The Stack

A while back, I wondered how I was going to squeeze in the Comp this year. At the beginning of the year, I had decided on a schedule of 25 games from the Stack, with two weeks reserved per game, leaving just two weeks of the year free — and that schedule was slipping. How was I going to fit in a month of IF?

Fortunately, the more recent games have been taking considerably less than two weeks to play. A sign of the direction the industry has taken? Or just a sign that short games don’t stay on the Stack for more than a few years? Probably a little of both. Regardless, I have plenty of time to spend on the Comp. There are a mere 26 entries this year, and Emily Short’s initial impression is that it “looks like a strong year”. I encourage my readers to play along and judge the games for themselves. Let us begin.

Grassland
You are in a pleasant grassy meadow. To the north, south, east, northeast, southeast, and southwest is a meadow; to the west and northwest is seething lava.
A red pyramid stands to the north.
A green pyramid stands to the south.
A blue pyramid stands to the east.

Since people have expressed interest in the IF adaptation of Icebreaker included on the CD, I suppose I should say a few words about it. In a way, it’s similar to the IF adaptation of Doom: when something is about to kill you, you simply type in a command beginning with the word “shoot” and that’s that, with no possibility of missing. Unless, that is, two seekers happen to come on you simultaneously from different directions, which can happen, but isn’t likely as long as you stay in the region where the pyramids and the natural obstacles are. This seems to be a 6×6 region, much smaller than in a normal Icebreaker level, and there are only 14 pyramids to destroy in it. It’s just as well that it doesn’t try to create a full Icebreaker level, if you ask me. The whole thing is basically a curiosity, and is just large enough to make its point.

The most interesting part is also the chief way it differs from the game it’s based on: the point of view. In the original game, you see a broad area around you — not the full playfield, but enough for you to make plans based on where everything is, and to see the Seekers coming. In the text version, all you can see is the square you’re on and the squares adjacent to it. Information about what’s going on elsewhere is conveyed through sound — which, actually, happens to some extent in the original game too: you can always tell when a Seeker offscreen has crushed a green pyramid from the distinctive “kssh”. But in the text game, “offscreen” means almost everywhere, so the noises play a larger role. Apart from that, the fact that you can see only one square around you means that it’s possible to forget where you are relative to other things — in other words, to get lost. Which means that, in grand adventure-game tradition, there’s motivation to draw a map.

The mechanics aren’t completely faithful to the original. You can’t edge between a pair of adjacent pyramids here; any attempt at movement sends you straight at the center of the square in the specified compass direction. You can shoot stuff by specifying a compass direction, but your shots seem to only have a range of one square: shooting at a red pyramid from two squares away does nothing. I have no idea if the pathing algorithm for the Seekers bears any resemblance to that in the original — it’s hard to tell, when you can’t see beyond one square — but I suspect not, because it has to happen on the level of grid-squares here, not on the pixel level. Still, you expect changes when going from one format to another. Icebreaker: The Text Adventure does a reasonably good job of aping the experience of the game it was based on, and that’s all we can really ask of it.

And so my month-and-a-half of IF blogging draws to a close. There were 11 games listed on the IFWiki front page when I started; a twelfth has been added since then. I’ve only posted about ten of them so far. The remaining two are both works of Textfyre ¹Not to be confused with Textfire, a fictional company that was the subject of an April Fool’s Day hoax back in 1998. , a small company that’s trying to make text adventures commercially viable again by catering to a new audience.

There has always been IF marketed for sale by individual creators — Howard Sherman alone would make sure of that, relentless huckster that he is ²This article isn’t really the place to go into detail about Sherman, so I’ll just point you to a blog post by the illustrious Dave Gilbert. — but Textfyre is, to my knowledge, the first serious effort at making a real company that solicits and publishes IF by multiple authors since the brief life of Cascade Mountain Publishing a decade ago. And it can even be called into question whether CMP really counts as a “serious effort”; it apparently started up without much thought about how to gain an audience outside the IF community. I’ll probably go into more detail about CMP in the future, because half of their catalog ³Once and Future, by G. Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. The other half of the catalog was a remake of Doc Dumont’s Wild PARTI by Mike Berlyn, which I had already played at the time. is still on the Stack. I bring them up mainly to contrast them with Textfyre. Although they only started releasing games this summer, Textfyre has been in the planning stages for years, and has a good notion of its market position. Just look at the website, with its “Parents” and “Teachers” tabs. David Cornelson, the company’s founder, understands that he’s competing with videogames, and that, although text games can be enthralling when you’re actually playing them, they can’t hold a candle to today’s graphics for the kind of obvious appeal that makes people look at an ad and say “I want to play that”. And so he’s marketing the games at one remove, overcoming the handicap by replacing the appeal of “I want to play that” with “I want my kids to play that”. How well it works, only time will tell.

