parser printing. I saw no serious implementation errors at any point. I’ve played a few good games in this year’s Comp so far, but A Rope of Chalk stands out as one of the more polished.

All in all, I’m glad I played it. I’m going to have to finally get to Taco Fiction and Robin & Orchid soon after the Comp.

Overall rating: 9/10.

Well, I liked it. It’s a small parser-based game, apparently the author’s first, in which you play a vampire (and failed venture capitalist) tracking down his business mentor (who is also the vampire who made our PC into a vampire). This is an amusing set-up already, an unusual but productive combination of elements, and Harby makes it pay off pretty well for a short (eleven-room, about an hour’s play time) parser game. 

It is a little too much on rails for me--I want a larger world to move around in, and not to be shepherded quite so vigorously through it. There is always one single immediate task in front of you, and you are unambiguously told what you’re trying to do next at every point in the game. If the first direction is not blunt enough, the NPCs will clearly and unambiguously tell you what needs to happen next. (Frankly, the in-game hints felt a little heavy-handed at times.) There is also an extradiegetic menu-driven help system that explicitly spells out the solutions to several puzzles, so it’s difficult to get genuinely stuck. Also contributing to the on-rails feeling, IMHO, is the menu-driven conversation system (though this once again has the benefit of keeping the plot moving forward, on the flipside).

All of this adds up to fairly linear game, though the puzzles are just puzzly enough to keep it from feeling like you’re just clicking to continue. What makes it work, I think, is that the writing is genuinely funny so often. There are a lot of good decisions that contribute to this: the lack of self-awareness on the PC’s part and the way that it contributes to a sense of dramatic irony; the one-dimensional-but-it’s-a-GOOD-single-dimension NPCs; the Spartan descriptions and lack of distracting objects. All in all, the writing is mostly spot on, snarky and funny and focused on the unfolding plot. There are places where it’s occasionally a bit clunky or awkward, but there are also moments of pure ironic gold:

The manager is sitting across from you. She gives you her friendliest smile. "Good to meet you, Mr. Vohsarb. I only have a few questions for you, just to make sure you're an appropriate fit for this department. So, could you tell me why you applied for this job, and why you want to work at Lunarcel?"

[1] Corporate espionage [2] Revenge [3] I've lost control of my life [4] It has always been my dream to serve the customer

It’s often in the wacky juxtaposition of unexpected elements that the writing shines in this one. It also helps a lot that the game understands the boundaries it’s set for itself and works well within them without straining at the seams, and that what implementation is there is done deeply and, overall, effectively.

Frankly, I guess what I most wanted from this but didn’t get was was more: more world to explore, more implementation and options at interacting with the world around the PC, more conversation options with the NPC. Which I think means that what is there is working pretty well, all in all. I’m looking forward to seeing something else from this author.

Overall score: 7/10.

Amazing Quest is an incongruous entry. It’s more of a simulator than a narrative, and the interaction is limited to a set of yes/no answers to questions the game poses. (And the yes/no answers, as Ant points out, have no effect at all on the outcome of the game.) It’s retrostyled by being written in Commodore 64 BASIC and packaged in an emulator. (And yet, how strange that that C64 emulator is written in JavaScript and running in one of a dozen open tabs in one of my five open Chrome windows.) It eschews the kind of polish that the Comp tends to value in its games in favor of a small set of simple language constructions. There is hardly any narrative at all. The “Instructions” and “Strategy Guide” documents are (or, at least, seem to be) typed on an old typewriter with a dry ribbon.

So Amazing Quest is a minimalist work in a lot of ways, and people have grumbled about that in their reviews: Vivienne Dunstant notes that the ending is sudden and unsatsifactory: “So I think I succeeded. But um I didn’t feel as though I earned it, or really enjoyed it.” Thomas Hvizdos said that it “seems like the sort of game where the code is having the fun.”

WidowDido suggests that the point is to “parody the activity of gaming.” Dan Fabulich takes it to be a prank on the player, one that “IMO ... treats its players disrespectfully.” Victor Gijsbers says that “in the end, it does seem like Montfort is just trolling us.”

But “trolling” suggests engaging in bad faith to provoke a reaction, and “prank” suggests the arrangement of an unpleasant surprise that is also a joke at the player’s expense. Even to call it a “parody” suggests that there’s a separate metacritical level from which it, properly speaking, needs to be appreciated. This is, of course, totally appropriate for a work by Nick Montfort, who works with emergence in a large formal variety of electronic literature projects, and who has a well-developed critical awareness.

