The Stack

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.

I’ve found myself devoting more time to A Monster’s Expedition. Not as much as Steam thinks I have, mind you. This is a game without urgency, and that seems to make me willing to alt-tab out and leave it running in the background while I check my email, or watch a movie, or take a nap. But also, I’m still finding passages to new islands frequently enough to make mere wandering around appealing.

One big way the game encourages this behavior: After you’ve won, it inverts its cloud policy. At the start of the game, there’s cloud cover obscuring your view of the world everywhere except for the islands you’ve visited and the sea lanes you’ve passed, and a little margin around that. Sometimes, if an island is close enough, you can barely glimpse its edges through the mist. Sometimes they’re completely obscured until you find them. But after you’ve won the game, the rule changes from “Clouds everywhere, except known islands” to “Clouds only over unknown islands”. The map is now mostly clear, except in spots that, because of the clouds, you know must have islands in them. This gives the game a certain Pac-Man-like appeal as you try to clear the board of every last crumb of cloud, but it also provides guidance. If I think I might be able to build and launch a raft in some spot, I can trace where it would go and decide if it’s going to hit anything of interest or not before I spend time trying.

I’m at the point where most of the remaining puzzles are probably the larger sort, involving multiple islands together. I haven’t been keeping good track of this, but I’m pretty sure that some of the puzzles I’ve solved have required time travel, in the sense of solving an island one way, then resetting it and solving it another way that uses a log or raft or even just an alternate entrance that you used the first solution to obtain. Checking puzzle dependencies on a thing of this size must have been a large undertaking. But the clouds make it all seem just a little bit more approachable.

So, it turns out that the backstory of Stephen’s Sausage Roll totally goes there, but not quite in the way I had expected. The feel is less squick than melancholy. Sadness at the passing of a civilization, at the loss not just of its physical forms, its buildings reduced to ruins and its people grotesquely dehumanized, but of its past, as all the knowledge that the people sought to preserve all their lives vanishes with no one to remember it. Like Link on Koholint, it’s questionable whether anything that happens on the island is anything more than a dream — a lingering dream of the doomed and dead, that confuses and combines the old celebratory feasts with the funeral rites that dominated their final days. Preparing the dead meat for its final rest.

This concern with legacy even informs the final few puzzles. The final chapter is largely concerned with puzzles that have mobile components other than sausages, and one of the things you notice as you go along is that they’re only mobile in puzzle mode. Once you’ve solved the puzzle, they’re frozen in their final positions. Some places take advantage of this to control exploration: solving a puzzle might require pushing some blocks to form a bridge to the grill, and once you’re outside the puzzle and the rest of the world comes back, you use the same bridge to advance to the next puzzle. But this isn’t something you really have to think about until the last few puzzles, where you can easily cook all the sausages and still leave things arranged wrong, blocking off further progress. It isn’t enough to deal with the remnants of the past. You now have to think about the future as well. This is the game’s last big twist.

The climactic puzzle makes it almost inevitable that you’ll mess this up at first. I honestly thought it was just a victory lap, a puzzle in name only that just gives you a whole bunch of sausages in an open space with nothing preventing you from cooking them, as a reward for getting through everything else. I should have known SSR would never do anything that friendly. It is, instead, a puzzle that’s all about setting things up so you can climb a spire after the puzzle is closed. The sausages are basically irrelevant. The game had the power to make difficult non-sausage-based puzzles all along and is only now pointing this out.

And after you’ve done that, then comes the real victory lap: the grills throughout the world light up outside of puzzle mode. Finally, you can cook the remaining overworld sausages! I observed before that you always have the ability to walk all the way back to the beginning of the game, if you’re so inclined, and now the game motivates you to do so. To revisit in reverse all the places where you spent so much time. The people of the island strove to preserve their memories and memorials, and now you have memories of your own associated with the island. So of course you share their fate in the end. In another game, this would come off as cheap irony, but here, it’s really the only possible way to cap off the game’s themes.

I’m still in what I believe to be the final stretch. It’s a long stretch, and the puzzles are getting monumentally difficult. Clearing just one per session feels like an accomplishment.

The DROD fandom uses the word “lynchpin” for a puzzle’s crucial insight, the non-obvious realization that enables you to solve the whole thing. A lot of DROD puzzles consist of a lynchpin plus a bunch of tactical maneuvering. I’m finding that a lot of the later puzzles in SSR have multiple lynchpins. You tinker with a puzzle for a while without getting anywhere, and then you realize “Wait, I can push this thing over by this ladder and stick my fork in this gap and lift the whole thing out of the water!” or whatever, and that opens up new possibilities, but it doesn’t solve the puzzle. It just gives you the tools you need to start thinking about the real puzzle. I’ve also seen a puzzle or two that are just outright multi-stage affairs, where you have to get a sausage from its starting position to the grill with a series of unrelated mini-puzzles along the way.

Once again, this stands in contrast to A Monster’s Expedition, where every island is small and elegant. Ah, but AME has larger puzzles that span multiple islands. I suppose the difference in feel has to do with the sense of what the smallest unit of puzzle is. In AME, where boundaries are fluid and every change persists, you can frequently think of the different parts of a compound puzzle as separate puzzles. SSR doesn’t allow that. Puzzles are sharply defined, with discrete conditions for entering the puzzle and leaving it, and if you leave without solving all of it, you haven’t solved any of it.

Heavy spoiler for puzzle content continue here. This is one of those games that it’s impossible to talk about in any depth without spoiling puzzles. It’s a game of twists and turns, and the twists and turns take the form of breakthroughs in solving puzzles.

