The Stack

This is the kind of game that people are thinking of when they complain about adventure game puzzles. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on its logic and chosen conventions, and can proceed without further need for the walkthrough, it throws me for a loop, read-the-author’s-mind-wise. My latest encounter with this tendency isn’t even related to puzzles!

It turns out that the laboratory I mentioned before had more in it than just the syringe. Indeed, there was a metal box that was specifically described as “an obvious hiding place” when I clicked on it. But there didn’t seem to be any way to open it, so I moved on. Turns out that I needed to zoom into first-person mode, which you’d think that I’d have learned to try by now. Inside, I found a bag of blood (an inventory item, which I haven’t yet found a use for), and a container with a human heart inside. The player character was horrified at the discovery, but I didn’t fully understand why until I went to talk to an NPC to see if I had spawned any new conversation topics. I had: “Stolen organs”. And I’m like, what the heck? What about this situation was supposed to suggest that the heart I found was stolen? Remember, this entire castle is owned by a major pharmaceutical company. They have legitimate reasons to do medical research, and the resources to obtain donated organs legitimately. But I was expected to treat a specimen from a cadaver like a major scandal.

What’s more, when I confronted the supervisor about it, the player character made another big unjustified leap. Now, I had learned some time back that the supervisor had been seen unloading a crate from a van in the middle of the night, and he denied it when I asked. Clearly he was up to something. But when I asked him about “Stolen organs”, the first thing I said was “I found the crate you were seen unloading from the van…” There’s probably a translation issue here: the box I found in the lab was not something I would describe as a “crate”. More like a refrigerator, really, given its contents. But even putting that aside, we seem to have started from “This is a box” and leapt to “It must be that specific box“, even though there are boxes of various kinds all over the castle.

A slightly related point: This game has names for its rooms, which it displays along with the time of day when you enter a new location just after time advances, like “Upstairs Hallway, 1:30 PM” or whatever. I don’t remember if I’ve ever seen a name for the lab, but the walkthrough calls it “Secret Laboratory”, so I’m guessing that this is what the game calls it as well. And it’s inaccurate. There’s nothing secret about it. The door is clearly visible, just locked with a keycode, which seems like a very sensible security precaution for a medical laboratory.

Maybe my mindset is just wrong for this game. Maybe I should be thinking more in terms of where the story wants to go instead of in terms of what’s reasonable. Perhaps I should just be thinking the worst of everyone. But even this presumes I can recognize what kind of story it’s trying to be, and that might not be the case. In my last session, I found evidence that, in the world of this story, the moon landings were faked and fluoridation is a CIA mind control scheme. This is totally not where I was expecting things to go, even with all the ley lines and doomsday cults.

So, I’ve been talking to the characters a lot. It seems like the designers imagined this as Step 1, because I keep getting hints for puzzles I’ve already solved, often by resorting to hints. The fact that I’d rather look up hints than talk to all the characters says something about the game. The voice acting is a big part of it, but really, not all of it is that bad. Here’s a list of the characters, ranked from best voice acting to worst.

Victoria Conroy, player character and ostensible lawyer: Not too bad, really. The worst I can say about her is that her delivery is a bit flat, especially when discussing ridiculous things like ley lines.

Greta Snyder, the caretaker: Stern and disapproving, this is basically a one-note performance. But she hits that one note competently and consistently, and in a way that’s consistent with the lines she’s been given.

Stephen Klausman, the cook: His characterization consists mainly of a thick accent, but in a way that I’d call fairly typical for point-and-click adventure games. At least his line readings are decent, and he expresses emotion at appropriate moments, if not all that convincingly. Of special note: One of his voice lines, in a sequence where you distract him so you can steal his keys, appears to be still in the original Italian. From what little I heard, I suspect the Italian voice actor is a lot better than the English one.

Christopher Anderson, the supervisor: Has some weird readings. I feel like his lines were written for a very specific characterization, a little posh and condescending, and the actor just didn’t understand that at all and went for Mr. Friendly instead.

Raul Hernandez, the gardener: Like the cook, his characterization consists mostly of an accent, except this time the accent is Indian rather than German, which is kind of strange for a character named “Raul Hernandez”.

