The Stack

I should start off by documenting my prejudices: I have never been a fan of the “visual novel” format. This sometimes surprises people who know me as a big IF fan, but your typical VN UI seems to me to just add a lot of pointless friction to the act of reading. Cheree presents itself as a VN, but its UI is less offensive than most: there’s tons of available scrollback, and it provides a welcome helping of agency through freeform text input after every line of output. It does, however, still cram the text of the story into one smallish corner of the screen while the bulk is reserved for illustration — the illustration being a 3D model of an anime-esque gothic lolita (presumably obtained from the Unity Asset Store) running mood-specific idle animations in front of various stock photographs.

This girl is Charity, aka Cheree, the ghost of a talented young Victorian spiritualist medium who died in mysterious circumstances. Now she’s on the opposite end of her own schtick, communicating with you from beyond, because she somehow has spiritual link with you and you alone. Much like in certain other VNs where you’re a long-dead girl’s sole contact with the world, this eventually leads to her asking if you consider her a friend… or more than a friend? To which my immediate reaction was “Ew, no, you are a child!” It strikes me now that I’m being a little hypocritical here: Charity canonically died and stopped aging at 16, and Analogue‘s *Hyun-ae must have been around the same age when she was digitized. But I eagerly accepted *Hyun-ae’s protestations of love! I think this is mostly due to the visuals: *Hyun-ae chooses to appear to you as her idealized adult self throughout her game, while Charity, despite saying she’s 16, looks like she’s three or four years younger than that. Also, *Hyun-ae is a lot more forceful about it, declaring her affection directly instead of hesitantly probing — which reflects their differences in upbringing, really, the modern girl vs the proper Victorian lady. (Eventually, Cheree brings in a second ghost, a modern 15-year-old girl named Mel, to provide a viewpoint that Charity cannot, although Mel can’t speak to you directly and her irreverence is filtered through Charity’s narration.) But there’s one other subtler factor at work, I think: Analogue put the player in the role of a space detective. That’s clearly a character I’m playing, not a representation of myself. Cheree goes to some length to erase that distinction, largely by having Charity ask you a lot of get-to-know-you questions.

But enough about Analogue; I’m supposed to be writing about Cheree here. The backbone of the story is of course the mystery of Charity’s death, a mystery that turns out to involve the psychic investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. (By the time Jack is mentioned, though, it’s clear that he didn’t kill Charity. The MO is all wrong.) But your only means of investigating Charity’s death is by probing her memories. She can teleport all around the globe, but her ability to interact with physical objects is severely limited, and besides, the events in question happened more than a hundred years ago. So what you wind up doing instead is: you visit a pertinent location, Charity chats about it for a bit, maybe you feed her some prompts, and then she starts to remember something. If you’re lucky, it’s a Clue, which takes the form of a cryptogram. Solving it jogs her memory and advances the plot.

Except a lot of the places you visit aren’t pertinent. Charity wants to solve her murder, but she also wants to just show you a bunch of exotic and photogenic locations and quiz you on trivia about them. In one case (that I noticed), one of these vacation spots turns out to advance the investigation anyway: going to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming can prompt some exposition about Devils, what they really are and what they can do, that becomes relevant later. I can kind of see justifying the other such scenes as supporting the Devil’s Tower, making it less out-of-place by turning it into an instance of a pattern, but there’s just too much of this stuff for it to be anything other than self-justifying. I got impatient with it pretty quickly, seeing it as just obstacles that I had to get through to get back to the interesting part, solving the mystery. I guess I’m just not the reader this work was meant for. It was meant for a reader who wants to date an underage dead Victorian girl. If the mystery is the game’s backbone, that’s the meat.

(It’s probably worth mentioning that Charity sometimes randomly walks towards the camera and through the near clipping plane, briefly showing the panties under her poofy black Victorian dress. Is this deliberate? Surely it has to be?)

Interaction in this game is conversation. You type words, it presumably does some pattern matching on them, and if it finds a match, it affects the direction of the conversation. If it doesn’t understand you, it tries to pretend it did. The author cites Starship Titanic as a precedent for this style of interaction, but similar things can be found as far back as 1980. Most of the time, though, I found it best to let Charity drive the conversation and just repeatedly enter a nonsensical command like “z” until she ran out of steam, unless she asked me a question or brought up a topic I wanted more details about. So functionally it’s topic-based dialogue, like Infocom’s ASK/TELL. But the game doesn’t give the player a lot of guidance about how to use it or what sort of input it expects, so it’s entirely possible that I missed out on a lot of content because I drifted towards ASK/TELL out of habit.

This is basically a fairly ordinary adventure-gamey treasure hunt in a wacky puzzle castle. The puzzles are generally fair and sometimes clever — sure, some actions result in instant death, but since you can always just undo it, death is kind of meaningless. (In fact, there’s a somewhat meta puzzle that relies on this.) The most technically impressive thing it does is rotate the entire map 180 degrees at one point, leaving the player struggling to reorient everything in their mind (unless you’ve bothered to draw a physical map, I suppose, in which case you can just rotate that too).