The commercial aspect does have one disadvantage for this blog in particular: by the terms of the Oath, I can’t buy them yet. I haven’t gotten anything off the Stack since September, and Steam weekend sales haven’t stopped during that time, so my game budget is all tapped out right now. But there are demos, which I have now played. There are currently two games on offer — Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter, by David Cornelson and Michael Gentry, and The Shadow in the Cathedral, by Ian Finley and Jon Ingold — each meant as the first episode of a series. These are all known names, with a number of titles under their belts, major and minor; just to name a couple, Gentry wrote Anchorhead, which I was commenting on in passing lately, and Ingold wrote Make It Good.

The Secret Letter demo seems satisfactorily solid and lushly detailed, and makes it clear that even in the part that I saw, there are interactions beyond what I tried. In short, it’s the level of professionalism that we demand even of amateur IF these days. Also, it’s very much written to appeal to the target demographic: this is young-adult fantasy to a T, and reminds me a lot of some of Lloyd Alexander’s books, particularly the Westmark trilogy. The setting is a fictional kingdom in something resembling an 18th century. Complications in the royal succession are mentioned enough times to make it clear that it’s going to be a big part of the plot later on, but the player character starts at the bottom of society, as a penniless orphan who spends time filching food from the open-air marketplace and getting into trouble. And is secretly a girl, as we find out towards the end of the opening chapter. By now, you presumably know if this is the sort of story that appeals to you. There are noninteractive text sequences of a length that I think I’d normally consider excessive, but they seem fine here, probably because they keep the story moving, rather than degenerating into infodumps. (The storybook-like interface may even help a little here, changing my expectations of how the text should look.)

The Shadow in the Cathedral is considerably sparer in its prose, preferring to do its world-building through the accumulation of little details mentioned in passing. It’s set in a world that literally worships clockwork and considers it sacred, providing a point of view that seeps all the way down to the player character’s automatic habits and the idioms used to describe the world. This demo seems a lot smaller than the Secret Letter demo, but it has a lot of promise. Specifically, it promises lots of opportunities to interact with elaborate mechanisms, and that’s always fun. It’s also the sort of thing that IF can do really well, much better than it can do interaction with characters. The gameworld is clockwork anyway, so we might as well celebrate it.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words said already about mere demos that you can try for yourself if you want to, so I’ll just conclude by saying that I look forward to playing the full versions of both of these games, once I can afford them.

I suppose that human sacrifice is often a metaphor for sexual violation: the thrust of the knife, the preference for virgins, the typical accompaniment by rhythmic chanting that increases in speed and intensity until it reaches an uncontrollable rapturous climax. The King of Shreds and Patches takes the analogy a step or two farther, having the villainous Barker lure Lucy to her doom by pretending to be in love with her. Rather than snatch her from her room by force, he invites her to a secret midnight tryst; when her housemaid learns of this, she begs the PC to intervene, fearing not for Lucy’s life but for her virtue and reputation. And even though the player knows better than that, the whole situation still has a strong whiff of romantic rivalry, with Barker in the role of the jerk who your long-standing crush is inexplicably gaga over, even though he doesn’t really appreciate her as a person and just wants to use her (albeit not, in this case, for carnal pleasure). I suspect that this is something that male and female players will read differently, with the men feeling the pangs of despised love more keenly. But when the PC finds out that the reason Lucy broke up with him months ago is that she was already seeing Barker in secret, well, I think we can all appreciate how nightmarish that situation is, even without the fear of death and summoning mad gods and so forth.

And in the end, when the player stumbles into the cultist frat party, Barker already has her naked and spread-eagled, chained to an altar. But the indignity doesn’t stop there. He hasn’t told her, but he’s planning a threesome. He’s going to share her with his colleague Van Wyck. There are two other sacrifices beforehand, one performed by each man, so you get to observe their technique; Van Wyck seems to savor the moment, while Barker just seems to want to get it over with. But then they raise their knives and prepare to penetrate Lucy together.

