The Stack

At last, the randomizer pulls up the one that I had been particularly looking forward to. For one thing, it’s by Brian “Mathbrush” Rushton, who’s made quite a name for himself in the community over the last several years, and is responsible for the 2020 train heist game that I liked so much. For another, like that game, this is an authorized sequel, and the game it’s a sequel to is The Impossible Bottle.

I’ll say this right off: It is a lesser work than the one it’s based on. It satisfies, but it does not dazzle the way Bottle did. To a large extent, that’s because Bottle‘s spatial weirdness has been replaced with time travel, and that’s much more familiar ground in adventure games. The cleverest time-travel puzzles in this game are echoes of Timequest and other decades-old works.

Nonetheless, it makes good use of the premise, not for its own sake, but to show a portrait of a family and how it changes over the course of decades. The changes are largely negative ones: people age and die or move away, the house itself becomes damaged, and ultimately the place is entirely abandoned as you approach your own end. Your temporal peculiarities let you fix some things, and see change that would normally require multiple lifetimes, which brings a sense of hope to it all, but there’s still a lot that’s beyond your power to affect. You can always revisit the past, though. Nothing is ever truly lost from your perspective. The feel is comforting, cozy, in contrast to Bottle‘s sometimes disturbing bizarreness. The family here may not comprehend what you’re doing, but at least they’re never dehumanized.

A brief mention of supply chain issues reminds me of how Bottle linked everything thematically to COVID lockdowns, and I can kind of see something similar going on here, comment on how the last couple of years have distorted our perspective of time. It’s a bit of a stretch, though.

It uses the same hybrid interface as Bottle, in which hyperlinks just generate text that gets fed into the parser. The problems with such a system are noticeable in one room: the text contains a link on the word “house”, which produces a disambiguation prompt — “Did you want to examine the house or the smashed treehouse?” — even though the link you clicked on isn’t ambiguous at all.

A chess problem, spiced with story. A king mourns the loss of his queen after his villainous opponent sacrificed his own queen to kill her, but he still has a loyal pawn who could possibly bring her back. (I don’t think the mechanics of chess quite fit the story here, since it’s possible to promote a pawn to a queen when the original queen is still on the board. But it kind of depends on whether the identity of the queen as a character is linked to its physical piece or its notional game object, and that’s really beyond the scope of the rules of chess.)

At any rate, the story here is really just flavor — while it does get reiterated during play, it isn’t extensive and doesn’t have a profound effect. No, the game is simply a chess problem, and the input is mainly a matter of making moves in “algebraic” chess notation. It’s not a large problem, giving each side just one piece other than the king, and it’s rendered smaller by the way that the game recognizes hopeless situations and cuts them short, in some cases before I personally understood that they were hopeless. Indeed, it’s so eager to do this that for a while I got the impression that there was only one allowable move from each position.

Apparently the problem is called the Saavedra Position, and it was thought that the best you could to is force a draw until Saavedra spotted a way to avoid stalemate through a clever underpromotion. It’s unlikely that I would have thought of this on my own if the game didn’t go to such pains to suggest underpromotion as a viable approach: a conspicuous portion of the help text discusses how to notate underpromotions, there are special commands for specifying what piece to promote pawns to by default, and even the title is a pretty big hint. I think that’s the main design takeaway here: how to direct the player by making them aware of possibilities.

Another novel engine: this one was made in Godot, a system not usually used for text adventures, but apparently just as capable of supporting them as any other Turing-complete programming language. Despite using a newish engine, the game is old-school, and the parsing is fairly primitive: you get two-word commands, a mere handful of verbs, and no abbreviations or synonyms whatever — if you want to go north, you have to type “go north” in full, and if you want to examine something, then I’m sorry but the accepted verb is “inspect”. In general, the only words that are available for use at a given moment are ones currently displayed on the screen, either in the output text or in a sidebar containing a verb list and your inventory, in colors indicating their function: blue for verbs, green for takeable objects, brown for inspectable room features, red for directions. Colored words embedded in the output text look enough like hyperlinks that I really want to click on them, but that functionality doesn’t exist. There are some context-specific verbs that only show up when they’re doable, but most object interaction is done with a generic USE.

