The Stack

Here’s an experimental one. It’s a two-layered narrative: layer one is a short story by classic sci-fi writer Robert Sheckley, a critique of technological consumerism and consumer debt, and layer two, where all of the interactivity takes place, is a discussion of the story by a couple of audience members, breaking in periodically in a different font. Their conversation contains occasional blanks for the player to fill in with interpretive words: “Don’t you get the feeling that Carrin is ______ about Miller?”

Now, the system makes it clear that it’s paying attention to how you fill in the blanks. An introductory section is very clearly responsive, asking yes/no questions, and later parts bring up words that you typed in previously. Nonetheless, it felt mostly inconsequential. Obviously the course of the pre-existing Sheckley story isn’t going to vary with your choices, but even the discussion seemed like it was just producing the same output regardless of what I typed a lot of the time, just swapping in the words I typed. I suspect that it really was varying the output, but not being very obvious about it. I could accept this as what Emily Short calls “reflective choices”, prompting the player for a reaction just to provoke one, but a lot of the prompts seemed to be angling for specific responses, like a middle school English test. Consider the passage:

Vesper: He gossips about everyone in town. Company’s code. Yeah right!
You know he uses that line at every house on that block.

Harris: You don’t think Pathis is being ______?

How do you fill that with anything other than “honest”? And if you’re giving me a purely reflective choice and making it clear what you want me to choose, I start to feel like my interaction isn’t serving any purpose at all.

Also, the ending is less than satisfying — so much so that I thought at first that I had hit a bug and the game had ended prematurely. Admittedly, the inner story’s ending is unsatisfying by design — it’s depicting an unsatisfying world! — but the game gives the last word to Sheckley, not the audience, and I would have at least expected the commentary track to have a summing-up, giving the fictional audience’s thoughts after seeing the whole thing.

But I can kind of see a thematic justification. Two-layered stories always implicitly ask “What is the relationship between the layers? Why is this particular story told in conjunction with that particular story, and how do they resonate?”, and once you’ve posed that question outright, the obvious answer is that the Sheckley story is about a society that’s technologically advanced but constraining, pressuring people to conform while plying them luxuries that don’t really satisfy them, and then the interactivity is similarly technological but constrained, unsatisfying, and pressuring. I don’t really buy this, though, because you have to ignore so much about the story to make it work. The inner story’s central ideas are luxury and debt, and the outer story doesn’t reflect that at all.

Still, I give it kudos just for experimenting with form. That’s always interesting to see, no matter what the result.

I recently learned the term “database fiction”. It refers to works like Her Story or Portal (Brad Fregger, 1986) where the player’s main activity is querying a database for more story.

Kondiac is the smallest work of database fiction I’ve ever seen, consisting of “about 9 different pages” according to the author. Each page is an image of a document, mostly containing text with names or other notable keywords you can enter into a search bar to pull up more documents. (I’d be very surprised if it’s actually parsing the input at all.) There’s no definitive ending; you just stop looking for keywords when you’ve satisfied yourself that you’ve learned an Alaskan town’s grisly little secret, which, if you’re genre-savvy enough, could happen the moment you enter the game’s title and see the words “butcher shop”.

And that’s honestly a bit of a problem. The game starts with just a prompt and a photo of a building, with no instruction or orientation to let you know what kind of game it is or what you’re supposed to be doing. By the time you know what you’re looking for, the game is over. Can we really call it a mystery when answers precede questions in the audience’s mind?

On the surface, this is a slim bit of nonsense made of crudely-drawn stick figure art, with minimal implementation and puzzles that you really need the built-in hints to solve, including critical-path urination at one point. It really reminds me of the stuff that students used to slap together in Flash, back in the day.

