The Stack

Turandot, by Victor Gijsbers, is a romance flavored with peril, only very slightly connected to the opera of the same name: it tosses the exoticizing orientalism out the window and expands the princess Turnadot’s test for her suitors from a mere three riddles to a full-on dungeon with pitfalls, traps, and a ravenous crocodile. The protagonist, Calaf, is a self-centered hedonistic playboy who sneaks into the princess’s garden on a dare, and, on seeing her, is immediately smitten with an irrational operatic love that persists even when he finds out that she’s the sort of sadist who would build such a dungeon in the first place. The bulk of the piece is spent in that dungeon, where Turandot essentially plays GLaDOS, following your progress from various balconies and observation posts and bantering with increasing familiarity as you go. Most of the interactivity here is dialogue; actions like dodging traps and wrestling the crocodile are peppered throughout, there being no particular reason to separate dialogue from action in a choice-based work.

There’s something very comfortable about the texture. By which I mean, the amount information you get before making your choices, and the amount of text between them, seems just right to me. This has definitely not been the case for every Choicescript work I’ve encountered, and when they err, they tend to err on the side of giving you too much to comfortably process at a time. One way Turnadot avoids this is by just throwing in fake, inconsequential choices once in a while to break things up into manageable pieces. In other games, I’ve sometimes found this annoying, smacking of dishonesty. But here, it’s generally clear what’s going to have real effects and what isn’t, and the author frequently uses these points as what Emily Short has called “reflective choices”, where you’re choosing the contents of your character rather than the progress of the plot. Figuring out what it means to be in love with someone who’s trying to kill you.

Because that’s really what this work is about: a character being forced into confrontation with himself. Two characters, really, including the deadly princess. The dungeon is a metaphor for the terrifying work of self-knowledge, and of being known by someone else. That goes for the princess as well — the whole thing is basically a huge, externalized defense mechanism to keep people from getting too close. At the same time, she has the power to make things easier or harder for her prisoners; ultimately, the real reason all her previous suitors failed the challenge is that they annoyed her. She’s almost a vigilante, really, avenging the sins of male privilege, of all the princes and potentates who dared to try to claim her, treating their desire as more important than her will to self-determination. Most of all, her experiences have made her detest powerlessness, and so her tests cull out both those who will try to take away her power, and those who will allow her to take away theirs.

Even at the story’s most serious moments, when Turandot and Calaf discuss their guiltier secrets, the tone is fairly playful. And this works into the choices as well — there’s some formal experimentation that reminds me of the old Lucasarts games. On several occasions, you’re given a set of choices with the sole sensible choice grayed out, clearly indicating that Calaf knows it’s an option but is determined not to do it. The ending indulges in this so hard, it feels like he’s trolling the player.

Sugarlawn, by Mike Spivey, is built on essentially the same conceit as Ryan Veeder’s 2013 game Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder: the whole thing is one big optimization puzzle, giving you an environment rich in treasures to collect, and not enough time to collect them all. Some of the treasures are just lying out in the open, others require puzzle-solving. The cash value of each treasure is unknown until your evaluation at the end, so it takes multiple playthroughs to learn which items are worth spending the time to do whatever you need to do to collect them. (This is extremely distinctly characteristic of Verdeterre, and eliminates any possibility that the game wasn’t made in conscious imitation of it.)

That said, Sugarlawn does innovate on the formula. For one thing, it’s a lot bigger. Verdeterre was set on a sinking pirate ship, Sugarlawn in a sprawling southern plantation house turned tourist attraction. This alone has an enormous effect on how one approaches the game; the chief thing that consumes your limited time is simply walking around.

Now, a sinking pirate ship imposes a time limit fairly naturally. To get one in Sugarlawn, the author adds the premise that the whole thing is a game show. This also excuses a variety of other unnatural rules. In addition to simply retrieving treasures for money, you can return them to the locations where they belong: books to the library, for example, or a toy steamboat to a river-themed bedroom. This earns you a bonus which, in many cases, is larger than the value of the treasure itself, but it makes for a lot more running around. You can double this bonus by refusing to use the sack provided for you, which imposes an inventory limit. Such things make the question of optimizing your earnings a lot more complicated.