It’s mainly exploration-based, telling its story environmentally, although there’s a strong temptation to ignore the environmental storytelling and only pay attention to the colored words. The basic idea is that you go to check up on a friend when the radio tower next to his house is hit by lightning, and in the process you discover the mad science stuff he was tinkering with and get attacked by wandering monsters. The monsters at least form an additional game mechanic, based around healing items and ad hoc weapons that can only be used once, forcing you to keep finding more of them. The inflexible two-word parser and the multiple weapons combine in a weird way: you have to phrase your attacks as “attack hatchet” or whatever. I feel like there must be a way of phrasing this that doesn’t make it sound like you’re picking fights with your inventory.

Here we have a sort of religious horror story that’s also a riddle. It’s a translation from Spanish, and it’s a good translation; I have no complaints about the prose. In structure, it’s a series of vignettes. An evil muse makes you relive moments of sin from your past and then write verses about them in a book, delighting in your transgressions. The vignettes are pretty minimal: most require just a single command to complete, although it’s not always obvious at first what that command is. Writing a verse consists of choosing a single word, and any word you type in will be accepted, although picking something meaningful and relevant can provide hints to the larger puzzle of who you are and why you’re in this situation. Here the game uses the parser interface to its strengths, making input completely freeform so as to avoid constraining your guesses.

The same can be said for the ending. There’s no natural ending built into the story: the vignettes cycle after a while, and the only way to escape the cycle is by asking God for forgiveness. This can be done in more than one way, and can be done at any time, including before you’ve seen the entire story. My first play-through ended prematurely when I wrote the word “mercy” into the book, thinking not “Lord, have mercy on me”, but “I was pretty merciless in that last bit. Maybe I can counteract that a little.” Another premature ending happened when I was told to start an animal sacrifice ritual, and had no idea what to do, and thought “Maybe we start with a prayer?” And it’s a bit of a shame that this happens, because ending the game provides revelations that would otherwise be built up to slowly over the course of the story.

This is a decently-put-together short piece that feels like an intriguing first chapter. It follows the same basic pattern as the opening to Curses!, giving the player a deceptively mundane task — moving three boxes to the loading dock — that lead you into something strange and supernatural, involving a mysterious cave under the storage facility. And then the game ends.

That’s my biggest complaint, really: that the balance of content is tilted against the part where it starts getting really interesting. The bulk of the player’s time is spent firmly in the realm of the mundane and mechanical, including some fiddly business about a tight passage and a freight elevator. If the game were much longer, I’d say that this is the sort of interaction that needs to be either circumvented or automated on repeat visits. In fact, the game kind of does that in the end, skipping over the whole thing when you get the final box.

I suppose the real point, though, is in the depiction of place, which is one of the things parser IF is really good at.

Neil deMause is one of the old guard of IF, an entrant in the very first IFComp and author of the acclaimed Lost New York. But it’s a bit of a surprise to see his name crop up here, because his last known IF work was 20 years ago. (Welcome back, Neil!)

Improv: Origins is a prequel to a series of superhero parody games he wrote from 1997 to 2002, featuring the “Frenetic Five”, a team whose questionably-useful powers are all inspired by parser-driven text adventures. The player character, Improv, specializes in using ordinary objects in unusual ways, and he’s supported by a character who can find objects, a character who can guess words for you, and so forth. As such, ParserComp is almost the only venue where they really fit any more, in an IF world that’s increasingly leaving both parsers and puzzles behind. Although the game presents itself at first as an Improv solo adventure, it’s really an origin story for the team, showing how Improv met everyone else.

The whole game takes place in a single room, a sort of comically adventure-gamey bank vault, containing an impossible-to-open safe that you’ve been hired to open. Some of the puzzles are quite difficult even with the hints you can get from the other heroes; I know I’m not the only one to get stuck on the puzzle to find duct tape, which, given the power to locate objects, is really just a puzzle to realize that you should be looking for it. (I have some complaints about that power, by the way. It doesn’t seem to work on rubber bands, and you need a lot of rubber bands.) Still, it’s satisfying to make use of everyone’s powers, even (especially!) the less obviously useful ones.

