The Stack

We start with the wry premise of a world where jurassic parks are cheap and plentiful but not always reputable or well-run. The player takes the role of an entry-level employee at such a zoo, earning minimum wage by throwing buckets of fish to the dinos, but it doesn’t take long before a dinosaur rights extremist gets at the button opens all the electronic locks and sets everything free. Chaos and carnage ensue. The rest of the story is spent dodging large predators in a choice-based interface, usually three or so options at a time, often including backing off to try other routes: go through the cloning labs where scientists are menaced by what the game calls “velociraptors” (although they’re considerably larger than the real thing), or head for the docks and leap from boat to boat as a mosasaur smashes them, or whatever.

In a way, it reminds me of a certain genre of game I remember from my youth: dreadful little branching peril dungeons written in BASIC by bored middle-school students. That is, there are lots of choices that lead to immediate death, without much of a way to predict which ones they are other than by replaying it. It’s more entertaining than those, though, and also has a more of a world model. Come back to an area later and it’ll be in a more advanced state of devastation. If it works, anyway — at one or two points, I repeated an action and found myself stuck, without any choices to select. This frustrated me enough to give up before completing the game, even though it’s apparently fairly short. I imagine such glitches will be fixed before long, though, as the author solicits bug reports on the Twitch page housing the game. (Yes, this game is hosted externally, and the Comp’s “Download” link just gives you a page with a hyperlink to Twitch instead of the actual game content, even though it’s ultimately just made of HTML and Javascript and doesn’t require a server or anything. And yes, I’m going to gripe about this every time it happens.)

Now this is what I call an Adventure Game. The very first thing that happens is that the player character, a master hacker, menaced by corporate thugs, is forced to flee across the city sky on a stolen hoverbike. After that, it’s all about pulling a daring data heist in cyberspace playgrounds. This is cyberpunk in wish-fulfillment mode. Last year’s Comp saw more than one thoughtful cyberpunk piece that asked hard questions about technology and society, extrapolating things to nightmarish extremes. Shadow Operative has you uncover some secrets that make a throwaway gesture in that direction, but it’s basically all about the power fantasy of doing what you want while powerful people try and fail to stop you.

It uses the Vorple library to provide a hybrid parser/hypertext interface, with a big menu of verbs on the left side. It’s reminiscent of the UI in some of the games by Legend Entertainment, and, just like in those games, I found I preferred to type in commands most of the time — the exception being clicking on object names in the output text to examine them.

I don’t think the resemblance to Legend’s UI is coincidental, either: the two cyberspace sequences reminded me a bit of Gateway, even pulling one of the same tricks, letting you complete a mission too easily only to discover afterward that you’re still in the sim. Cyberspace in this game takes the form of shared fantasy worlds: you get one D&D-ish medieval fantasy and one Samurai fantasy, little mini-adventures that aren’t under the same obligation of in-world plausibility as their cyberpunk frame. They’re still in basically the same mold as the frame-story, but a little more self-aware.

It keeps the pace brisk and does what it sets out to do. My only complaint is that there are some menu-based conversations where you have only one option of what to say, prompts without interactivity.

Here we have a mixed-media short story in the Southern Gothic mold, where you investigate creepiness from your family’s past. It’s decently written, and has an intriguing central idea, “Looking at a thing uses it up”, that motivates the creep’s creepy behavior — hiding from sight, wearing masks — and provides a clear metaphor for the value of bringing secrets to light, to defeat darkness and danger with an unflinching gaze.

But it’s barely interactive. There are bits where you choose which of your deceased mother’s old snapshots to examine. So you have some control over the order in which bits of backstory are elaborated on, but no agency beyond that. Instead, it’s mainly using Twine to govern presentation: sound cues, fade-ins, and the like. The sort of gimmickry that I always complain about because it interferes with engagement with and immersion in the text. And of course it has an excess of forward links, often showing only a sentence or two at a time, sometimes even just a sentence fragment, with a solitary link on the last few words to show more. This is a style that the Twine community at large seems to have embraced, but it’s always bothered me. What’s wrong with just putting in a paragraph break?

It’s even innovated new ways to annoy me! In addition to text that fades in after a delay, we now have text that fades out after a delay. It does some clever things with it, fading out all but certain words, as if revealing meanings that were lurking there unobserved all along, like Babyface in his creepy house. But it also has the effect, probably unintended, that once I knew it could happen, I wound up rushing through reading passages from that point onward, just in case they started disappearing before I was finished. I suppose individual passages aren’t all that important in a work that works more from building up a cumulative effect. But that’s what I did nonetheless.

There’s one gag that I quite liked, though: at one point, the text describes a fly bothering the protagonist while it plays an animation of a fly landing on the screen, silhouetted by the monitor’s glow. Somehow, the effect here was that I kind of filtered out the fly’s buzz until I reached the point in the text where it’s mentioned, triggering the shock of recognition.

