The Stack

I’m in chapter 7 (out of 10), and I’ve got most of the backstory by now — some of it from conversation, some from visions in dreams, some from physical evidence. The game provides plenty of redundancy in presenting information, so other players will have discovered things by different means — and in different orders. Let there be spoilers.

Basically, it all comes down to sentient alien trees that need my help. Normally, these trees bond psychically with humanoids from their own planet, effectively providing the trees with the advantages of eyes and hands. But these particular ones, the survivors of a spaceship crash, have been stranded without a host. Until Progue showed up, that is.

Progue used to be a “wayfarer” like the protagonist, although the art that moved him was sculpture rather than painting. He came to the island with his two young daughters some years ago, leaving behind the world where his wife died. The daughters, both wayfarers as well, departed the island when Progue became strangely obsessed with building strange technological devices, driven by the whispers of the trees.

Mental contact with the trees ultimately drove Progue mad. The trees claim that this is was the result of misunderstanding — Progue wasn’t familiar with the concept of trees that put thoughts in your head, and the trees weren’t used to humanoids who aren’t familiar with that concept, so neither side was really prepared. Progue assumed for a long time that the thoughts in his head were his own, and felt terrified and violated when he realized they weren’t. One of the main ways the backstory has been revealed is through the memories revealed by the trees in my dreams, memories which I see from the point of view of Progue and his children, complete with their thoughts. Progue calls this the ultimate violation of privacy, and he has a point. The trees have had years to figure out where they went wrong, and have taken care to be more delicate this time. After all, even if they’re sugar-coating things and what they actually want is a mind-controlled slave, it’s counterproductive if the slave figures out what’s going on and starts resisting and subsequently goes on a felling spree, like Progue did.

And in fact the “mind-controlled slave” theory isn’t without support. The phone-home device that the trees used Progue to build has been hacked by another group: another colony from the same planet, but one where the humanoids survived and the trees died. They say they’re doing fine on their own, which throws the trees’ “peaceful symbiosis” claims into question, and their messages to me essentially boil down to “Don’t trust them, they’re just using you”.

Which is fair enough, but given that I’m to withhold trust, why should I trust either side? It’s very much a Sirrus and Achenar situation, or, since only one side is issuing dire warnings, perhaps more like Yeesha/Esher. (The humanoids aren’t quite as snide as Esher was, but they are snide enough for it to be a little off-putting.) Anyway, I feel like I’ll be called upon to pick sides soon. Maybe a third option will present itself. Maybe one side or the other will be turned into an unambiguous bad guy via revelation of atrocities, as seems to happen a lot in fiction involving moral decisions in an atmosphere of deceit. But probably not: a couple of chapters ago, Progue gave me this big speil about relativism, and it seems like that has to have been leading somewhere.

In the latest chapter, I found a shark stranded on land, and had the opportunity to help it get back into the water, if I so chose. Not a major plot point, just an incidental event of the sort that’s been enriching the experience throughout. In our world, there’s no way the shark would be alive at the point when I found it, hours after the event that stranded it. Since we’re in an alien biosphere here, I can accept it, but it’s still enough of a strain to make it clear that it wasn’t included solely for its literal meaning.

When people hear the term “interactive fiction”, often the first thing they imagine is branching plots. And that’s seldom the case. Even when a work of IF provides multiple endings, it’s usually a matter of only one split made at the very end. This is because branching structures yield exponential complexity, and it’s largely work wasted: a player is probably going to see only one story out of the many available, and may not even be aware that the alternatives exist, if the differences are governed by hidden variables.

Blue Lacuna is at least partly governed by semi-hidden variables. By “semi-hidden”, I mean that when I type “score”, part of the output is like:

You’ve met Progue, who likes you (+6), feels dominant towards you (-1), and feels paternal towards you (+3).

.. but the “score” command is completely undocumented, even in the verbs list in the help menu. The only reason I tried it is that it’s one of those standard IF verbs handed down to us from the golden age. I’ve said before that this game is clearly built with newcomers in mind, but this extra information is effectively available only to experienced IF players. And it does affect how I play. At one point, after conversing with Progue, I discovered that I had inadvertently increased his romantic interest variable (which isn’t in the above listing — it seems to have dropped out of the list of relevant stats completely at some point). This was an unwelcome development, not only because my character (this time around) is male and heterosexual, but because it seemed like it could only cause problems later if he saw himself as a rival to Rume. So I immediately restored to my last save. Without such a concrete sign, I would have kept playing.

