#ryan veeder

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.