Darrel Boone, player character and ostensible paranormal investigator: Really doesn’t know where to place the emphasis. Reminds me a lot of the English voice acting in cheesy Japanese zombie games.

Carla Hoffman, the maid: Quite stilted, especially when she tries to express emotion. Sometimes she recites her words with an unnaturally rhythmic cadence, like a Dalek.

Henry Eistermeier, the caretaker: The voice actor seems to have decided that the way to play an elderly man is to have is voice crack up and down all the time like he’s yodeling. His lines are written to be very casual and frequently contain colloquialisms that the voice actor clearly has never heard said aloud, resulting in some very awkward readings.

Jude Roberts, the supervisor’s wife: Distractingly bad. Just the worst. I am unconvinced that this actor understands English at all. Her delivery reminds me a little of Christopher Walken: the same sort of odd cadence, words grouped in ways that don’t make sense.

I’m posting about this game more than it really deserves because I can’t bring myself to binge it. Each session is fairly short, but still requires a post, by the terms of the Oath. Still, I’ve made it past noon! (The game says the time is 12:15 AM, but it’s a little confused.) My latest time-advancing accomplishment was tricking the supervisor into leaving his office so I could ransack it. This gave me the combination to a locked room, a small laboratory full of microscopes and centrifuges and things. The upshot: I now have a syringe. What do I want with a syringe? I don’t know. Presumably it’ll come in useful later, but this isn’t really what I was hoping for when I searched the man’s office. There’s a whole lot of Caesar’s ladder going on in this game. Also, I’m starting to think it may be going by a general rule that each room holds exactly one inventory item. If I’m right, that’ll be a big help going forward, letting me know when I need to keep searching and when I can stop — although there’s danger that I’ll trust the rule too much and stop prematurely.

Getting rid of the supervisor involved a small act of vandalism. It’s really making me think about how antisocial the player’s actions are in this game generally. Oh, you get to do a couple of good deeds, finding lost items for people to gain their trust or whatever. But most of what I’ve done in this game involves wrecking stuff, breaking and entering, and making people’s jobs harder. Just imagine how embarrassing it’ll all be if it turns out that my employer’s information is wrong and the doomsday device is hidden somewhere else.

The other thing I’m discovering is that yes, you really do have to ask every character about every topic. It usually doesn’t lead to anything useful or interesting, but sometimes there’s a vital clue, and there’s no way to tell which combinations are the magic ones. At least the game does us the courtesy of greying out the options you’ve already covered. I don’t always see things greyed out that I know I’ve asked about before, but I’m willing to believe that this is a result of me quitting without saving.

Let’s take a little break from griping to describe the game more fully. The most striking thing that I haven’t mentioned is that you have control of two characters, which you can switch between freely, like in Maniac Mansion or Thimbleweed Park. It even improves on those games slightly: there’s a feature that lets either character summon the other to their location. It isn’t always enabled, though. The manual says that the button to do it appears only when the characters are in different rooms, but it seems to be considering logical rooms that contain multiple rooms in the conventional sense.

The two player characters are Darrel Boone, an expert in the paranormal, and Victoria Conroy, a lawyer sent to accompany him. They’re interchangeable for most purposes, but there are occasional interactions that require one character or the other. From what I’ve seen, these moments are more linked to the characters’ genders than their professions. Since each character keeps a separate inventory, it makes sense to use one of them as the primary character you use for exploration. The game generally seems to regard Darrel as the story’s hero — the intro cutscene makes him the viewpoint character, and the manual gives him a longer bio than Victoria — but I’ve been using Victoria as my primary, because I’m in the habit of choosing female characters in games when given the choice, and because she has better voice acting.