And honestly, the surface is pretty much all there is. Nonetheless, it stands out in ParserComp for violating one of the basic assumptions I had about the sort of games I expected to find here: there is no text output. Commands are typed in, but the results are communicated entirely with pictures. And while it seems likely that this isn’t the first game to do this, I’ll be darned if I can think of any others. Modern IF has more gone the opposite route, keeping textual output and ditching the parser, and it’s good to be reminded that there are still other possibilities out there, underexplored and waiting. This game doesn’t do a lot with the concept, but it does at least show some of its difficulties and promises — specifically, the asymmetry of communication. In an all-text game, concepts are communicated from player to game and game to player in the same way. Take that away, and you immediately create uncertainty about the possibility space, even in a dinky game like this one. Even the hints require interpretation. There’s stuff here that could be built on.

As an unrepentant thief, your goal is to ransack an alchemist’s house in the woods and leave with as much gold as you can carry. This is a solidly implemented physical-puzzle game, not too long or difficult. I have only one complaint: the one time I was stuck enough on a puzzle to use the hint system, which supposedly gives context-sensitive hints, all it gave me was a general “examine everything and draw a map”.

One thing I appreciated was how much destruction you cause in pursuit of your selfish goals: chopping down a tree here, breaking a lock there, an adorable squirrel betrayed. It’s all fairly minor for an adventure game, really, but it gains some meaning from the fact that you’re doing it all to someone, and the fact that the game doesn’t dwell on it feels like characterization. The player character is basically an AFGNCAAP, but at the same time comes off as callous and irresponsible. And I’m here for it. In the end, you have to avoid the alchemist on his return, provoking a sense of guilt that the player character pointedly doesn’t share.

A short and ultimately rather silly archeology story, this is essentially a one-joke game, but you get to determine which of several jokes the one joke is. You do this by choosing one of several objects to save from a fire, although in your first run-through, the fire hasn’t started yet and it’s not at all clear that you’re making a choice. Whatever you choose, it maintains a straight face until the ending. It’s a bit like the various “practical joke on the player” games I’ve seen in IFComp over the years, but less aimed at provoking anger.

The main obstacle along the way is an ancient door covered in runes, with an implication that you’ll be able to open the door if you figure out what the runes say. In fact figuring out the runes is never necessary; depending on what ending you’re heading for, the door may just open itself. I devoted a little time to figuring out the runes anyway: the pattern of repetitions suggest it could be a cryptogram, but nothing I tried worked. I’m left uncertain about whether it’s actually a cryptogram or not.

At any rate, it is what it is, and what it does it executes pretty well, so whether you like it will mainly depend on whether you like what it’s going for.

I don’t want to dwell too much on faults, so this post will be short. This is a cursory combat-based RPG of the most boring sort. Combat is just dice-rolling without interesting choices, and all you can do between fights is wait for random events, where the only random events are the arrival of traders or more things to fight. And there are only two things to fight: a wolf and a bear. Playing this left me thinking “There must be something I missed. This can’t be all there is to it.” But reading the source code confirms that it is. Maybe the author uploaded their test data by mistake.

This one feels distinctly old-school. Partly it’s the palette: the text is in the sort of sixteen-color mix I strongly associate with amateur games from the 1980s. Perhaps this is because it’s the easiest sort of text styling to do in QBasic, which this game is written in. This makes the quality of the parser a pleasant surprise — my only complaint about it is that objects in containers are treated as out of scope, making you use commands like GET PAPER FROM TRUNK instead of just GET PAPER. (The author recognizes this, and emphatically provides a hotkey for the general GET ALL FROM IT, I suspect in response to complaints from playtesters.)

The prose, too, fits the pre-web-amateur impression: it’s wordy, in a trying-to-impress way. A Lovecraft quotation in the beginning made me suspect at first that this was deliberate pastiche, that Uncle Mortimer’s mansion hides eldritch secrets in grand gothic style, but no: the theme is time travel. Uncle Mortimer’s inventions take you to a handful of major events, where minimally-implemented historical figures recognize you from your family resemblance to Mortimer and give you information and/or objects he entrusted to them. Hearing everyone throughout history say variations on “I remember Mortimer, he helped me enormously, and I see your family resemblance to him” gets comical after a while, but for the most part the repetitive structure is used well here. Having similar overall goals in each time period gives the player something reliable to anticipate, even as the obstacles to it change.