But while I was interacting with it, I was curious to think what an unironic reading of the game might look like: what is it that the game is ostensibly asking us to meditate on? If we take it ironically, what is it that the irony is hiding behind? If we read the game “straight,” what is it that it purports to represent? What would a generous reading of the piece look like?

On those terms, perhaps the most generous reading of the piece is to think of it as an experiment in minimalism. What is the least possible amount of interactivity in a piece of interactive fiction? Possibly the amount required by someone just hitting Y<enter>, N<enter>, or just <enter>. That the interactivity is wholly illusory—the piece grinds forward with no interest at all in the player’s input, storing it in a variable that is never again referenced, and simply produces a series of randomly generated sentences at intervals when the player enters a response that’s ignored—reduces the amount of interactivity in this piece of IF further: the only control the player has in the game is over the intervals at which the text is generated, and that only by delaying zir response to the game’s requests for a decision. It is the zero-case input version of Zarf’s definition of parser IF as “enter text to get text”: the only relevant fact about the entered text is that it is zero-length of more. Nothing else matters.

The other end of the definition is also minimized as the game explores another boundary: what is the least amount of fiction in a piece of interactive fiction? Why, basically none at all, aside from the fact that the story has an author-scripted beginning and ending, both of which are themselves quite minimalist. The beginning consists of two sentences totaling seven words: “The gods grant victory,” says the first, giving a minimalist set-up. The second gives an even more minimalist explanation of the task the player is trying to accomplish: “Now to home!” The ending is just barely less laconic: “At last, the battered shuttle brings you alone home to family, hearth, rest.” This framing is of course the same as the basic framing of the Odyssey, and the randomly generated text in between is also vaguely “Odyssey flavored”: nautical, pious, pagan, fate-driven, ostensibly action-oriented. But the mid-game text (if we dignify the structure enough to call it that) is of course not structured logically or ethically, which would require an event to have a meaningful relationship to what precedes it instead of simply being randomly determined. And it is not structured narratively, because the mid-game parts bear no necessary relationship to each other: they need not come in any particular order, and there seems to be no guarantee that you’ll see any particular kind of event on a particular playthrough. (Indeed, there are no “kinds of events,” because events are not simulated any further than by being described in randomly assembled text.) So the entire narrative between the opening and closing, in an expected average of just over 18 turns, is entirely emergent, an epiphenomenon of the reader’s mind seeking meaningful connections between purely random events.

And yet the basics of narrative are there for the reader’s mind to play with. If nothing else, there is the thematic unity of the randomly selectable elements, their clustering largely around the vaguely Odyssey-like warrior culture and its trade-based and military concerns, the pious faith that there is reason underlying the apparently random actions. There are (by counting and combinatorial multiplication) 198 types of places that might be encountered, and each has (the same) three possible outcomes to the player’s ignored answer to the randomly generated action choice.

In the end, I think, what the program -most resembles is the short “how to program” demo programs that were common in magazines and books in the C64 era. Strange as it is to think about software being distributed in printed source form in a now-archaic language 30-odd years ago, it was of course a common way for people to get their software: having bought a computer and subscribed to a “things you can do with your computer” magazine, people would type in programs from the magazine and run them. By modern standards the “games” that were distributed were incredibly primitive, often doing little more than demonstrating concepts in ways that programmer-users were inveigled to use as a model for larger projects, and Amazing Quest is in range for just such a “here’s how to write a procgen in C64 BASIC in 1984″ program. Only it wouldn’t have been called a “procgen,” but a “game,” in the lax sense that lets anything with any narrative tension, even merely the narrative tension resulting from a delay in seeing what the random outcome is, be called a “game.”

This is clearly one of the things that the formal presentation of the short randomized procgen is playing with: the disconnect between our notions of electronic fictionality in 1984 vs. electronic fictionality in 2020 is mirrored by the JavaScript-powered one-tab-in-a-web-browser C64 that runs the procgen program.

But there are other disconnects, as well, and one of these is the disconnect between a program that might have been an interesting basis for an article in, say, Family and Home Office Computing in the late ‘80s, on the one hand, and the rest of the kinds of entries in IFComp this year, and I think that, from the perspective of assigning the entry an IFComp judging score, “that’s an interesting experiment in minimalism” is not the same thing as “that was a fun game to play.”

Overall score: 5/10.