The castle you’re searching was bought some years ago by a major pharmaceutical company, referred to by characters only by “the multinational”, which modernized portions of it and made it into a remote headquarters. The only people currently in residence are the supervisor, his wife, and assorted castle staff: maid, cook, gardener, housekeeper, and caretaker. All conversation with these people consists of picking items out of a topic inventory. Topics include each of the residents, the multinational, and various other things you discover over the course of the game, but significantly don’t include any mention of the doomsday device you’re looking for or the religious fanatics suspected of stealing it. Presumably you’re being circumspect because of the likelihood that some of them are involved. But it does mean that your investigation has to be a little indirect, tricking people into giving you what you need and circumventing their reasonable desire to keep you out of the more dangerous, unrestored sections of the castle. Heck, you’re starting from a place of dishonesty, passing yourself off has regular guests of the multinational.

At the beginning, you’re told that you have until midnight to complete your mission — that’s when they ley line energy will be at its peak, or something. The clock starts at 9:00 AM, and advances only in response to your actions. I assume that this means we’ll only be able to finish the game right at the stroke of midnight. Right now, after five sessions, I’m only up to 10:15 AM. But even that small progress represents acceleration; I spent the first three sessions stuck at 9:20.

It looks like a lot of my problems with this game have been a result of not reading the manual. There are ways of interacting with it that I didn’t know about, because I was thinking of it as a point-and-click adventure, and generally trying to do stuff with the mouse. I did figure out on my own that you needed to use the tab key to bring up the interface containing the in-game PDA and the save/load menu, and I managed to hit on the idea of pressing shift when clicking to run instead of walking (a virtual necessity, given the size of some of the rooms). But I apparently never tried pressing the space bar, which shifts the camera into first-person mode. You can’t move in first-person mode — it’s more meant for getting a close-up view of small areas with multiple small clickable objects, and in some cases there are objects you can’t even see without zooming in like this. (The chessboard, which I still haven’t solved, puts you into first-person mode automatically when you select it, but it’s the only thing I’ve found that does that.)

Also, in addition to clicking the ground to move, you can navigate with the arrow keys, which act as tank controls, like Grim Fandango or Alone in the Dark. This isn’t necessarily an improvement over click-to-move in games, of course, but the environments in this game really aren’t designed for click-to-move, and the fact that I was trying to use click-to-move anyway detracted from the experience in little ways that made me less patient with it than I could have been. See, this is one of those third-person games where the camera shifts between fixed (but rotatable) positions based on where the player character is. Using click-to-move, there are hallways where you have to pan the camera down until it’s nearly vertical just to walk to the point where the camera points the other way, and there are places where it’s hard to move at all because the use box for a hedge or something extends over the ground you’d need to click on. I had been thinking that these scenes were simply badly built, but it turns out I was using them wrong.

I can’t even really say that these features lack discoverability. They’re on the space bar and the arrow keys, for goodness sakes. How it is that I tried tab before trying these, I don’t know.

So, playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, I’m finding it’s a significantly better game than I thought. But I still don’t think it’s a good game. If anything, discovering first-person mode makes the lack-of-guidance problems worse, because of the possibility that there could be a useful object hiding where I have to zoom in to see it. I’m not yet at the point of just playing entirely from a walkthrough, but I’m definitely playing with a walkthrough open.

Just another pro forma post because I played The Watchmaker a little more but didn’t get anywhere. My basic problem is that the explorable area of the game is large enough, and full of enough pointless furniture, that you really need some sort of guidance as to what to do, at least in the early part, and the game just doesn’t provide that guidance. That is, it provides some guidance, but not the guidance you need.

Right now, there are two things telling me what needs doing. First, there’s a list of pending tasks in my PDA, along with a summary of discoveries. I do like this feature — it even highlights newly-added entries! Right now, my task list contains two items: gaining access to the old wing of the castle, which is closed to the public, and checking out the bottom of a dry well in case there’s a secret chamber down there or something. But I can’t actually do either of them. The listing for the well specifically notes that I’ll have to wait for the gardener to leave the area so I can sneak in unobserved. Time in this game only advances in response to plot events, so it’s basically telling me that I’ll have to get some other arbitrary unrelated thing to happen first. I guess this is the main purpose of the list: to let the player know that they should try things again later.

The other thing telling me where to direct my attention is the camera. When I leave the mausoleum, it first zooms in on that chessboard, just in case I didn’t notice it. “Look at the chessboard! It’s important!”