The one thing about it that really stands out is the interface. All commands are entered as a single keystroke, like in an early roguelike: x for examine, p for push, l for lick, arrow keys for movement (which took some getting used to, as a player accustomed to n/s/e/w), period to both take and drop objects, and so forth. If a verb needs an object, the game will fill it in with whatever’s relevant and/or available. It reminds me a bit of minimal-command-set games like Inside the Facility — it doesn’t take the minimalism quite that far, recognizing enough verbs to make a decent point-and-click adventure menu, but it has to do a similar kind of extrapolation to read the player’s intentions through a very narrow communication channel. (Fortunately, of course, the game knows what you should be attempting, even if you don’t.)

Actually, I’ve told one lie. Entering a command requires not just a single keystroke, but two: the meaningful one that indicates the command, followed by the enter key to execute it. Why? Well, the first key displays a command detailing what you’re doing on a sort of pseudo-command-line, albeit often in a chattier form than you could reasonably expect any parser to accept. At first I thought this was mere frippery, just a way to visibly imitate parser games enough to justify the game’s entry into ParserComp. But after playing for a while, I began to see it as essential as a counter to the ambiguity of the one-keystroke commands. To maintain a sense of agency, you really need to feel like you can anticipate what a command is actually going to do before doing it, and the fake command lines give you that. Sometimes I’d hit a key and only then notice that it would result in something pointless or counterproductive, at which point I could decide to not actually do it.

The author’s description of this one is simply “shitty game”, and it’s hard to disagree. In form, it’s basically an amateur graphics demo, with blocky people and animals with wacky shaders floating in space in front of a bunch of particle effects, bound together by a story of a dream about a “fear fairy” helping you to conquer your greatest fears (which turn out not to be thematically interesting ones, but, like, fear of spiders and stuff). There are occasional command prompts, but you’re told exactly what to type — anything else is simply unrecognized, even if it varies only in spacing or punctuation. Only one prompt offers you a choice of things to type in. The rest might as well be “click to continue” prompts, except that then it wouldn’t be allowed in ParserComp. Which would be a good thing. I’ve complained before about the sort of Twine piece that’s mostly composed of linear, noninteractive text chunks joined together by hyperlinks without player agency, but now I’ve discovered something worse. At least the pseudo-interactive Twine stuff doesn’t make you type in the text of the links.

And right off the bat, here we have a freestyle entry that’s old-school-IF-like but doesn’t really have a parser (or even a command line): it’s written in Gruescript, Robin Johnson‘s system for hypertext games with an underlying parser-game-like world model. But while Johnson basically uses his system to provide a more modern interface to a traditional rooms-and-inventory adventure game, this piece is entirely about an interrogation, where inventory objects are chiefly topics to be asked about. In fact, it doesn’t distinguish between physical inventory and abstractions like the “her name” and “poetic bullshit” — they all go into the same inventory, and can be dropped. In a less enigmatic game, I’d assume this was a bug. Here, I can believe it’s a deliberate effect, a “this world works differently from yours” thing. For it’s clear from a dozen offhand references that there’s world-building going on just offscreen, where we can barely glimpse it. There’s something to be said for the parallelism of the player character prying into the captive’s secrets while the player effectively interrogates the game, trying every trick to loosen its lips about its setting and mechanics.

It’s very short, and doesn’t have a satisfying ending. I thought for sure that I had gotten the game into a stuck state, from which I could only access inconclusive conclusions, but the source code shows that, while there were in fact some easy-to-miss conditional effects I had failed to find, they don’t have any material effect. I kind of suspect it’s a “Uh-oh, the deadline is almost up, I’d better just slap an ending on and submit what I’ve got” job.

ParserComp is very young, as annual events go, and still experimenting with what it wants to do and how it wants to do it. Its basic mission is to satisfy the curmudgeons who miss how the big IFComp used to be before the influx of Twine, and it’s been something of a failure in that regard so far. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s hosted on itch.io, attracting a different set of authors, who see it as just another jam with a novel constraint. But whatever the reason, ParserComp has attracted a significant number of entries that don’t fit the spirit of the thing — either they’re graphical games that just barely have parsers, or they pretend to have parsers but don’t really. (A parser is not just a command prompt!) But no one’s policing this, probably in part because it’s such a small event that they need the questionable cases to fill out the numbers.

At any rate, this year the organizers decided to deal with it by splitting the event into two categories, “classic” and “freestyle”, with a winner to be declared in each category. There are eleven “classic” and five “freestyle”, which is a small enough total that it’s pointless to try to identify trends and talk about what it means for the future of ParserComp and whether the split is a good idea or not, tempted though I am to do just that. I guess I’ll just have to play some games. I will be playing all sixteen games, in random order, classic and freestyle mixed together.

