The Stack

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.

The voting period of the 25th annual IFComp is over, and the results will be announced tomorrow. I managed to play all but one of the games ¹The one I skipped, Alice Blue, only runs on Linux. I do have an old Linux machine around — once upon a time, it served as my web server — but the game has a bunch of requirements beyond that: the Gnome desktop, a list of packages, certain terminal preferences. It didn’t seem worth the effort. , but I didn’t write up as many games as I intended, and those that I wrote up weren’t necessarily the best of the Comp. I think the randomizer shuffled a bunch of the best games toward the end for me, and I basically wimped out for the last few days due to my failure to adequately describe Hanon Ondricek’s robotsexpartymurder.

So here’s some brief comments about just a few of the remaining games I’d recommend most highly:

robotsexpartymurder: As a work of sci-fi, deeper than the title suggests. As a web-based interactive experience, amazingly dense and varied, mixing dialogue and locations with in-game computer interfaces. As erotica, not really my thing, but at least it’s sensitive to the fact that not all the Comp judges want erotica and makes it fundamentally optional.

Zozzled: Steph Cherrywell’s prose is always a treat, and it turns out to be even moreso when mixed with a dose of 1920s slang. You play as a boozy flapper hunting ghosts in a hotel. Classic adventure-game tomfoolery.

Hard Puzzle 4 : The Ballad of Bob and Cheryl: Somehow I managed to miss the first three games in this series, but the fourth is right up my alley. In content, it’s post-apocalyptic wacky. In form, it’s meta shenanigans. Puzzles are largely based on exploiting bugs. Does some very nice indirect hinting, where things mentioned in the changelog or whatever aren’t directly exploitable but suggest things that are. Still haven’t finished this

But my prediction for winner is still Turandot.

I’m guessing that the Golden Banana of Discord (the unofficial prize for the game whose ratings have the highest standard deviation) will go to one of the “But is it IF?” pieces, of which there are several.

IF through the medium of fake college admissions test prep software! A friend of mine from college once wrote a non-interactive short story along similar lines, putting social commentary into the format of reading comprehension questions. URA Winner! doesn’t take that route. Instead, it mainly goes Fission Mailed with it.

Most of the interaction takes the form of picking answers to multiple-choice questions in a series of brief practice tests for the Undergraduate Readiness Assessment. Between tests, you visit “Examination Island”, a little gameworld with areas devoted to the three major sections of the test: English, Mathematics, and Social Studies. For the most part, the only choice you have in the island is what order you visit the three areas in, which does seem to affect the content somewhat. The first hint of something peculiar going on is that “Social Studies” doesn’t mean what it usually does. Instead, the test questions there are about the unwritten rules of social interaction — for example, one question concerns the appropriate way to acknowledge seeing a friend unexpectedly in a movie theater. Later, the narration on Examination Island starts uncomfortably shifting registers. One moment it’s being all edutainmenty and talking about the importance of reading critically and what kinds of calculator are allowed in the exam room, the next moment it’s in a more fictive mode, narrating your inner thoughts and reactions to things, treating other characters like real people with their own problems that don’t have a lot to do with your exams. Some of them aren’t particularly motivated to help you study for your exam, and treat you with impatience and consternation. There are vignettes where you just plain fail to get any help at all. These are jarringly out-of-place in their context. The effect is uncanny.

Now, I said that the Social Studies material is the first hint of something wrong. That’s not quite true; it’s just that the earlier hint is one that’s liable to go unnoticed at first. At several points throughout the tests and the island interludes, there are words in boldface. In fact, these are hyperlinks that, when clicked, make little changes to the text of the page, turning it into something less friendly and encouraging and more bizarre, sometimes in Chinese. The thing that makes these easy to overlook is that they’re not part of the choices presented to you as choices. Each page normally has a button at the bottom that says “Continue”, or a sequence of multiple-choice questions, or a map of the places on Examination Island. In all cases, the choices are set apart from the text. But if, like me, you get all the way to your final evaluation without clicking on the inline boldface, there’s a final message, hidden at the bottom of the page after a big gap where you have to scroll to it. “Still, you can’t help but feel like you missed something.” The brilliant thing about this is the boldface on the “missed something”. Those words are a hyperlink back to the beginning, but this time the emphasis is strange enough to invite a click. And once you’ve done that, you’re primed to click on any other boldface you see.