Now here’s the kicker. I didn’t want to resort to hints this early in the game, but I also didn’t want to spend another few hours wandering around aimlessly, so I’ve looked up a walkthrough, and it turns out that my next step is actually to check out some areas I hadn’t found yet because they’re only accessible via a service lift that wasn’t working before. Presumably it gets fixed when you advance time by observing the greenhouse explosion, but I hadn’t tried it again. Because I had no particular reason to think it had been fixed, and the game was pretty firmly directing my attention elsewhere.

I’m thinking that this game suffers for being played out of its time. This sort of design makes a lot more sense if the player is expected to want to prolong the experience of just walking around in a fully 3D-rendered environment, randomly opening cupboards and things. This may not even have been a realistic expectation back in 2001 — certainly, I myself gave up on it pretty quickly at the time. But at least it was closer to true then than it is now.

Not much progress in The Watchmker today. I keep exploring the castle and its grounds, and I keep on finding not much of importance or interest. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play. Not that it’s hostile to the idea and puts up intractable obstacles, but that it’s totally indifferent to whether I play or not. It just gives us a large collection of rooms to explore, and no reason to explore any of them. The rooms are full of a vast array of furniture items with utterly generic descriptions. Occasionally there’s a locked door, or an NPC who won’t let us search their room, which provides some hope that there’s something interesting that the game isn’t letting me see yet. But I won’t be surprised if at some future point I manage to unlock a door and find it conceals just another roomful of generic furniture.

The NPC dialogue, too, is mostly fairly bland and uninformative. You can ask everyone about their relationships to each other, but you can’t ask them about the cultists or the doomsday machine you’re looking for. I suppose part of the problem here is that this is a mystery in which the crime hasn’t happened yet, giving you nothing in particular to interrogate people about. But also, part of the problem is just that the game is trying to take itself seriously. I’m thinking that there’s a reason that the best-beloved point-and-click adventures have been the ones built around wacky humor. If every line of dialogue is likely to produce a punch line, that in itself provides a motivation to ask everyone about everything.

Just one thing of real interest has happened: On first exiting to the castle’s grounds, a greenhouse vibrates oddly, then blows out two holes on opposite sides, as if shot through by an invisible cannonball. The player characters observe the direction that the glass fell on the side “towards the mausoleum”, which I suppose is a hint to explore the mausoleum, although left to myself I think I’d feel like checking out the direction the shot came from is more likely to yield answers about how it happened. At any rate, the mausoleum contains what appears to be a genuine adventure-game puzzle, involving a chessboard whose squares make clicking sound when pressed. Perhaps I’ll feel better about this game once I’ve solved that and been put on the track to more puzzles.

I thought I’d continue with the point-and-click adventures, but this time do one that’s on the Stack proper. My first attempt was Jazz and Faust, a game that I’ve heard nothing good about, but picked up anyway when it hit the bargain bins, because decent games of its type were still kind of sparse on the ground even in 2002. I played it a bit back then, but got very stuck early on. I’ll have more to say about it if I ever get it running properly, but for now, it’s going onto my expanding sub-stack of games to try again if and when I get a Windows 98 machine working.

Some notes about it for my future self: On my main gaming machine, it installed without problems, but the FMV video sequences played very badly, essentially alternating between playing a brief bit of video without sound and playing sound while the video was either frozen or playing very slowly. The video are right there in the install directory in .bik format, and played without any hitches under VLC. (A lot of the other game assets are simply installed uncompressed to the hard drive, too. All the character textures, for example. This game could be very easily modded if anyone wanted to.) From what I’ve peeked at, it looks like the videos may be an important part of the game, so I don’t want to just ignore the problem. So I tried installing the game on a cast-off Windows 10 laptop that I recently obtained from a neighbor for cheap, and it plays the videos in-game just fine. I don’t know what the relevant difference is between the two machines. However, on both, the framerate in the game proper is low enough to make it unplayable. How it manages to run slower on a modern machine than it did on 2002 hardware, I don’t know. This is after installing a patch, which was necessary to keep the game from crashing.

Also, Windows 10 puts a window border around the game, even though it’s playing full-screen. It did the same for Kao. I don’t know why. Both games run at a rather low resolution by today’s standards, of course, but I don’t remember this happening before.