I’ve been describing the levels in SSR as being grouped into “worlds”, but in another sense, it’s all one world: one environment, with puzzles embedded in it. You can just walk all the way back to the beginning whenever you want. Individual puzzles, however, are self-contained. When you activate one, the rest of the world literally falls away, sinking into the water to temporarily isolate you. Two other changes happen at the same time: the grills light up, and certain immovable pink boxes with their own special shader turn into sausages. When you grill all the sausages, some unseen force eats them, removing the pink boxes from the overworld. There are also green boxes that turn into sausages when you complete all the puzzles in what I’ve been calling a “world”. The green box sausages are thus available in the overworld between the puzzles, and are used to reach the next world, typically by pushing them into a gap so you can walk across it.

That’s the pattern for the first five worlds, but the sixth breaks it in all kinds of ways. It all starts with a puzzle that appears to be absolutely impossible, because it gives you a sausage to grill and no grill to do it with. This puzzle is actually accessible from world 5, but can’t be solved until you you’ve solved all the world 5 puzzles and, by so doing, have a green box sausage that isn’t on bridge duty. That’s the first twist: that you can bring sausages into puzzles just by physically bringing them into the puzzle and leaving them lying on non-sinking ground. Suddenly the puzzles aren’t self-contained any more. The second twist is that you can keep stuff from sinking by wedging a sausage under it. It has to be a very specific sort of terrain feature: something with an overhead protrusion right next to the puzzle, so that a single sausage can lie half on the puzzle ground and half under the thing you want it to hold up. Up to this point, the sinking of the ground around the puzzle seemed like just a graphical flourish, but this twist establishes it as something physically real, and capable of physical interactions with puzzle elements.

And once your habits and assumptions have been so thoroughly upset, this immediately becomes the theme for all of the following puzzles. I had been thinking of the unlocking of green boxes as the thing that defines the boundaries between worlds, but now, every single puzzle unlocks one or more green boxes, giving you overworld sausages to use in the next puzzle.

Will there be more twists that alter the basic nature of the game in even bigger ways? Maybe not. Several things suggest that it’s all coming to a climax. For one thing, I’ve reached a point where the island curves back on itself, so that I can see the little wrecked boat where the game starts. That seems like an endgame thing. For another, there’s the plaques. Each world has an informational plaque or two in a prominent place, giving a little piece of the island’s history. In this gauntlet of green boxes, where every puzzle lets you go a little farther, there’s a plaque after every puzzle, giving you backstory at a much faster but still maddeningly slow rate. Right now, I’m at a point that seems like it’s just short of confirming all my worst suspicions, and it casts a lingering sense of dread over the whole game. It’s like A Monster’s Expedition crossed with Silent Hill 2.

Puzzle spoilers ahead. (Puzzle spoilers are the worst kind. According to studies, plot spoilers actually increase people’s enjoyment of a story. I’m a bit skeptical about that myself, and suspect that it doesn’t really apply to all kinds of story, but even so, it’s undeniable that plot spoilers hurt a story less than puzzle spoilers hurt a puzzle. The pleasure of a puzzle lies mostly in the process of figuring it out.)

The puzzles in world 5 become a lot easier once you’ve solved even just one of them, because once you’ve done that, you know their uniting theme. It’s even a theme that I was anticipating: the first time I accidentally lost my fork back in world 3, my reaction was “There are going to be puzzles based around making you do this deliberately, aren’t there?”

And that’s a tricky thing to require of the player! When it first happened, I didn’t really understand what I had done wrong, or how to reproduce it. It turns out to be fairly simple, once you know how. You just have to put yourself into a situation where you’re falling but the fork isn’t, separated by a cliff edge. And since you’re not permitted to just walk off cliffs directly, the only way to fall is to do it while riding a sausage.

After you’ve dropped your fork, you can pick it up again just by being in the right position to do so, standing at the handle end and facing it. In fact, this happens automatically, and that can be a problem. You can’t tell the player character that it’s not time to pick up the fork yet. One of the reasons to drop your fork is to get it past an obstacle that you can’t pass while holding it. To do this without inadvertently picking it up, you might need to walk backwards, so the player character can’t see what they’re pushing.

I spoke before about how the controls are alienating. Fork-dropping puzzles are alienating in the specific sense that they clash with the instinct to identify with the player character. In these puzzles, you’re tricking the player character into doing what you want. The PC has a number of automatic behaviors that aren’t under your direct control — not dropping the fork, not stepping off cliffs, picking up the fork whenever possible — and your job is to fight them. In a strange way, it reminds me of The Fall, an adventure game where you play an AI with constraints on its behavior, where the puzzles are largely solved by deliberately provoking emergencies for the sake of the emergency powers they grant you.

By now, I’ve blown past where I stopped playing Stephen’s Sausage Roll the first time. Back then, I had gotten stuck on the third world, the cold-themed world. Having now gotten through that, I took world 4 at a leap, and am now having trouble getting started at all in world 5. The game reminds me of this at the start of each session: your initial position is at the location of the last puzzle you solved, which, for me, is pointedly still in world 4.

By now, I’m noticing repeated structures. If there are three grill tiles in an L shape that’s accessible from only one side, that’s recognizable as a device for completely grilling a single sausage in a specific orientation. Quite a few levels in world 4 contain a small tower with a ladder up it, with a 3×3 cross section and a little knob in the center of the top. The usual purpose of such towers: you can climb up with a sausage stuck to your fork, pull the sausage off against the knob, and then push it off the edge to stack it on top of another sausage waiting below. If the knob also has a ladder, you need to use it get on top of the sausage yourself before you roll it off the edge by trying to walk crosswise.

And sometimes there are passageways you can’t traverse with your fork, an effect produced by the constraints of ladders and/or inconveniently placed pillars. This is most commonly a pattern that means exit route: you can’t go that way, but you can come back through it.