The second pass through the game is shorter, because it helps you along by cutting out things you don’t need to revisit. Find all the special links, and you get a new scenario, heading to work on a train that apparently links Examination Island to San Francisco, followed by a very silly moment when the world’s ultimate secret, the prize for all your efforts, turns out to be a reprise of Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise, the author’s pseudo-educational entry in last year’s Comp. The whole ending is even more dreamlike than the rest of the game, blurring disparate things together and throwing in a large handful of nightmarish anxiety.

The feel of the whole thing reminds me a lot of Too Many Cooks and Unedited Footage of a Bear. There’s a similar sense of things being not quite right, of a breaching of realities. And, ultimately, of things reaching a breaking point where you can’t take it seriously enough to find it disturbing any more.

This one’s just nasty. A brutish, grotesque piece about a brutish, grotesque person. You might guess from the title that it’s going to be mean toward fat people, but you’re probably going to underestimate just how mean. The protagonist, Borsch, is practically inhuman. He periodically reports urges to punch something, he goes into feeding frenzies where he shovels food and dirt into his face indiscriminately, and he has to rely on improvised echolocation to get his bearings once in a while because of the way his fat has degraded his vision and cognitive faculties. Note that the echolocation isn’t just a matter of exposition, but a game mechanic.

You spend the game’s first act preparing to commit a senseless murder in a factory parking lot. That’s what the “Fat Fair” is. The game doesn’t say so explicitly, but two of the items on your three-item checklist are an acid bath and an incinerator, so you pretty much know where things are going. In the second act, things have gone wrong enough to start a fire, and you have only so long before the police arrive. Your challenge is to clean up, to dispose of the body and any incriminating evidence (as well as a second body, because there was a witness). Or so it seems at first, anyway — if you do the obvious minimal requirements, the ending tells you that you’ve received ending B (“for BORING”), and that there are two better endings. One results from cleaning up evidence not just of the murder but of the petty misdemeanors you committed along the way, leaving you completely free to kill again. The other results from maximally monstrous behavior, from not just leaving things as bad as they are but making them worse, shocking even the police.

I don’t think I’ll be pursuing that branch. This is a game where my reaction isn’t just to say “Well, this isn’t to my tastes” and move on, but to wonder what kind of person would write it. It lavishes on the unpleasantness like it’s praising a lover. You can die by falling into a cesspit, and if you do, it doesn’t kill you right away, but lets you flail around uselessly in the shit for several turns first, reading color messages. It’s solidly implemented, and handles all sorts of combinations and special cases. Someone spent a significant amount of time and effort to make this. To share this vision with the world.

Planet C is an epistolary novel at war with an optimization puzzle. The premise is that it’s a space colony management sim, with stats about population, land use, energy generation, greenhouse gas emissions, and so forth. You make big decisions affecting these stats — usually, but not always, about which colony ship to order in next. Each ship you can choose, in addition to bringing colonists, has some kind of colony upgrade: more efficient energy generation, for example, or food preservation facilities to help you weather the winter. The goal is to reach a target population of 2000 people, and to do it sustainably. Sustainability features big in the story.

But at the same time, each round is also an exchange of letters with your lover back on Earth, who describes how things are getting worse and worse, environmentally and politically. The letters contain expressions of affection and personal photographs, but they’re also the delivery vehicle for both sci-fi technical exposition and details about your efforts in the optimization puzzle. I suppose the intent is to humanize the stats, but the juxtaposition winds up feeling weird. It’s a kind of weird that’s not out of place for hard sci-fi, though. The presentation works into it too: all the text is shown in a lightweight sans-serif font that fades in a line at a time, an effect that suggests a cleaner but less human kind of futurism.