We’ve had multiple stories in this comp that have you start off in a seemingly ordinary house or building, probably based on a place familiar to the author, then discover the bizarre and fantastic as you explore. It’s a pattern as old as Colossal Cave and Zork, really. But you seldom see a work that holds off on the turn quite as long as this one, or provides such a convincing pretense at being a a relatively mundane story. The story of a teenager investigating her aunt’s disappearance, and gradually uncovering her secrets as you explore her house, is certainly enough to carry a game by itself, especially when you can talk about her with the rest of the family: the concerned mother, the distant father, the hostile and secretive sister whose secrets turn out to be linked to the aunt’s. So it’s a family drama blended with detective story and adventure-game puzzlery, but then hallucinogens enter the story, and then you start having obvious hallucinations yourself without having taken anything, and then things really start getting weird when it turns out that some of your hallucinations weren’t hallucinations at all. It all builds up to a finale involving magic and alternate dimensions. You can question how much of the ending is “real”, but for my money, all the fantastic elements feel a lot more grounded once Aunt Beverly returns and takes charge of the situation, mainly because she’s willing to explain everything.

Repeatedly, throughout the game, the player character expresses qualms over invading her aunt’s privacy. Should I really be unlocking this door? Do I have the right to read her diary? To break into her safe? The player is prompted, and I of course unhesitatingly select “Yes” every time. I appreciate the PC’s concerns, and consider them to be a sort of flavor text that helps establish her character, but her perspective is not mine.

The actions you can perform, and therefore what puzzles you can solve, are to some extent linked to the passage of time, which is linked to advancement in the story. This is sometimes a little frustrating, putting some avenues of investigation out of reach just when you start making headway in them, but the game is usually pretty good at guiding you back to the things you can actually do, sometimes by means of text messages from friends or family members.

Oh, this one’s nice. Pastoral and poetic in tone, its main mechanic, the core of all its puzzles, is literary-style riddles — riddles that, once answered, turn into the things their answers name, but are still somehow made of words. That’s the power of abstraction you get from text — although the same transformations are also powered by concrete poetry, words arranged to make shapes, sometimes in very clever ways. (Admirably, the author has taken special care to make this not interfere with screen readers, for those who use them.)

That makes it all sound very cerebral, but the heart of the story — and its inspiration, according to the endnotes — is that the riddles are a metaphor for the struggles of an old woman with dementia, losing her vocabulary. Solving them is a sort of quest to help her preserve what she’s losing. It puts a layer of sadness on every puzzle, and nicely connects theme and mechanics.

Riddles are perilous territory for adventure games, because of how they can stop a game dead: where a well-implemented object-based puzzle can give you more cues about what you’re supposed to be doing with each near miss, riddles tend to be all-or-nothing. Fortunately, the riddles here are easy, and on top of that, the in-game hints are pretty good.

In addition, the prose describing the environment is delightful, filled with randomized wildlife. I think this is the most satisfactory game I’ve seen in this Comp so far.

Another time-travel game, fairly small and kind of underdeveloped — it would be more satisfying with more interactive detail, and some of the puzzles just outright tell you what to do instead of presenting you with the information you’d need to figure it out. A time travel device moves you through a three-day span, and also lets you send objects between the days, but it’s all a bit unconvincing: although the three periods share a layout, it’s clear that they’re essentially parallel copies of each other, not the same place at three times. You cannot, for example, leave an object in the past and see it show up in the future. Past and future have nothing to do with each other, except in certain hand-authored special cases.

To be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a fundamentally bad game — just that it could be a lot better with some more work put into it. Satisfying time travel mechanics are fairly hard to do, and even the sleight of hand necessary to cover up their absence is kind of tricky.

The premise is that Anita (whoever that is) has died, and you’re trying to get some closure by visiting her one last time in an alternate timeline where she didn’t. This leads to an ironic ending where the Anita who survived doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. It’s an ending that could have been melancholy, but instead the author basically went for cheap shock, which would probably feel insulting in a game where the premise is better-integrated into the gameplay.