Chapter 3 of Blue Lacuna ends in a conversation with a castaway named Progue, the game’s other major character. Much of the game is occupied with learning Progue’s backstory, which Progue himself doesn’t know at the beginning. He’s quite mad, you see. He doesn’t even remember his own name for a good long time. But talking with the player apparently acts as a kind of psychotherapy, and by chapter 3’s end he’s recovered his wits enough to talk sensibly about a lot of the things you’ve discovered on the island.

The conversation system is sort of a hybrid of menu-based conversation and Infocom-style ASK/TELL: you’re limited to specifying a keyword to talk about, but the keywords you can use at any given moment are presented in a list at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t like any of the current options, you can type “subject” to bring up a broader list. There’s an occasional problem with interpreting keywords the wrong way, if they’re present as both a conversation option and a thing in the current room, but for the most part conversation is straightforward: at any given moment you’re either answering a question, in which case your choices are constrained to the possible answers, or you’re asking questions yourself, in which case you exhaustively go through your list of options, just like in most other menu-based adventure game dialogue systems.

In the particular conversation just after Progue goes sane, there was a keyword “sketchbook”. I didn’t remember seeing any sketchbook, but I asked him about it anyway. I did remember some sketches in one location, so I figured that maybe they had been in a book and I had just forgotten. It’s easy to forget details in the rush of initial exploration. Well, it turns out that I actually hadn’t found the sketchbook yet. I’ve found it now: it was in a place where I could have easily gotten to it very early on if I hadn’t been so dense. Presumably all of the beta testers found it well before this point, and thus didn’t notice that it could be discussed out-of-order.

I’m not describing this just to complain about the bug. It’s actually pretty impressive how bugless the game had been up to that point, especially with all it does with variable descriptions: all sorts of things change with the time of day, the state of player knowledge, even with the tides, and it all just works flawlessly. Rather, I bring it up because of what it illustrates about the conversation system. The fact that you’re typing in keywords makes it feel a lot like ASK/TELL, but in a traditional ASK/TELL system, this bug would have been invisible to me. The “sketchbook” topic could have been available, but I wouldn’t have known about it.

One thing about the keyword-highlighting system: it makes it easy to pick the keywords out, and therefore easy to take them out of context. When I see a paragraph of descriptive text with a few blue nouns in it, it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m going to type in those nouns, so I find myself often doing so before I’ve read the text around them. Entering an abandoned cabin, the first thing I notice is the word “skeleton”. Clearly a significant thing to find! Typing it in, I get the response “The skeleton, mounted on the wall, makes a large diamond,” — what? — “and must have once belonged to some flat, manta ray creature…” Not at all what I had been imagining from the word “skeleton” alone. Only at this point do I look back at the room text and notice that it was described from the first as a manta ray skeleton. It’s just that the words “manta ray” weren’t blue, and didn’t stand out.

Well, I’ve explored most of the island where Chapter 2 takes place, and I’ve finally found some puzzles. Really unmistakable ones, too: a complex bit of non-operational machinery with multiple components here, a locked door with a bunch of enigmatically-labeled buttons there. Finding the combination for that door seems to require going out and observing wildlife in various parts of the island. These puzzles all feel particularly Myst-like to me. Perhaps it’s just because that’s the kind of puzzle you get when you design for no inventory — the game still hasn’t yet admitted that it has an inventory at all, although it may introduce the concept in a later chapter.

But the author does acknowledge the Myst series as a strong influence, and it shows, even if you ignore the puzzles. The world-hopping is strikingly similar, both games using a mechanic where links are established by precise artistic depictions of the destination world. (Ironically, the graphical game uses books for this purpose, while the textual game uses graphic arts.) Chapter 2 Island has an ecology as diverse as Riven‘s, with lush descriptions that create much the same effect as Myst‘s rich (for the time) graphics, making it clear that this is a world meant to be savored. (The examine-all-the-wildlife puzzle encourages this too, of course.) And the particular situation of the wayfarer and Rume in the beginning reminds me a lot of Atrus and Catherine, living in voluntary rustic isolation, crafting their own tools and achieving the kind of comfortable lifestyle that usually requires more than two people to support it. It’s a bourgeois fantasy of life outside the city, reminiscent of 18th-century nobles escaping the pressures of court life by playing at being carefree shepherds, without the privations experienced by real shepherds. But hey, a fantasy is a fantasy.