One tangential complaint: It’s online-only. The download available at the Comp website contains just a document providing a link to different website, which means that the IF Archive won’t have any record of it when its author decides to stop hosting it or moves it to a different URL. This is far from the first time this has happened, and it’s always antithetical to the spirit of the Comp as I understand it. It also isn’t handled by the Comp front-end very well; even thought it’s web-based, it’s presented as a download of a MHT file which, as I’ve said, contains nothing but a link to the actual game. Presumably because the Comp’s “Play Online” links always link to files hosted on ifcomp.org.

I commented before that Flight of the CodeMonkeys provokes the question “But is it IF?”, but that’s a little unfair. CodeMonkeys devotes most of its space to a noninteractive story punctuated by coding exercises, but by the end, it resolves into something clearly recognizable as choice-based IF. In the last few days, I’ve hit several other entries that push the boundaries much harder.

Consider Language Arts. This is a Zachtronics-style puzzle game about creating little programs to transform words on a grid. It has exactly the same relationship to story and text as any other Zachtronics-style puzzle game: between puzzles, you get to read some expository dialogue. It has interaction, and it has fiction, but it never puts the two together. OK, but surely that’s true of the more soup-can-oriented works I recognize as IF? Maybe, but that’s because IF, like all genres, is more a matter of “family resemblance” than of definition. This game is clearly recognizable as a different genre. Maybe if it ran under Glulx I’d consider it an abuse in the tradition of Andrew Plotkin’s 1995 Tetris adaptation, but as it is, I don’t really feel like it belongs here. And that makes it difficult to know how to judge it, because it really does seem to be a pretty good Zach-like.

Then there’s The Shadow Witch, a story of an evil witch trying to meet a quota of five misdeeds in a small cave system in a fantasy world. This is a genuinely interactive story, even supporting multiple endings, and if it were more text-based, I’d have no problem recognizing it as IF. But it’s a graphic adventure made in RPG Maker, like To the Moon (but shorter and sillier). You can bring up the character stats and everything, although without any combat, they’re just for show. I suppose it’s a difficult edge-case to be in, because it wouldn’t comfortably fit in an RPG comp either. Do we want this here? I don’t know. It fits your dictionary definition of IF a lot better than Language Arts, but it’s still not in the genre of thing that the term “IF” is used to describe. On the other hand, we’ve had a few point-and-click graphic adventures in the Comp before; I think the only thing really keeping them from being submitted in greater numbers is the effort involved, and the relative obscurity of the Comp. From a certain angle, it’s less of a stretch than accepting Twine.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Lucerne. Lucerne is a short horror story written in Twine, and as far as I can tell, the fact that it’s written in Twine is the only thing giving it anything like a claim to being IF. It’s neither parser-based nor choice-based: it has no parser, and it has no choices. It is simply split up into a series of pages, each containing a single link to the next page. It’s not at all unusual for Twine pieces to begin like this, to have an intro consisting of several pages of static text before you get to the first choice, but here, that’s all there is. It doesn’t even do pauses or annoying text effects, so it’s hard to see why Twine was used at all; it might as well just be a text file. The author has either missed the point in a fairly epic way, or is deliberately testing to see what can be got away with. And yet, on the “family resemblance” front, it clearly beats out both Language Arts and The Shadow Witch!

I don’t want to be a gatekeeper. Sometimes I act like one anyway, but that’s a character flaw that I struggle to overcome. But the Comp has always relied on its judges to act like police. Instead of making executive decisions about what does and doesn’t belong, the organizers trust us to make that decision with our votes. But it’s always a bit uncomfortable to have to exercise that authority. There were people who said that my own Comp entry from 2001, The Gostak, wasn’t really IF, and I disagree there. I guess the best we can do is for everyone to draw their own line in the sand, and let authors decide how many they want to cross.