The Stack

On the surface, this is a slim bit of nonsense made of crudely-drawn stick figure art, with minimal implementation and puzzles that you really need the built-in hints to solve, including critical-path urination at one point. It really reminds me of the stuff that students used to slap together in Flash, back in the day.

And honestly, the surface is pretty much all there is. Nonetheless, it stands out in ParserComp for violating one of the basic assumptions I had about the sort of games I expected to find here: there is no text output. Commands are typed in, but the results are communicated entirely with pictures. And while it seems likely that this isn’t the first game to do this, I’ll be darned if I can think of any others. Modern IF has more gone the opposite route, keeping textual output and ditching the parser, and it’s good to be reminded that there are still other possibilities out there, underexplored and waiting. This game doesn’t do a lot with the concept, but it does at least show some of its difficulties and promises — specifically, the asymmetry of communication. In an all-text game, concepts are communicated from player to game and game to player in the same way. Take that away, and you immediately create uncertainty about the possibility space, even in a dinky game like this one. Even the hints require interpretation. There’s stuff here that could be built on.

As an unrepentant thief, your goal is to ransack an alchemist’s house in the woods and leave with as much gold as you can carry. This is a solidly implemented physical-puzzle game, not too long or difficult. I have only one complaint: the one time I was stuck enough on a puzzle to use the hint system, which supposedly gives context-sensitive hints, all it gave me was a general “examine everything and draw a map”.

One thing I appreciated was how much destruction you cause in pursuit of your selfish goals: chopping down a tree here, breaking a lock there, an adorable squirrel betrayed. It’s all fairly minor for an adventure game, really, but it gains some meaning from the fact that you’re doing it all to someone, and the fact that the game doesn’t dwell on it feels like characterization. The player character is basically an AFGNCAAP, but at the same time comes off as callous and irresponsible. And I’m here for it. In the end, you have to avoid the alchemist on his return, provoking a sense of guilt that the player character pointedly doesn’t share.

A short and ultimately rather silly archeology story, this is essentially a one-joke game, but you get to determine which of several jokes the one joke is. You do this by choosing one of several objects to save from a fire, although in your first run-through, the fire hasn’t started yet and it’s not at all clear that you’re making a choice. Whatever you choose, it maintains a straight face until the ending. It’s a bit like the various “practical joke on the player” games I’ve seen in IFComp over the years, but less aimed at provoking anger.

The main obstacle along the way is an ancient door covered in runes, with an implication that you’ll be able to open the door if you figure out what the runes say. In fact figuring out the runes is never necessary; depending on what ending you’re heading for, the door may just open itself. I devoted a little time to figuring out the runes anyway: the pattern of repetitions suggest it could be a cryptogram, but nothing I tried worked. I’m left uncertain about whether it’s actually a cryptogram or not.

At any rate, it is what it is, and what it does it executes pretty well, so whether you like it will mainly depend on whether you like what it’s going for.

I don’t want to dwell too much on faults, so this post will be short. This is a cursory combat-based RPG of the most boring sort. Combat is just dice-rolling without interesting choices, and all you can do between fights is wait for random events, where the only random events are the arrival of traders or more things to fight. And there are only two things to fight: a wolf and a bear. Playing this left me thinking “There must be something I missed. This can’t be all there is to it.” But reading the source code confirms that it is. Maybe the author uploaded their test data by mistake.

This one feels distinctly old-school. Partly it’s the palette: the text is in the sort of sixteen-color mix I strongly associate with amateur games from the 1980s. Perhaps this is because it’s the easiest sort of text styling to do in QBasic, which this game is written in. This makes the quality of the parser a pleasant surprise — my only complaint about it is that objects in containers are treated as out of scope, making you use commands like GET PAPER FROM TRUNK instead of just GET PAPER. (The author recognizes this, and emphatically provides a hotkey for the general GET ALL FROM IT, I suspect in response to complaints from playtesters.)

