#matthew warner

So there’s some things that work quite well here. Anyone who knows me knows that I like a good piece of postapocalyptic fiction, and this is a pretty good piece of postapocalyptic fiction in a number of ways. It understands the basic expectations of the genre, and it does a good job with a lot of the writerly skills and concerns: PC voice is well developed through the game, consistently, right from the very beginning. The character is a stock survivor character from any of a number of postapocalyptic settings, and the game focuses on a single narrative problem that the PC has to solve. The NPCs are better implemented than they absolutely need to be, and their voices, too, are strongly developed. The pacing of the story is good, and the ticking clock in the status line really helps keep up the pressure of an urgent situation as the game progresses. The time pressure is not extreme, but it’s always there: you can explore a little, but there’s no chance to see the whole game world. And the plot has a well-designed structural elegance (though the game pulls this off by putting the plot pretty strongly on rails). 

But the game is pretty strongly on rails, and it often doesn’t feel interactive for precisely that reason: it’s a solve-puzzle-to-get-another-plot-chunk structure a lot of the time, which is immersion-breaking for me. The puzzles themselves are often only tenuously connected to the plot: there’s a set of “look up some facts in an encyclopedia” puzzles throughout the game, and while yes, I am in fact playing the game in a browser, and yes, I can just do a Google search, there’s no reason to believe that the PC just knows these things offhand; making the puzzles work in this way forces distance between the player and the PC. Sure, *I* can look up this particular translation of a word into Japanese, but there’s no indication that the player speaks Japanese as far as I can see. There are also cryptogram and arithmetic puzzles that are a stretch for in-game likelihood of inclusion. Other puzzles are mostly of the “find an item” type, which feels like a slog because the game lacks the kind of small kind affordances that I’ve come to expect with modern parser IF: you can’t read things, or wear them, until you’ve explicitly taken them, for instance, and I really missed the implicit TAKE action in a lot of places in this game. Similarly, disambiguation is kind of pushy, and hard to avoid: going through an airlock makes you close one door before opening another. Well, fair enough: that’s the point of an airlock. But the parser only recognizes DOOR for the relevant nouns, as far as I can tell, and so you have to type CLOSE DOOR and get a question about whether you mean the interior or exterior door. CLOSE INTERIOR DOOR results in a parser error message. Transcripting commands in Adventuron are non-standard (nonstandard transcripting is a pet peeve of mine; I had to go to the Adventuron manual to figure it out). Worst of all, I think, is that UNDO does nothing, not even giving an error message. 

There’s also a problem with structure: the one time that I detected a failure to keep the game on rails, the plot cohesion fell apart. This happened on my first play-through, when I thought I had more time to explore; it turns out that there’s an attack that’s scripted for late in the game, outside the ruined city, when you’re returning with the doctor to help deliver your wife’s baby. But you can get the attack earlier, if you decide to try exploring on the hoverbike. Fair enough, I suppose: this is another “why are you exploring the postapocalyptic landscape when you’re supposed to be finding an obstetrician, which is a someone your wife needs now” moment that promotes urgency. And the result of being able to continue playing even though the game is now unwinnable is a fair, realistic response to the situation. But it feels like this possibility was only sketched out roughly.

There are also some larger-scale things that bother me about the construction of the premise, and one of those is the overused postapocalyptic trope of the Return to Real Gender Roles Now That Our Degenerate Society Has Collapsed. This is probably most prominently visible in The Walking Dead, where the major female characters are basically all hysterical machines for producing babies and demands while yelling about their feelings, while the major male characters are basically inarticulate, violent providers for their families; the process by which children become adults in the show is largely a process of learning how to play out those gender roles. (Go back and watch the first conversation between Rick and Shane in the first episode of the show again and tell me that I’m wrong.) Second Wind doesn’t lay it on nearly as thick as The Walking Dead, but it is after all a story about having to go out and experience danger while your wife stays home and has a baby, and it doubles down on this by forcing the PC to sacrifice himself in order to save the two women and his child. I would frankly have preferred a postapocalyptic story with another problem situation to get the plot moving forward.

In the end, I’m not sure how much of what I’m noticing is the author’s work, and how much is Adventuron, because this is the first time I’ve played an Adventuron game. What I am asking is not “Is Adventuron a useless tool for writing parser IF?” because it clearly is not: small things aside, this is a well-executed work.  (Things that don’t work the way I wish they did are not automatically and necessarily wrong; it’s just that they’re not a good fit for me. Rough spots are not always an indication of poor construction; sometimes they just haven’t been cleaned up yet.) And I’m not asking whether it attracts “less capable” authors in the mode of parser-IF authors who sneer at, say, Twine; because it’s perfectly clear that this story is well written, and there are plenty of other authors who have proved they know what they’re doing in more established, traditional systems and who are now working (or also working) in Adventuron; and in fact, nitpicks aside, I wish I’d picked up a few Adventuron games earlier, because there’s something about the sparse, retro feel that promotes good, terse writing, which is one of the areas where this particular game does shine. (Adventuron’s on-screen graphics are part of this appeal to retro sensibilities and, by the way, using them as an in-game map here is a good idea that’s executed well.)

I guess what I’m really asking about is to what extent Adventuron’s retro appeal is connected a sort of conservative desire for simpler times, when we all only had eight-bit computers and simpler gender roles to play out: not whether the system forces that, which of course it does not, but the extent to which it inadvertently clusters those things together and encourages works that do the same.

That’s a hard question, and I don’t have an answer. I certainly wouldn’t claim to have drawn any sort of penetrating transcendental insight from playing one game written in the system. I’m just pondering.

But Second Wind has a lot to recommend it: wonderful writing, good plot structuring, and plenty of pressure to solve the sub-problems that arise while trying to solve the main problem. 

Overall score: 6/10.