Another complication: You’re only allowed to carry one key at a time. There’s a box in the foyer where you can exchange a key for another one, but again, this means going back to the foyer, which uses valuable time. Apparently there’s a shortcut: each locked door also has a voice code, a magic word that opens it. I still haven’t figured any of them out. Finding the passwords seems like it would be a major breakthrough in the game, a point where your experience of the thing is utterly transformed and you can really start thinking about optimizing. Before that, maybe you shouldn’t bother.

I did anyway, of course. My first playthrough, which occupied the majority of my time during the judging period, was spent taking the scenario at face value and trying to do as well as I could within the time limit even though I didn’t know anything yet. I was under two time limits, really, the one in the game and the one imposed by the Comp. And I found this quite stressful. Going back to it afterward was much better.

That’s a lot said about the game’s structure and gameplay. The rest of the content — the descriptions and the like — is pleasant and, I suppose, faintly educational. In addition to the historic displays (explicitly somewhat altered for the game show), there’s an announcer who provides additional information whenever you enter a room for the first time, describing its relevance to the history of the house and to the history of Louisiana. Slavery is mentioned, but not really addressed beyond acknowledging that it happened, which, I’m told, is somewhat daring for a historical plantation house. I strongly suspect that all this additional data works into the game’s riddles, the passwords for the doors and certain display cases, but can’t say for sure.

The thing is, even without solving any of the game’s real puzzles, there’s a lot to do here. You can spend a lot of time just running around picking up loose treasures for the pleasure of easy reward. I certainly did.

Truck Quest is a social satire, almost a political cartoon. But it’s served on a substrate of choice-based trucking sim. You know, the same sort of thing as in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and the like, but greatly simplified. You get to choose missions of varying difficulty, the harder ones paying more, then you make some kind of arbitrary choice about your approach (go fast and risk accidents, or go slow and risk being late, sort of thing). Make enough money, and you can pay off your loans and upgrade to a bigger truck that can haul larger loads for more money. Independence. Entrepeneurialism. The American dream.

Except it quickly becomes clear that just trucking will make you money at a dismally slow rate, and you’ll make much better progress if you take on shady side missions from a series of caricatures: a hedge fund manager, a paranoid cyber-warrior, a big-government technocratic politician. Unlike the trucking, these missions are non-interactive and never fail. What’s more, they’re exaggeratedly effective: completing them alters the zeitgeist. Do missions for the hedge fund manager, for example, and people in general become more profit-minded and greedy. Do missions for the privacy advocate, and people become less engaged with their community.

Thinking about it afterward, I think the game missed an opportunity by not having the cultural mood affect the details of the trucking missions you’re offered. Or maybe it did, and it just didn’t make it obvious enough for me to notice.

At any rate, the piece makes its points mainly by showing you what doesn’t change. Between missions, you can talk your trucking mentor, Joan, who had to retire for medical reasons. No matter what changes you wreak on the political climate, Joan can tell you why it’s bad for her and her neighbors. Then there’s Smilin’ Dan, who runs the truck dealership. He sets the terms, gouges you at ruinous interest rates, and then, when you’ve finally made your last payment and own your truck free and clear, he secretly sets fire to it. (It’s pointed out on a few occasions that his name isn’t “Honest Dan” or “Empathetic Dan”.) Smilin’ Dan doesn’t care what the reigning ideology is, because none of the options challenge his power to run roughshod over you.

At one point, a waitress at a truck stop proudly announces that she’s decided to become a trucker herself. The sensible option at that point is to warn her not to do it, to get out while she still can.