The prose is generally good — there’s a repeated gag I particularly liked of Lexicon, the word hero, responding directly to narration — but much of the humor is based around casually mentioning absurd superheero names, which I suppose is consistent with the original Frenetic Five games, but it feels to me rather played-out by now, the same old joke about a subject that isn’t what it was 20 years ago — heck, the superhero parody genre has moved on. We’re in the age of One Punch Man now and this game is still imitating The Tick.

Okay, we’re not off to an auspicious start here. Lantern is a Windows app with a hybrid hypertext/command-line interface in a graphical display, written in a Lua-driven engine called LÖVE, which doesn’t seem to be designed primarily for parser IF. The first thing we’re told is “The story is about a blind man carrying a lantern, trying to solve the mystery of his blindness. As he walks around the only sense is hearing, smell, touch, and taste.” Interactive fiction has historically had a substantial following among blind people, as it’s one of the few forms of computer game that they can play, provided it’s in a format that’s friendly with text-to-speech software. This game isn’t.

It starts with your basic amnesia plot: you’re stuck in three rooms (that I could find), with no idea how you got there, and puzzled by the fact that “your sense of sight is missing”. Except I’m more puzzled by why the player character thinks that. If I found myself in a strange room and unable to see anything, I wouldn’t think “I must be blind”, I’d think “Gee, it’s completely dark in here”. I suppose the lit lantern in your hands is supposed to address this, but even with that, I really think my first thought would be “There’s something wrong with this lantern. It’s giving off heat but not light. Is there some kind of cover I have to open?”

I struggled a bit with the UI. The introductory instructions are longer than the screen, and at first I thought it was impossible to scroll — it doesn’t recognize scrollwheel or arrow keys, but can be dragged with the mouse. If you type a command and press enter, and the command isn’t one that the game understands, absolutely nothing happens — no error message, not even clearing the command line. To make it worse, what commands are recognized is highly contextual, even for things that shouldn’t be. You can’t refer to objects that aren’t currently named on the screen — and pretty much every command response has its own screen, because output is all based around nodes, like a Twine game. So if you, say, examine an object, the response acts like a modal pop-up, blocking all other interaction until it’s closed.

In fact, what this scoping suggests is that typed commands are simply mapped onto highlighted keywords or pairs of keywords from the output text, including the sense organs (“fingers”, “ears”, etc.) and so forth that are (otherwise bafflingly) included in your inventory listing. Verbs are effectively fake: “touch” is a synonym for “fingers” and so forth. Thus, in contradiction to the spirit of ParserComp and possibly its actual rules as well, the game seems to be primarily built for mouse input, with the command line as an afterthought. The parsing is lousy enough that I’m not convinced that it’s even happening — the game recognizes so few commands that the game could very well just be looking up the entire command string in a table. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that adding an extra space between words is enough to turn a valid command into an invalid one.

It’s a difficult game to communicate with — the whole premise is that it’s giving you less information than you want, and it doesn’t make it easy to make your intentions known via input either. After a few hours of just exhaustively trying all the possible combinations of keywords, I’m giving up on it. I solved a bunch of inventory puzzles but I haven’t solved the mystery of blindness. I don’t know what proportion of the game I’ve seen. I’ve seen enough.

Time to reconnect to my roots a little. The voting period for ParserComp 2022 started just yesterday. Like the Spring Thing, this is an alternative to the annual IFComp, and a newish one at that — apparently the first ParserComp was run in 2015, but that was a one-off until it was revived last year. The main thing distinguishing it from the main Comp is that only entries with a text parser are allowed — so no Twine or Choicescript or other choice-based or hypertext works. In other words, it’s an attempt at addressing the problem of judging parser games and hypertext games together, and doing it without kicking Twine out of the main Comp. I slept through it last year, but I’m told there was some good stuff in it.

There are 20 entries this year, which seems to me a very comfortable quantity. I could play one a day and comment on them all here and be finished before Narrascope.

What’s your least favorite part of Tomb Raider?

Is it the water levels, making you search desperately for the next air pocket while using a less familiar control scheme? Or maybe it’s the boss fights, making you figure out puzzles while constantly distracting you by chasing you around? Perhaps it’s the parts where you pull a lever to open a door, but it only opens for a little while, forcing you to do a difficult sequence of jumps within a tight time limit and start over whenever you fail?