Anyway, after abandoning that, I picked another game of similar stature from the Stack: The Watchmaker, a very cheesy mystery about searching an opulent Austrian castle for a device that some cultists are planning to use to end the world by overloading the ley lines. This game was made by the same people as Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, although the passage of years between games means that they’re now working in fully 3D-modeled environments that don’t look nearly as good as Nightlong‘s pixel art. The English localization (from Italian) is awkward, and isn’t helped by the voice acting, which sounds not so much like acting as just reciting words off a page without regard to their meaning or context. Still, unlike Nightlong, it runs on modern hardware and Windows 10 without any problems at all. At this point, I’ll take it.

The story in Dropsy develops a split tone as it progresses. On the one hand, the clown is off having fanciful adventures with his animal friends, bringing happiness to every stranger he meets. But at the same time, his friend’s health just continues to deteriorate, and there isn’t much he can do about it. A miracle cure stolen from the laboratory of a wealthy corporation just ends up not doing anything, and possibly making things worse. For a time, it seemed possible that the game would actually let him die. It would certainly fit the work’s themes. Several of the NPCs you help are suffering from similar loss. The very first mission was to visit a grave. Ending the same way would be a neat little bit of design.

But that’s not the direction the author chose. Instead, he introduces a villain: the head of the aforementioned wealthy corporation.

Struggling against villainy is kind of against the ethos of the game so far, and so that isn’t what you do. This villain is a deceiver, and the clown is easily deceived. He approaches you with a deal: “I’ll take care of your friend, give him state-of-the-art medical care, if you come work for me. I’m setting up a circus of my own — a bigger, better one than the one you used to work for, and I’d really love for you to be our star attraction.” (I’m paraphrasing. Like everyone else in the game, he speaks entirely in images.) To the player, this is offer is immediately recognizable as mephistophelean. The mere fact that there’s no obvious downside is a clear indication that the downside is something he’s not telling us about.

I won’t go into detail about the ending, but I’ll note that it confirms some suspicions about the clown. Past a certain point, you’re basically guided through a linear series of rooms, with the “save game” functionality disabled so you can’t accidentally overwrite your last opportunity to complete side-quests. (And good thing, too. There are still a few citizens that I haven’t figured out how to make happy.) Most of these rooms are ones which you’ve seen before, but with some additional context that ties together things that didn’t seem important previously. As someone who comes from a text adventure background, I’m well aware of the things that text can do more easily than graphics, but it strikes me that the narrative techniques on display here, of environmental details that fade into the background when you don’t have the context to understand them but assume greater importance later, are a form of storytelling more easily done in graphics than in text, where it’s nearly impossible to show the reader something without drawing their attention to it.

But then, maybe I’m just obtuse. There are definitely things in this game that I didn’t understand when I was supposed to. Like what the hug icon was. Replaying the beginning a little, I found that the game attempted to tutorialize it by making you use it on the clown’s friend, but this wasn’t enough for me. Also, there were several puzzles where I didn’t understand what I was trying to accomplish (beyond just solving a puzzle for puzzle-solving’s sake) until afterward. On the story side, one thing I learned from the late-game revelations is that the character I’ve been calling the “friend” in fact raised the clown from when he was a little clown baby. Was I supposed to have been reading their relationship as father-son all along?

Then there’s the matter of the fire. This is part of the backstory established in the intro cutscene. The reason the clown is a free agent through most of the game is that there was a terrible fire in his circus, which killed several people. We see the fire start, and the clown’s dismayed and horrified reaction. Then, in the game, we find out that the clown was blamed for the fire, and demonized for it in the press. This is part of the reason he has to work so hard to get people to trust him. My assumption from the beginning, based partly on what I saw in the intro and partly on thematic resonance with Hypnospace Outlaw, is that he was blamed unfairly. But a dream sequence suggests that he feels real guilt over what happened. Was he in fact in some way responsible? I don’t believe for a minute that he set the fire deliberately, but it’s quite plausible that he could have started it through accident or negligence. The game, as far as I can tell, doesn’t provide a definitive answer. But I’m not sure if it’s being deliberately ambiguous or just failing to communicate clearly without words.