There’s only one way to stop them, and that’s with a better phallic symbol. By this point in the story, I had two pistols. And you need two to rescue Lucy, because you have two people to shoot, and these are 17th-century wheellock pistols that take multiple turns to load, ¹The game handles this really well. Loading a pistol for the first time is treated as a puzzle: open this cover with a lever, rotate that bit with a spanner, pour the powder in, etc. Once you’ve done it once, you can repeat the actions by simply entering the command “load pistol” — but it still goes through the entire process, or as much of the process as necessary given the pistol’s current state. And in the endgame, where things are happening fast and threats can come at a moment’s notice, “load pistol” simply performs the next step in the process. I don’t know how the development of this game went, but this all seems like the sort of thing that you get in games with really good playtesters. and which have to be laboriously reloaded if the powder gets wet, which it probably is at this juncture. I wrote in my last post that either rescuing Lucy or failing to rescue her could produce a satisfactory conclusion to the story, and in fact the game allows either: any ending where you send the loathsome thing that the cultists have summoned back to whence it came is considered to be a victory worthy of an epilogue. But for a while, I thought that saving Lucy was impossible, so great was my trouble with damp powder.

Speaking of endings, I’ve joked before now that the biggest way in which Lovecraft-based games fail to be faithful to Lovecraft’s writings is that they’re winnable. To really be true to the original stories, the best ending should be the one that you get by quitting immediately. Investigating dark secrets only makes things worse. But then, this game isn’t a direct adaptation of Lovecraft, but an adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module, and it’s very true to the spirit of that game.

(Spoilers ahead.)

The King of Shreds and Patches is pretty good at small-scale variability. There are a number of little choices not just in what order you things happen, but how. For example, at one point I stopped a man from finishing a dread incantation by assaulting him with my bare fists. I later discovered that I could have obtained a wheellock pistol in an area I had already passed through. I’m not sure what the consequences of using that instead would have been. In the story as I’ve seen it, I had to climb up to where the man was with a makeshift grappling hook, and after I interrupted him, he cursed me and ran away. Either of those things could have been changed with a way of killing from a distance. But even if they didn’t, the scene was able to play out to its conclusion with the player either armed or unarmed.

More broadly, much of the game is spent questioning people like a sort of Elizabethan detective, and the number of things you can ask people about grows as you progress. In general, it feels like each person you visit generates one or two new snippets of useful information, but which snippets you learn from whom depends on what order you visit them in. In the story as I experienced it, I got some of my early leads from a patron at a pub frequented by the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe. I eventually visited him again, for no other reason than that I was temporarily stuck, and found that he had information about the whereabouts of one Barker, the man of mystery at the center of events who I hadn’t even heard of on my first visit. I could have easily not noticed this, just as someone who visited the pub later than I did might not have noticed that the same information could be squeezed out of the illustrious John Dee. The game kind of discourages visiting most characters twice; once you’ve questioned someone, they’re left out of the task list produced by the “think” command ¹“Think” to produce minor hints or reminders seems to be rapidly becoming standard; several of the games I’ve played this year implement it. Perhaps this is in part because the verb is included in the standard Inform library, although without modification it just produces a snarky reply. , even if they have more information.

But of course any variability is set within a fixed framework. Despite what I said before about the day/night cycle, I now think that the game doesn’t actually let you miss important plot events. One thread of the story concerns a vanished girl named Marijne, whose cousin, the well-to-do Lucy Henry, was once courted by the player character. It’s pretty much a given that Marijne will be dead by the time you find her, just because a horror story needs a corpse or two by the end of the first act to let the audience know it means business. And when Lucy is in danger later on, and I arrive on the scene just a little too late to prevent her abduction, I recognize that this happens to provide motivation in the story’s imminent climax, not because I was too slow. But I don’t know yet what Lucy’s ultimate fate will be. In a conventional game, this would be the setup for rescue-the-princess, and any failure to rescue her would simply be the player’s fault, and a temporary condition at that. But in a Lovecraftian horror, a happy ending might not even be an option.

Oh, I have little doubt that I’ll be allowed to halt the ritual and banish the monster, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be able to save the damsel. The author lets the player know when and where the ritual is to occur, which means that the cultists have to keep Lucy alive until then. This explicitly gives the player character hope, presumably shared by the player, but the same knowledge could easily provoke dread, with the time running out while you struggle to reach the appointed place. Either way it goes, it could fit into the story. Which means that this isn’t necessarily just a matter of success and failure, but may even be another matter of narrative variation. We’ll see how it plays out.

