The Stack

I’ve recovered three of the eight stolen diamonds and made significant progress on most of the rest. This was no simple theft: the thieves went to the length of building elaborate mechanical devices into the very architecture of the fairgrounds, a process that must have started when the fair was still in its planning stages, in order to provide hiding places that a sufficiently clever investigator could penetrate. And there’s no doubt at all that they want me to find the gems. Some of those elaborate devices are not hiding places but rather clue dispensers. Then there’s the riddle in verse that they left at the scene of the crime. And one of the thieves even talks to me through one of those new-fangled “telephone” devices on display in the Electricity building, giving measured hints on a daily basis.

All of which leads to one question: Why? Why go to all this trouble to indirectly give back everything they stole? The game has been mostly treasure-hunt so far, and the devices holding the treasures are basically a lot like the things you’d expect in a game about an Egyptian tomb. (Come to think of it, there seems to be one in a replica Egyptian tomb exhibit.) But this is a mystery — it says so on the packaging, plus I’ve found a corpse by now, and felt sundry other background rumblings of a story beyond the battle of wits with Edward Nygma’s grandfather. So what are the thieves trying to accomplish?

As I see it, the only real effect of the crime is the investigation it’s produced. It’s drawn the attention of the player character, one of the foremost detectives of his era. So that means that they either want me to pay attention to something — something that would escape the casual fairgoer, but which I’ll inevitably discover in the course of my investigations — or the whole thing is a distraction — they want my attention on the gems so it won’t be elsewhere. Or maybe it’s all some kind of weird Masonic initiation ritual. Who knows.

In some ways, 1893‘s size works against it. First and most trivially, more text means more opportunity for mistakes, and greater difficulty in proofreading it all. I’ve seen “way” for “weigh”, “oxen” used as singular, one exhibitor who’s described as both male and female — nothing big, but there it is. I don’t think errors of this sort occur more frequently here than in a typical text adventure, but there are more errors simply because there’s more text.

More significantly, the profusion of nouns mentioned in the descriptions of the exhibits means that a lot of them are left unimplemented, and sometimes not even recognized as nouns for input (the difference between “That’s not important” and “I don’t recognize that word” — not that the game often resorts to messages as generic as “That’s not important”). This sort of thing may have been typical in the text adventure’s golden age, but by 2002, when this game was written, the better amateurs were holding their works to higher standards. Even here, there’s an impressive amount of irrelevant detail, but that makes it all the more disappointing in those areas where it’s lacking.

But it’s not all bad: having lots of stuff to play with makes for good gameplay. I’m finding it’s hard to feel like I’m ever stuck, even when I’m out of ideas for how to make progress in finding the diamonds and catching the thieves. Being stuck in an adventure game isn’t so much a matter of not being able to solve puzzles as it is a matter of running out of things to do, and that doesn’t happen quickly in an environment so full of curiosities and distractions. Even when I know where I’m going and what I’m going to do there, on the way I’ll suddenly find myself in the presence the world’s largest cheese, or a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge constructed entirely of soap ¹ The game provides photographic evidence of the historical authenticity of both of these examples. , and have to delay my goals while I take a gander. I can’t even think of these things as red herrings, as I would in a smaller game. They’re part of the fabric of the place, and it would feel artificial if they were left out.

I wonder why there aren’t more adventure games set in exhibitions and galleries and museums and the like? It seems like a good fit to the typical adventure experience: wandering around a bunch of tableaux that don’t change until you interact with them, lots of unique objects, frequent use of the “examine” verb, etc. But I can think of only a handful of examples: The Dagger of Amon Ra, Temüjin, Ian Finley’s Exhibition, a couple of other less-familiar titles.

Almost a month ago, like everyone who purchased 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery through the Illuminated Lantern website, I got an email from the author, Peter Nepstad, asking me to take a “customer satisfaction survey” to help him decide what to focus on in the forthcoming sequel. And I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t take the survey in good faith: enthusiastic though I was about the game when I ordered it several years ago, I had not even removed it from its shrinkwrap. Why? Basically, War and Peace syndrome. This game has a reputation for being vast and sprawling, so much so that even starting it is a little intimidating. But if Mr. Nepstad wants customer feedback, who am I to deny him?

So, the basics: This is a text adventure (albeit one charmingly illustrated with authentic Victorian photographs), and Nepstad deserves a lot of credit for trying to sell works in a format that was already reputedly dead when the game was released in 2002, let alone today. It concerns the theft of eight diamonds, although the blurbs promise that kidnapping and murder will follow. And it is set in the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where America celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage by showing off the achievements of its arts and industry to the whole world. Nearly 200 buildings were built for the fair, and it’s easy to believe that they’re all implemented here.