Myst, for all its success, is reviled by a lot of people, and its imitators moreso. This is because the worst aspects of Myst are also generally the easiest to imitate. But Blue Lacuna does a good job of picking out the the things that are actually appealing, the stuff that kept the fans coming back. Obviously it’s not imitating the user interface, except perhaps in a very abstract way.

But even as it’s getting more and more Myst-like, it’s also getting more text-adventure-like. In my last session, I found a compass. If you’re holding it and its cover is open, exits are listed with their compass directions. The textual descriptions are there too, alongside the directions, like “Sand stretches south towards the center of the beach, and you could also head back southwest down to where the waves are breaking”, but it’s the compass directions that are highlighted in green, not “beach” and “waves”. This is a big change to how the game plays, and it’s completely voluntary, and can be switched on and off at will — which means that the author went to the trouble of writing two different exit lists for every room on the island. It remains to be seen how this will apply to other worlds. Since compass-direction listings are dependent on an object in the gameworld that wasn’t crafted by the player character personally, it should, according to the rules, be left behind when I wayfare.

I first became aware of Blue Lacuna from its amusing promo, which consists of a several paragraphs of text introducing its premise and protagonist. The amusing part is that the text is spread over a series of public-content websites such as Myspace and Flickr and Youtube, each fragment ending with the URL of the next fragment. It tells the story of a “wayfarer”, someone with the rare ability to move between worlds, and the presentation was clearly chosen to reflect this. The game content doesn’t really rely on this introductory text, but I’ve seen games before that rely on external websites, and it always makes me uneasy, because it renders content which could otherwise be archived and preserved subject to the web’s transience and volatility. But then, I suppose that even this works with Blue Lacuna‘s themes, which have a lot to do with abandonment and loss. Our wayfarer can travel to new worlds, but doesn’t have the ability to go back. To fare way is to farewell, forever.

The author has gone to some lengths to make the game accessible to beginners. Travel by means of compass directions, that old bugaboo, is abandoned in favor of destination nouns. Important nouns in the output are highlighted (blue for objects, green for exits), and nouns are accepted as complete commands on their own, like in Ferrous Ring. In fact, we’re told in an early bit of interstitial tutorial that you can complete the game without ever typing a verb. Playing entirely by choosing highlighted words in the text you’re reading can make it feel more like a website than a game, even if the act of selection consists of typing rather than clicking. Still, you can use freeform IF commands if you want, and there are things you’ll only see if you do. There is in fact more adventure-game stuff under the hood than is at first apparent. I wasn’t even sure that there was an inventory until I tried typing “i”. The tutorial text never mentions it. Likewise, compass-direction movement really is still there, but if you want to use it, you’ll have to find exits by trial and error.

The game further accommodates both the old-school hardcore adventurer and the newcomer by offering a choice of “story mode” or “puzzle mode” at the beginning of chapter 2. I’ve chosen puzzle mode, but it’s not yet obvious to me what the effects of this choice are. Anyway, this isn’t the first momentous choice in the game. At the very beginning, you’re asked to select a gender for both the wayfarer and Rume, the soon-to-be-left-behind love interest (heteronormativity off!), but I’m guessing that this mostly just affects pronouns — I chose male for the PC and female for Rume (and will use pronouns that reflect this in these notes), but, having made that choice, Rume seems to me like the more traditionally masculine one in the relationship. But of course this is a matter of opinion. People managed to make cases in both directions for the obvious genders of the two leads in Jigsaw. No, the more interesting initial decision, when you don’t yet have any information about its significance, is that you have to choose “love” or “art”.

Love or art! Usually they’re portrayed as allies, but this is not the first work to suggest that they’re opposites, or at least rivals, both demanding the individual’s exclusive attention. What’s more, within this story, love is what makes you stay and art is what makes you leave: painting scenes of other worlds is the means by which you travel to them. As such, it’s clear from the start that art is going to win out in the short term, just to get the story going. There comes a point where you’re given a clear choice: heed the Call or refuse it? And if you refuse it, it’s just a matter of time before you heed it anyway.