Let’s talk for a moment about this game’s use of sound. There’s one puzzle in particular where you render a Bedlamite temporarily coherent by unscrambling some dismembered music. It’s not completely essential to have sound — you get some textual feedback, but it’s subtle and requires a lot more trial-and-error if you can’t hear what you’re doing. And for a while, that’s how I tried to solve it. I had the sound turned off. I had forgotten about it. The in-game documentation said that there was occasional sound, and even warned me that there was a sound puzzle, but it also said that I’d know it when I came to it, and, well, I didn’t at first.

I don’t normally turn sound off in games. I generally want the full experience intended by the author. I do find sound in text games a little weird, though. I find that playing IF, like reading a book, essentially puts the mind into a mode disconnected from direct sensory experience — one where you’re seeing through the mind’s eye, and, similarly, hearing through the mind’s ear, filtering out the real world. Illustrations interrupt this mode, but then, so do the command prompts, and you just get used to a certain rhythm of going into and out of reading mode. ¹This is why it’s considered a good idea in IF to break up long text-dumps with command prompts, even when the player can’t actually affect anything: it preserves that rhythm. I’m starting to wonder if breaking up the text with illustrations would be just as effective. Sound, on the other hand, plays while you’re reading, and conflicts with the imagined experience.

But that’s not why I had the sound off. I had it off simply because for the last month I’ve been playing IF primarily in public. (I’m spending upwards of two hours a day on a bus these days.) I have headphones I can hook up to my laptop, but digging them out and dealing with the cord (either unwinding it or untangling it, depending on how careful I was about stowing it last time) seldom seems worthwhile, especially for a game that only features occasional sound. And, my personal experiences aside, I think there’s a valid criticism to be made here: if you’re going to use sound in a game, it’s better to make it a constant presence that the player gets used to, not an occasional surprise.

January, 1603. Queen Bess is on the throne, Shakespeare is on the stage, and the black death casts its shadow over London. And, of course, in his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, as he has for eons. Based (with permission) on a scenario for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, The King of Shreds and Patches throws all of these things together into a single story. Which is kind of like writing a modern-day Cthulhu story about Barack Obama, Pixar, and swine flu, but that’s period drama for you.

Any substantial work of Lovecraft-based IF invites comparison to Anchorhead, the classic of of the genre, but playing this game really reminds me more of playing Call of Cthulhu. And not for obvious reasons — it doesn’t have what I normally think of as RPG elements, such as upgradable stats or skill checks or randomized combat. Rather, the structure so far is more what I associate with the live CoC sessions I’ve tried: you’re presented with lots of leads to follow up on, but not enough time to follow up on them all before bad things start happening. The game has a day/night cycle, and unless I’m misinterpreting things, it seems to be linked to the number of turns taken, rather than (as in Anchorhead) linking days to progress in the story.

Also reminding me of CoC is the way it throws lots of recognizable Cthulhu Mythos stuff at the player from early on. Anchorhead didn’t use any established Mythos material at all; the fact that the Lovecraft inspiration was clearly recognizable despite this is a sign of how well it achieved its aims. But also, using entirely new stuff preserved a sense of mystery. In TKoSaP, when I find the Yellow Sign depicted in one of the game’s rare uses of graphics, I immediately recognize it as the Yellow Sign. The character I’m playing doesn’t know what “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” means, but I do, and it’s going to affect how I play that character.

But then, given the decidedly non-Lovecraftian setting, would it be recognizable as a Cthulhu Mythos story without these touches? Even in the game as it is, an episode of supernatural disruption of a performance at the Globe put me more in mind of a certain Doctor Who episode than anything else.

Like pretty much everything else Emily Short has done in the field of IF, Alabaster is an experiment. The idea here was to provide a number of testers/co-authors with the ability to extend the dialogue tree: suggestions made within the game were automatically recorded to a file, which they sent back to Short, who incorporated them in the next version that she sent out to the same authors for further suggestions. The game lists eleven authors (including Short herself), and boasts 18 distinct endings (including some obviously unsatisfactory ones).