Okay, ParserComp 2022 has been over for a good few days now. I said at the beginning that the number of games seemed very comfortable for the deadline, but I wound up scrambling at the end nonetheless, due to interference from life for a couple of weeks in the middle. But most of the games were pretty short (and I gave up on a couple of the longer ones before reaching an ending), and I wound up giving a brief writeup to all of them but one, The Euripides Enigma. I could write it up now — there’s no rule saying you can’t play or discuss the games after the Comp’s deadline! — but I just don’t feel like it.

After the first few games, I fretted a bit about whether this entire event was a bit retrograde, more concerned with rehashing the past than with exploring new possibilities. I suppose that’s how a lot of people see IF in general: aren’t we all just still trying to be Infocom? But to me, amateur IF has always been more about taking paleo-IF as a starting point and striking out in new directions. But one of the main new directions people have struck out in over the last decade is the Twine Revolution and the shift to choice-based interfaces, and ParserComp is kind of set up to attract people who’d like to roll that back. Gladly, though, I found a good amount of experimentation here: new engines and interfaces, new forms of interaction. And if not all of it is entirely successful, well, that’s just in the nature of experiment.

Which is part of why I find the scoring system so unsatisfactory. Unlike the IFComp, which simply asks you to rate every game on a 1-10 scale, ParserComp imposes a rubric. Players are asked to rate the games in eight categories: Writing, Story, Characters, Implementation, and Puzzles each get a weight of 17% in the final score, with 5% going to Use of Multimedia, Help and Hints, and Supplemental Materials. Not only does this reflect the values of the comp organizer rather than the players, it’s clearly set up to favor the conventional over the extreme. Works are effectively penalized for doing a puzzle-free narrative, or a pure puzzle game without characters. Heck, one of the entries arguably didn’t feature writing per se. I hope the authors pay less attention to their numeric score and more to the reviews, where more nuanced reactions are possible.

Here’s another one it looks like I’m not finishing. The whole idea is that you’re spending the night in a spooky house full of Halloween monsters — at the very least, there’s a werewolf, a skeleton, and a mummy, and on the basis of the garlic and wooden stake in my inventory I’m going to go ahead and say there’s probably a vampire as well. Monsters are killed or escaped in time-limited chase sequences that can come without warning, so saving frequently is crucial. Other than that, it’s a largish exploration game with locked doors and secret passages. It has a bit of a problem with recognizing alternate phrasings, but nothing that an old hand like myself can’t power through with the aid of the in-game hint menu — very often, all I needed from the hints was confirmation that what I had attempted was the right thing, and all I needed to was to rephrase it until it worked. There’s my advice to the author: Accept more phrasings.

On the other hand, phrasing isn’t always the problem. Some of the puzzles are a bit too read-the-author’s-mind-ish, and I found myself playing mostly from the hints after a while. The reason I’m giving up on it at a mere 40% completion is that I finally hit a point that the hints don’t adequately cover — they advise recovering a ring stolen by a mouse by trading some cheese for it, but the mouse won’t take the cheese and I don’t know why.

Seems like it wouldn’t take a lot of reworking to turn this into a decent puzzle-based adventure game, though. It’s written in Adrift, but avoids the most common pitfalls of Adrift games, like overdescribing rooms.

I’ll have to state right off that I didn’t finish this game, as it soft-locked before anything very interesting happened, and it’s entirely possible that I didn’t even begin to see the real plot. If so, it takes a while to reach it. You spend a lot of time navigating the corridors of an arctic research station, looking for breakfast and a shower, getting some offhand world-building in the background, learning things about the player character and their coworkers. But maybe that’s all there is. The author says that this game is basically a demo for a new engine.

What I really want to comment on is the UI. First of all, the game has the output text trickle in character by character, like in a console videogame. This is just about tolerable in a game not made mostly of text, but it’s absolutely a bad idea for a game where you spend so much time walking back and forth through multi-room corridors. It just slows you down when you don’t want it, and if there was any button to skip the text animation, I never found it.

Secondly, this game takes autocompletion to an extreme. At every point, the command line is accompanied by a list of every word you could type as part of an acceptable command. The effect is that interaction feels a bit like a Monkey-Island-style point-and-click adventure, choosing words out of a menu. (You don’t actually pick them with a mouse, but you usually don’t need to type anything more than the first letter of each word plus tab to complete it.) Where one of the strengths of parser interfaces is the sense of boundless generality, this UI makes the player acutely aware of exactly how limited your input is.

Curiously, the output text imitates the form of traditional adventure-game room descriptions, with its lists of objects, a style that’s a consequence of a world model that the UI makes it clear isn’t actually present here. Like CGI lens flares, it’s technological artifacts reinterpreted as a style. This isn’t the first time I’ve observed this, and it will doubtless not be the last.

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?