But this matter of time is a matter of unexpectedly long time — within the game, long enough to bring a daughter into the world and raise her to young adulthood, and for the player, encompassing several screenfuls of text. I certainly wasn’t expecting this when I experimentally made what I considered to be the wrong choice. (After all, I want the story to advance.) The years with Rume pass by in a slightly-interactive stream of consciousness, which prompts the player periodically to type in a word to finish a sentence. Once I realized that it would accept any input at all, not just things that make sense, I started typing in increasingly inappropriate things, flippant and dark. This suited the story of a relationship’s inevitable decay so well that I can almost believe it was what the author intended. At any rate, even if the choice to stay ultimately had no mechanical effect (which I’m still not certain of), it produced enough variation in the text that it really makes it feel like a different story. Choices can actually be significant in this game. It reminds you of this whenever you type “score” (another standard adventure-game command not mentioned in the tutorial) — there’s no point system, but it gives you a report along the lines of “You’ve made it to chapter one (out of ten), exploring one region (out of twenty-two). And never forget that at first you chose art.”

Well, it’s that time of year again. The judging period of the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is underway, with a lean 24 entries, well within the power of any interested person to play through before the November 15 judging deadline.

Me, I’ve decided to sit it out this year. I’m somewhat soured on the comp-judging experience for the moment, what with the lackluster and buggy entries of the last couple of years. I was planning at one point to submit an entry of my own, which would disqualify me from judging, but the year proved to be a busy one, and in the end I had to admit to myself that being disqualified from judging was in fact my main motivation for my planned entry. If that’s all I wanted, I could spare myself the effort and just not judge.

Plus, this seems to just be an unusually rich year for IF outside the comp — or at any rate, at least one of the editors of ifwiki.org seems to think so. The current featured article there is a list of this year’s significant non-comp releases. The only thing on this list I’ve gotten around to trying before now is the first chapter of Blue Lacuna, so my intention is to play and blog them in lieu of the comp games. If you want comp comments, I suggest you hop over to Emily Short’s blog; not only does she provide thoughtful and articulate commentary of her own, she’s keeping a list of other blogs with comp reviews.

So, last weekend Steam had a sale on a big package of indie games. Some of them I had already played, but enough of them were of interest to me that I had to snatch it up. And since it looks like I’m not finishing my last game any time soon, I might as well dig into them now.

First on the docket: Erik Svedang’s Blueberry Garden, a short ¹Steam tells me that it took me “0.9 hrs” to play it to completion. 2D platformer in a charming hand-drawn style. I’m not the first to make this comparison, but: its closest relative is probably Knytt, in that it’s a quiet game, a platformer based on exploration rather than combat, where a large part of its appeal is simply observing the art of the highly open landscape and the weird creatures that inhabit it. But more than that, Blueberry Garden is about figuring out how a world works, without aid of instruction or exposition. Although the world model and controls are platformer material, it’s got the heart of an adventure game. One of the weirder ones, like Myst or For a Change.

Or, for that matter, like Windosill, which it also resembles in its initial price point. It’s listed on Steam for under $5 US, and not because it’s old. Again like Windosill, it’s short and arty, which puts it in the same niche as a hundred free browser-based Flash games. It’s priced accordingly, but some consider even that pittance too much.

And now that the vague generalities are out of the way, it’s time for spoilers.

Given the game’s tranquil, exploratory atmosphere, it comes as a bit of a surprise that there’s a time limit. The main goal throughout most of the game, it turns out, is to save the garden from flooding by turning off a large faucet. Not that I understood this at first — on my first go, I squandered precious time just noodling around. The thing is, the faucet is the first thing that the game shows you, but without context, it’s hard to know what to make of it, and consequently easy to forget about it. On my first sally, I eventually noticed that the water level had risen to the point where I was wading whenever I revisited my starting point, and I wondered why. My best guess was that it was something I had done, perhaps the combined weight of the large items I had stacked up putting pressure on the wrong spot. (The stack of large objects is essential for reaching otherwise-inaccessible locations.) Only on my second try, after failing the first, did I see that faucet with enough information to grasp its importance.

The game’s victory screen contains a URL where you can leave comments. There, I discovered that my experience of the game was actually pretty common. Is it what the author intended? Probably not; I imagine that the introductory scene of the faucet was intended to convey information on first viewing. Not necessarily to make the player immediately say “Aha, that faucet must be a flood threat”, but to make the player say, on discovering the flooding later, “Aha, this must be because of the faucet”. If I’m wrong about this, and my experience was the intended one, I have to say it’s a masterful touch. It all but guarantees that the player will see both the good and bad endings — and, giving the generosity of the time limit, the player will likely see the bad ending only once. It also breaks the game into two pieces, one before you come to understand the threat and one after. These acts are very different in tone, despite the fact that the game doesn’t actually change at all between them.