Well, whatever your preference, the last few levels of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness have got you covered.

The final boss fight against Eckhardt actually isn’t all that bad — my only complaint about it is that you spend a lot of time waiting through phases where Eckhardt isn’t attacking or vulnerable — but it’s preceded by a far more aggravating one, where Kurtis, now allied with Lara for the moment, battles a huge insectoid abomination that spits acid. Being hit by an acid missile makes Kurtis flinch, which makes it harder to dodge the next missile — a classic “stun lock” effect. And at the end of it, Kurtis appears to die a cutscene death, making me wonder why I just put in so much effort to keep him alive. But really, it only took me so many tries because, even after playing for so many hours, I still didn’t fully understand the controls. The monster has multiple targetable spots, which you have to switch between, and the game is generally light enough on combat that this was the first time I ever needed to use the “switch targets” button.

On a positive note, there are some really good sets throughout this section. The twisty catwalks above the marine biology area are like a satisfyingly explorable jungle gym, and Eckhardt’s old alchemical laboratory is full of first-rate atmospheric knick-knacks.

The ending is a bit of a confusing mess, though, and I’m guessing it’s a big part of why the game got a reputation as rushed and unfinished. Specifically, a character who I don’t recall ever seeing before, but who Lara recognizes, reveals himself to be a nephil shape-shifter, and the real identity behind every single person who helped Lara throughout the game, including Kurtis. The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. Kurtis has a bio on various wikis. He has a backstory. Apparently there were plans to spin him off into his own games if he was popular enough — and no surprise there, that was pretty obvious from the moment he appeared onscreen. And yet here the game is, implying that he was never a real person. Maybe some of his appearances were the real Kurtis and some were the shape-shifter? I’m mulling over the possible combinations, and I don’t see one that works.

At any rate, I’m not the only one with criticisms like these. This game was enough of a critical failure to kill the original Tomb Raider continuity. Lara’s next game is a reboot, made by a different studio. This seems like a good opportunity to close the book on her adventures for a little while.

In the lower depths of the secret research complex under Prague — like Amnesia, this game largely equates progress with downward motion — Lara runs into Kurtis again, and again he constrains and disempowers her, trapping her in an airlock to keep her from causing any more trouble than she already has. And he has something of a point: Lara’s ingress involved shutting off the power to the security systems, which were also the systems keeping the monsters under control. She’s literally meddling in things she doesn’t understand, and for the first time in her life someone is effectively holding her accountable for her actions. It still bodes ill for their budding relationship, though. I can’t imagine Lara Croft accepting someone who keeps trying to control her like this.

While Lara’s stashed, player control shifts to Kurtis. It’s a move that reminds me of the seasons of Murder, She Wrote where they experimented with protagonists other than Jessica Fletcher: it feels a little wrong, but it’s really not all that objectively different. The main effect is that it takes away the opportunity to ogle Lara, and thus makes me aware of the extent to which I was doing so: not a lot, as my attention is generally on the game’s challenges, but every once in a while. The sorcerous powers that Kurtis displayed in his first appearance are disappointingly limited to cinematics, and beyond player control. Early on, there’s a bit where he uses his “Far See” power to get a keycode from a post-it on the other side of a locked door, and afterward I kept thinking “I wish I could Far See right now. That would be nice.” It’s like they designed a special mechanic for the character and then didn’t get around to actually implementing it.

The really peculiar part is that we don’t really know what Kurtis is trying to accomplish. We’re just piloting him forward in the hope that he knows as much about what’s going on as he seems to. He seems to be a good guy, at least to the extent that he’s fighting the bad guys. He’s probably with the Lux Veritatis, the secret guardians of forbidden knowledge who have been battling dark alchemists for centuries. That would make him the enemy of Lara’s enemy, but not her friend. This is a pattern we’ve seen as far back as Tomb Raider II: You have two warring sides, one dedicated to securing and protecting a dangerous power, one that wants to seize that power for themselves and exploit it. Then Lara Croft enters the picture. Now there are three sides.