One last thing I’ll note: the name of the clown. The clown is named Dropsy, probably because of his distressingly swollen and squishy appearance. But I’ve been taking meticulous care not to refer to him by that name, because it didn’t seem to be established anywhere in the game — sure, it’s the game’s title, but what does that show? I remember once overhearing some people in an arcade arguing about whether the title of the classic Sega coin-op game Shinobi referred to the player character or the end boss. (In a sense they were both right: “shinobi” is just a synonym for “ninja”. But this was not common knowledge at the time.) But it turns out that the clown’s name is established in the descriptions of the Steam achievements, for example, “Furry Friend: Dropsy rescues a new friend from peril” or “Clownographer: Dropsy explores the whole entire world.” Now, I personally like to treat adventure games in particular as self-contained, and reject out-of-band information, at least while playing, because once you seek additional information online, you open yourself to puzzle spoilers. Do achievement descriptions count as out-of-band? I suppose they’re in the same nature as a printed manual: not part of the game per se, but canon nonetheless.

But now that I’ve finished the game (at least in the sense of reaching the ending, if not in the more important sense of befriending absolutely everyone in the world), I’ve looked at the guides a little, and learned that what I had dismissed as “meaningless squiggles” is actually a substitution cipher. So maybe the ambiguities and lacunae I’ve noted would be resolved for the meticulous player. It’s a little strange to me that I didn’t even think of trying to translate them myself, especially coming straight off Heaven’s Vault. Certainly I eagerly solved the ciphers in Fez and Gloomhaven. I suppose the difference is that those games seemed more challenge-oriented. When you come across runes there, it’s just another thing for you to overcome. Whereas in Dropsy, as I’ve noted, it seemed more like a way to establish your illiteracy. That makes the player’s attempts at deciphering it seem inappropriately out of character. It does explain why several scenes let you zoom into closeups of what I had taken to be unreadable text, but I had taken that to be a gag similar to what it does with telephones: when you try to press their buttons, your handless stubs of arms just mash random groups of buttons uselessly.

Now, I still haven’t finished Dropsy, so I could turn out to be wrong about this, but: It seems like most of the puzzles around befriending people are in the nature of optional side-quests. Advancing the story does require gaining cooperation from certain people, I think, but for the most part, you’re expected to simply want hugs for their own sake. Although if that’s not enough, the game does provide one other motivator for completists: there’s a record of everyone you’ve hugged, in the form of crayon drawings on a wall of the clown’s bedroom. This gives it a definite “Gotta hug ’em all!” aspect.

It also reminds me a little of The Witcher and its sexual conquest cards that drew so much attention. I was contemplating making that comparison into the basis for an entire blog post, exploring the question of what the difference is, but on reflection, it’s hardly even a question worth asking.

There are a few drawings already on the wall at the start of the game, of those that the clown has already had ample opportunity to hug: the clown’s green-haired colleague, their deceased friend, the dog. Yes, animals count. So does any sufficiently-huggable inanimate object, such as a statue or a tree. There’s one drawing that kind of puzzles me, though: it shows what looks like some kind of squidlike alien. ¹UPDATE: It turns out to actually be a rather impressionistic depiction of a security robot from the corporate HQ lobby. Now, there is definitely an alien presence in the game. Off in the desert, there’s a guy in a camper-converted-into-a-storefront trying to sell merchandise related to his personal alien encounter, while a beefy man in black hovers nearby. Elsewhere, in a mysterious cave, I can catch a few glimpses of the very same tentacled being as in the camper man’s pictures, lurking but not particularly trying to hide its presence. The thing is, though, I haven’t hugged the alien, or any other aliens — unless it’s an alien shapeshifter. Maybe I could figure out who’s secretly an alien by process of elimination: it would be the one person who I’ve hugged who isn’t in any of my drawings. But that would have a strange implication: that the clown, who’s presumably the one making the drawings (although goodness knows when he finds the opportunity) saw the shapeshifter’s true form while I, the player, saw only its disguise. So more likely it’s just a bug.