The story is a revisionist take on Snow White, with the player in the decidedly weird role of the huntsman, commanded by the Queen to murder the heroine at the story’s beginning. In the original story, this is hardly a major character, or even an interesting one. I suppose that if you were to write a story about him, you could play up the emotional conflict, the fear of defying the Queen vs the obvious perfidy of killing a beautiful child, but that’s not a very interesting choice for IF. If you ask the player to make that kind of choice, they’ll usually just immediately choose good over evil. But Alabaster doesn’t make it that easy. This Snow White is creepy, and knowing, and, despite being your prisoner, gives a strong sense of being more in control of the situation than you are. She’s already made a bargain with you to spare her life and lead her to a haven among the dwarrows, but she does nothing to help you feel good about it. You naturally start to wonder if the Queen might have good reasons to want her dead. And so you talk to her — nearly all of the game is spent talking — and although you might be uncomfortable about trusting what she tells you, she’s pretty much your only source of information. Is she a witch? A vampire? A god, even? Possibilities suggest themselves, and are rejected in turn as too obvious.

I’ve seen (and participated in) IF collaborations before, and usually the seams where the authorial voice changes are pretty obvious, but the tone in Alabaster is surprisingly consistent. Short says she edited things “to improve continuity and conversation flow”, which explains this somewhat, but it’s not like the content was all hers. She also says that she was surprised at some of the turns that the plot took. Which, coupled with the consistency of style, makes me wonder: which turns were unexpected?

I’ve seen only a few of the endings so far, but one of the ones I’ve seen solves a mystery that I hadn’t even considered: what happened to the King? From a certain point of view, this ending might be the best one, because reaching that point explains nearly everything and brings the story to a definite resolution. But it isn’t entirely a happy ending. On the basis of what I’ve seen, I doubt there are any completely happy endings in the game.

The rest of the game took me less time than I expected. Once you’ve reached a crucial turn, a body turns up, and the game settles down into being a murder mystery for a while. This shift brings the return of the NPCs, who guide you through the rest of the plot. I kind of feel like I took longer to complete the self-directed snooping segment than I was supposed to, probably due to my reluctance to use the hint system (which actually proved very gentle on those occasions when I tried it). After the murder, you get to roam about looking for clues, accompanied by a character who comments on their significance. I had spent so much time poking around earlier that I had already found them all, except for a couple of final open-and-shut-case ones that I simply didn’t have access to before.

Overall, what we have here is a well-done shortish period piece. It’s also quite technically sophisticated, with such features as a pathing “GO TO” command, automatic spelling correction, and a conversation system that combines the best features of menu-based and freeform conversation without ever taking away the player’s ability to enter ordinary commands. Actually, these are all features that I’ve been seeing in other games this year and not commenting on. It seems like the state of the art is advancing incrementally, and that features that Infocom could only dream of are becoming standard — especially when you consider that this game was written in TADS, and most of the other games I’ve been playing were written in Inform. So no actual code libraries were shared between this game and the others. Ideas that seem good get imitated.

And now a wartime tale from Eric Eve, author of last year’s Nightfall. The year is 1940. A British lieutenant, on his way to report for duty, gets stuck in a thunderstorm in the countryside. Finding a house nearby, he persuades the maid to let him in; there follows a section where he meets the family, follows people around and engages in lots of the sort of menu-based conversation where there are more options than you can choose in the number of turns allotted. This goes on for a while, then stops abruptly, the soldier left alone while some mysterious noises upstairs draw his attention.

It’s strange, but at this point, despite having played the game for a while, I still had no clear idea of what sort of game it is. I’d have said it was basically a character-based drama, until I was abandoned to the world of objects and forced to take Action. Strange noises in a large house could mean anything from H. P. Lovecraft to C. S. Lewis. After a while, I started to suspect that things were a bit more prosaic than either of those extremes, and that I was simply dealing with a Nazi spy ring. My first clue was that the housemaid, supposedly a Jewish refugee, is contentedly listening to Wagner on the radio as she irons. And, once I had gotten my head sufficiently out of character-based-drama mode to start searching closets at random, I started finding more clues suggestive of this conclusion. I still don’t know who else in the house is involved, though, or even if the people I’ve met are who they claim to be. The noises I heard could be the house’s rightful inhabitants, tied up in the closet.

I should mention one of the game’s larger peculiarities: that it lets the player choose the person and tense of the entire game. I’ve chosen to play it in first person past tense, like it’s an episode from the soldier’s memoirs. I know I’ve seen at least one other incomplete fragment game that allowed the player to choose the tense, but the effort to produce this degree of variation over a full game seems strangely decadent. Still, it makes it a valuable resource for anyone investigating the effect of tense and person on the feel of a game.