This one’s baffling. It’s a small one-room puzzle game set in a wizard’s laboratory, which is the sort of setting that seems highly conducive to one-room puzzle games. But it’s written in Twine, which isn’t. And instead of packing the room with massed detail to build puzzles out of, the environment is almost barren. There’s a macguffin you have to unlock, and there’s a bookshelf containing a small collection of fairy tales twisted to a villain’s perspective (really the piece’s highlight), and there’s an alchemy workbench where you can mix ingredients with fanciful names like “knook bile” and “haint juice” and “tungsten”. The puzzle is to select the right ingredients in the right order to unlock the macguffin.

The problem is that there aren’t any clues. I say that with some confidence: it’s a tiny game, and there just aren’t many places for clues to hide. You might think that the bookshelf would be the likeliest place, but it explicitly tells you not to waste your time looking for hints there. And a combination consists of five picks from a set of 15 ingredients with repeats allowed, for a total of 759375 possible combinations, well beyond easily brute-forcing. Each wrong guess results in death, with some randomized details about what kills you and how.

I don’t think I’ve ever sneaked a look at a Twine game’s source code to solve it before. Here, I mainly just wanted confirmation that winning was possible, that it wasn’t just a story about having no information and guessing wrong and dying. It turns out that there are in fact two combinations, one that wins the game and one that gives you a series of nonsense words that I assumed to be a hint for the winning combination, but if so, it’s a highly obscure one. Even knowing the answers, I had no idea how the puzzle could be solved. The macguffin is referred to as “the Knot”, so maybe it’s meant to be a Gordian one, only untanglable by breaking the implicit rules? The game’s blurb says “Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual source.” (emphasis mine) — maybe reading the source was the right idea? It wouldn’t be the first game I had played where cheating was part of the intended solution, but that didn’t explain the solitary inscrutable hint. And after you enter the solution, what happens? You get a view of a grid with some cells marked, clearly part of another puzzle. But it’s just a passive image, with no way to apply it.

It was only after submitting my rating, and fussing with the clue some more, and moving on, that I looked at that Comp’s game list and noticed two other games that, although submitted under different names, have suspiciously similar cover art and descriptions, with some shared made-up vocabulary, like “Chirlu” and “Willershins” and, most of all, all containing that line about no knot untying itself and seeking aid from an unusual source.

In other words, it looks like we’ve got another hat mystery on our hands, albeit one that’s more obvious about it. I just wish I had noticed this before the two-hour mark, when my rating locks in. As it is, I rated the game rather lower than I would have if I had noticed the rest of it. I may rate the other parts higher to compensate.

Here we have the tale of an American teenager in the 1980s, horny and rebellious but still bound by high school and absent parents. It starts with his unsuccessful attempts to dissuade a friend from making a fool of himself over a crush, then proceeds into discovering a possible kidnapping — and that’s as far as I got in two hours. I say “possible” because Tom himself isn’t completely sure if it’s anything more than someone messing with him, and also because it would invest the first part with more meaning if he’s making a fool of himself over flights of fancy too.

It’s got some very silly moments, but it’s not dominated by them. The overall mood is one of frustration at difficulties, especially avoidable ones, exacerbated by the protagonist’s sense of loyalty, his dutiful persistence about not letting his friends down. He doesn’t give up, he always knows what he needs to make happen, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell the player. That’s really the most striking thing about the work: the degree to which it leads the player by the nose. If Tom is asked to deliver a note, he’ll talk about possibly reading it, but balks if you actually try. If he decides that you need to search a house, you don’t get to leave until you’ve inspected every room. The very first thing that happens to him is that he gets an inexplicable urge to check his locker. It makes me wonder a little if parser-based was the right way to go with this story — but then, it does get a lot out of scenery and object descriptions, using them to convey character.

I had been thinking of skipping IFComp this year, especially if it seemed too big to fit into my suddenly-busy schedule. I was contemplating playing the remaining text adventures on my Stack instead — Once and Future, Demoniak — as something more manageable but still seasonally IF-related. And when it was announced that the number of entries this year had broken three digits for the first time, well! That seemed to settle it. There’s no way I could get through that many games in six weeks and still be enjoying the experience by the end.

But the same announcement extends the deadline to eight weeks, and also pleads with us to participate in judging despite the intimidating size, to help keep the judge-to-entry ratio up. People enter the Comp to get their works noticed, but we’re getting to the point where it’s not good for that any more: works can get lost in the vast numbers of Comp entries. Judges aren’t required to play all the games, and indeed probably very few will this year. So it’ll take more judges to give every game adequate attention.

Why the increase in entries? It must be pointed out that this has been the trend for a number of years now. I’ve attributed it to the Comp’s embrace of Twine in the past. A colleague also suggests that Narrascope has increased participation by making the ELO more aware of what the IF community has been doing.

So what the heck, let’s give this a go. I’m probably not going to play all the entries. I’m definitely not going to post about them all. But we’ll see what happens.