Windosill is the sort of game where you have to poke at things to see how they react. It’s drawn comparisons to Cyan’s early works, such as The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, because of its surrealist busy-box vibe. Those games, though intended for children, always had a slight tinge of menace to them, which I don’t think was intentional; it was just a side-effect of the gameworld’s utter unpredictability. In Windosill, though, it’s definitely intended, and contributes to the toybox-of-mystery ambience. Everything is clean and flat-shaded, but the palette tends towards dark blues and there are eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes.

It’s basically a Flash-based adventure game, consisting of a series of one-screen rooms. In each room, there are things that can be clicked and things that can be dragged and even things that can be spun or thrown; although the interaction is basically two-dimensional, the models are clearly 3D, and things tend to bounce and judder in response to your actions in a satisfyingly physical way (especially in comparison to other Flash adventures, which seldom go beyond clicking on things to trigger scripted behavior). Your goal in each room is to find a cube, which you then use to unlock a door, through which you drag a boxy toy car (cyan in color) to go to the next room. In most rooms, getting access to the cube means that the puzzle content is over, but the ritual of unlocking the door and moving the car gives the rooms an extra bit of unity, and provides a basis for unexpected variation at one point, when a room’s inhabitants grab the car away from you.

The whole thing can be completed in a single sitting, and in fact pretty much has to be, because there’s no way to save your progress. As such, I suppose a lot of people will balk at paying for the full version, even though it’s only three dollars. After all, there are tons of Flash adventure games out there that are completely free. I see it as a small price to support good interactive art.

Before my last session, I would have said that The Final Cut is a game that has to be played twice: once to find out by trial and error what you’re supposed to do, and a second time to use your knowledge of the solutions to spot the clues that you were supposed to have noticed the first time round. But now, I have doubts that even this would be enough.

In the beginning of chapter 2, the detective finally meets his client, Robert Martin-Jordan, in person for the first time. Naturally he has a lot of questions. Some of these questions are about things that just plain haven’t happened. For example, one of the questions is about the things said on an audio tape that I had found, but had not yet found a means to listen to. (Perhaps he has the psychic power to divine the contents of audio tapes? I know there exists a man who can read the grooves on LPs…) Another of the dialog options is to tell him about how you were attacked up on the scaffolding. I had been up on that scaffolding, but there was no attack. All that happened there was a puzzlingly pointless first-person cinematic in which I pressed a button, after which the game returned me to the bottom of the now-unclickable ladder. Oh, and that somehow triggered the end of the chapter. I think I was doing things in the wrong order there.

The whole scaffolding scene had seemed incomprehensible at the time. (In retrospect, the button was probably the one mentioned elsewhere that turns the fire alarm on and off, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Unless perhaps the sound glitches prevented me from hearing the alarm. But if so, did I turn it on or did I turn it off? And either way, why?) But if I was attacked in that scene and didn’t notice, something was very wrong. So I found a walkthrough online to try to find out what was supposed to have happened there.

That walkthrough diverged from my experience of the game before it was even done with the intro movie.

After she leaves for bed, you observe a green car and have a momentary psychic flashback to the time your parents were killed in a car crash.

No I don’t! I saw the car, but there was no psychic flash, and this business about the detective’s parents is news to me. So at this point it looks like it’s just skipping over some of the cutscenes. But only some of them, which is odd. Maybe they’re using multiple codecs? Searching the web for reviews, I don’t see anyone else who had my problems. I see a lot of complaints about the story and the puzzles, but I guess my situation is like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in reverse: the more fundamental problems blind me to the surface flaws.

At least the walkthrough showed me something that I had genuinely missed on my own: I had failed to find the camera angle that lets you access the document giving all the characters’ names. This is something to be careful about, guys. If you’re going to make basic information missable, some people are going to miss it. Given that the rest of the game assumes that you have this information, it would have been a good idea to make leaving the prologue and proceeding to chapter 1 contingent on finding this document. Instead, the game makes it contingent on watching Mr. Martin-Jordan’s welcome video, which contains no information that’s useful once you’re out of the prologue.

It looks like this one is going back onto the shelf for a while, alongside Tender Loving Care. I seem to be having poor luck with technical problems in adventure games lately. You might think that adventures would be less prone to failure than big-name titles, being less technically demanding, but this also means that they’re typically developed on low budgets by small teams with tight deadlines. Also, their low replayability means that they often don’t get a lot of fan attention after release, ScummVM notwithstanding.