I’ve played for a few hours now, and made hardly any progress towards finding those diamonds. I have, however, followed a lengthy guided tour around the Court of Honor, listening to the guide heaping grandiloquent praise on the classical architecture and monumental statuary. There’s still a great deal to explore outside of what the tour showed, but I think it was a useful way to get grounded. It’s a little too early to talk with any certainty about how the game works overall, but I’m getting a strong impression that the recreation of the historical setting is the point of the work, and the mystery is just the means by which the author motivates you to explore it. It reminds me a bit of Cameron’s Titanic in that respect, with all that running around through all the major areas of the ship at the end, and in a different way of games such as GTA3 and Myst that create enjoyment by providing a sense of place, by giving the player somplace they can live.

So, let’s talk story. You’ve got this nameless city, ruled with an iron fist by one Thomas Malik, who keeps the city in an illusion of perpetual daylight. To sustain his magics, he secretly abducts travellers and extracts their souls, rendering them insane. He earnestly believes that everything he does is for the best. Opposing him is a Gnostic sect led by one Evaine, who might possibly be heir to the dynasty of Queens who ruled the city long ago, although I never found any definitive confirmation of this, and strongly suspect that there is none to be found. Malik’s enforcers are hunting for Evaine on the grounds that she’s a rebel and a terrorist, but in the end you learn that the two of them have some personal history together, which makes it seem like the whole city is in the grip of some kind of twisted lover’s spat or something. In a way, it reminds me of Aeon Flux.

As with most heavily plot-based adventures, reaching the end is not difficult: if you just keep plowing ahead wherever the plot guides you, important events will keep occurring until you reach the last important event, which is the ending. But it’s striking that you don’t have to do it this way. Usually, “plot-based” means highly linear and skimpy on simulation, both of which stem from an author’s decision to give priority to their one preimagined storyline over player choices, but that is emphatically not the case here. For example, there’s a point in the story when Malik asks for the player’s help in finding Evaine. In my first play-through, I took him up on it. I suspected that Malik was the bad guy by then, but accepting missions is what you do in these games.  The option to refuse a mission is, in nearly all games, a fake choice; if you choose it, the game will either find an excuse to force the issue or just end. Playing from the beginning a second time, I tried putting up a sterner resistance to Malik in order to see what would happen, and was surprised that he let me go. If I didn’t want to help him, I could just walk away and try to cope with the mysteries of the city on my own. It did not break the plot, although the decision would certainly have consequences.

The only part where player agency really goes away is at the very end, which is a little ironic, because the solution to the final puzzle is precisely to assert your agency, to refuse to be railroaded into doing what the game tells you to do.

City of Secrets is a text adventure by Emily Short, written on commission for a band that wanted it as an extra on their CDs (although this plan fell through for various reasons). It’s one of the few games on the stack that I did not, technically, buy.  It was never for sale; it’s freely downloadable from the Interactive Fiction Archive.  However, I did purchase the feelies, and that gives me the same sense of commitment-to-play as if I had paid for the game itself.

Feelies are tangible objects from the gameworld, a tradition dating back to Infocom and still indulged in from time to time. I purchased the CoS feelies back in 2003 because I enjoyed Emily Short’s previous works and wanted to do my part to support their production. Then I played the game for about fifteen minutes, got intimidated by how much information it was throwing at me, and didn’t get back to it until now.

I shouldn’t have been intimidated. Although the game possesses a great deal of depth of detal, it does a good job of keeping the player from getting lost in it. Plot-crucial information is often available from multiple sources, so it’s seldom if ever necessary to ransack a particular NPC’s entire dialogue tree or read every book on a shelf. This is contrary to adventuring habits, but once you’re used to it, it’s quite liberating.

As to the content: it’s set in a fantasy world with both magic and high technology, trains and robots and illusions.  The player character is a visitor to a big city who gets ensnared in a conflict between the city’s possibly fascist ruler and a mysterious rebel, both of whom are magicians. There are plots and counterplots. One of the first things that I learned was that I had been drugged, although the drug turned out to be an antidote for another drug.

I’ll say more when I’ve completed the game.  Despite the author’s estimation that it takes about three hours to play, I’m about five hours in now, probably because I spend so much time poking at inconsequential details, an activity which the game rewards.