So is it a South-Park-like nihilism, where every possible option is equally bad and all you can do about it is point out how bad it all is? Almost, perhaps, but the good ending, which involves exposing the grisly secrets behind a large tech company’s self-driving truck technology, has society reforming around new cooperation between all the factions. The real problem, the author seems to be saying, is imbalance.

It’s just about the least convincing part of the game. The entire scenario is basically an argument against capitalism, but since the author doesn’t trust governmental power, they don’t see socialism as a viable alternative. So instead we get a kind of redeemed capitalism, capitalism purged of its flaws. But the capitalism we see for the rest of the game, capitalism with its flaws exaggerated, looks a lot more familiar.

It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive Fiction is based on just two models, the explorable environments typically seen in parser-based text adventures and the branching stories typically seen in hypertext. So it’s good to get occasional reminders that there are other alternatives. Skybreak! is built out of randomized storylets, kind of like Fallen London and Reigns — but more like Reigns in the way it denies player control.

The premise is one of space-opera exploration, zipping from star to star, but the destinations are chosen by your ship’s AI, which claims to be in love with you. When you arrive at a location, you get a series of menus that let you choose what to do there. Once you’ve followed a path through the menu tree all the way to a leaf, it’s time to get back on that ship to another randomly-chosen destination. Often the choices are, unfortunately, meaningless: you arrive at a star with multiple planets and choose which one to explore further, on the basis of nothing more than an orbit number. However, on the basis of a jpeg map included with the game, I think it’s likely that the contents of each star system are fixed, not randomized at runtime. That you could theoretically take meticulous notes about every destination and use that information on subsequent playthroughs. It would take some time, though, because you can’t control where you go, and the galaxy is large.

Large, and uncooperative. At one point I seemed to be stuck in a morass of planets where there was basically nothing to do but mining, which I was terrible at. See, in addition to inventory, there are character stats and skills in this game, and a fairly elaborate character creation process; success at your actions is frequently contingent on where you put your skill points. I had optimized as a scholar/storyteller, figuring that finding the lost history of extinct civilizations would be the most interesting path. But I never found much of that during the Comp’s two-hour judging period.

Character creation involves choosing a race from a short list and two “backgrounds” from a longer one. The races notably include elves and goblins, and the backgrounds include sorcerer. Which is at least honest, I suppose. Backgrounds give you both victory conditions (which I never got anywhere near) and special abilities, some of which involve actions that aren’t in the menus. See, even though the game is basically menu-driven, it’s the sort of command-line-based menus where you type in a number at a prompt. Other commands can be typed in too, such as the ones that display your stats or inventory. This system feels a bit old-school, like Hunt the Wumpus, especially if you play it in a browser, where clickable links are more natural. But I kind of dug it. The game is written in Adrift, which is usually used for second-rate parser-based text adventures. I don’t think I’ve seen an Adrift game on this paradigm before.

The whole thing is just impressively baroque. There’s stats and skills you’ll never use, things you’ll never find. There’s a whole section in the inventory for exotic beetles. It may be best appreciated as an art object rather than played as a game.

So we’re two weeks into this year’s IFComp’s month-and-a-half judging period, and I haven’t posted anything yet. I intend to remedy that, but I’m definitely not going to be reviewing every single game. It’s almost cliché by now, but: This year’s Comp is the biggest ever. There are 82 entries. Last year, I mentioned how Cragne Manor had more authors than the Comp ever had. If I’m not mistaken, that’s no longer the case.

I was actually considering skipping the Comp this year, as I’ve done sometimes in the past. I haven’t posted Comp reviews since 2016, and anyway, who am I to be judging people’s creations, really? But then I looked at the list of titles and got excited. Such variety, such creativity! Browsing the Comp games list gives me much the same feeling as walking into an art supplies store: so much potential! And yet, in both cases, so much eventual disappointment as well.

But why dwell on that? My intention is to do what I did in 2016: post about one game per day for the rest of the judging period, picking just the ones about which I have something to say. I already have a few selected.