The prose, too, fits the pre-web-amateur impression: it’s wordy, in a trying-to-impress way. A Lovecraft quotation in the beginning made me suspect at first that this was deliberate pastiche, that Uncle Mortimer’s mansion hides eldritch secrets in grand gothic style, but no: the theme is time travel. Uncle Mortimer’s inventions take you to a handful of major events, where minimally-implemented historical figures recognize you from your family resemblance to Mortimer and give you information and/or objects he entrusted to them. Hearing everyone throughout history say variations on “I remember Mortimer, he helped me enormously, and I see your family resemblance to him” gets comical after a while, but for the most part the repetitive structure is used well here. Having similar overall goals in each time period gives the player something reliable to anticipate, even as the obstacles to it change.

We’ve had multiple stories in this comp that have you start off in a seemingly ordinary house or building, probably based on a place familiar to the author, then discover the bizarre and fantastic as you explore. It’s a pattern as old as Colossal Cave and Zork, really. But you seldom see a work that holds off on the turn quite as long as this one, or provides such a convincing pretense at being a a relatively mundane story. The story of a teenager investigating her aunt’s disappearance, and gradually uncovering her secrets as you explore her house, is certainly enough to carry a game by itself, especially when you can talk about her with the rest of the family: the concerned mother, the distant father, the hostile and secretive sister whose secrets turn out to be linked to the aunt’s. So it’s a family drama blended with detective story and adventure-game puzzlery, but then hallucinogens enter the story, and then you start having obvious hallucinations yourself without having taken anything, and then things really start getting weird when it turns out that some of your hallucinations weren’t hallucinations at all. It all builds up to a finale involving magic and alternate dimensions. You can question how much of the ending is “real”, but for my money, all the fantastic elements feel a lot more grounded once Aunt Beverly returns and takes charge of the situation, mainly because she’s willing to explain everything.

Repeatedly, throughout the game, the player character expresses qualms over invading her aunt’s privacy. Should I really be unlocking this door? Do I have the right to read her diary? To break into her safe? The player is prompted, and I of course unhesitatingly select “Yes” every time. I appreciate the PC’s concerns, and consider them to be a sort of flavor text that helps establish her character, but her perspective is not mine.

The actions you can perform, and therefore what puzzles you can solve, are to some extent linked to the passage of time, which is linked to advancement in the story. This is sometimes a little frustrating, putting some avenues of investigation out of reach just when you start making headway in them, but the game is usually pretty good at guiding you back to the things you can actually do, sometimes by means of text messages from friends or family members.

Oh, this one’s nice. Pastoral and poetic in tone, its main mechanic, the core of all its puzzles, is literary-style riddles — riddles that, once answered, turn into the things their answers name, but are still somehow made of words. That’s the power of abstraction you get from text — although the same transformations are also powered by concrete poetry, words arranged to make shapes, sometimes in very clever ways. (Admirably, the author has taken special care to make this not interfere with screen readers, for those who use them.)

That makes it all sound very cerebral, but the heart of the story — and its inspiration, according to the endnotes — is that the riddles are a metaphor for the struggles of an old woman with dementia, losing her vocabulary. Solving them is a sort of quest to help her preserve what she’s losing. It puts a layer of sadness on every puzzle, and nicely connects theme and mechanics.

Riddles are perilous territory for adventure games, because of how they can stop a game dead: where a well-implemented object-based puzzle can give you more cues about what you’re supposed to be doing with each near miss, riddles tend to be all-or-nothing. Fortunately, the riddles here are easy, and on top of that, the in-game hints are pretty good.

In addition, the prose describing the environment is delightful, filled with randomized wildlife. I think this is the most satisfactory game I’ve seen in this Comp so far.

Another time-travel game, fairly small and kind of underdeveloped — it would be more satisfying with more interactive detail, and some of the puzzles just outright tell you what to do instead of presenting you with the information you’d need to figure it out. A time travel device moves you through a three-day span, and also lets you send objects between the days, but it’s all a bit unconvincing: although the three periods share a layout, it’s clear that they’re essentially parallel copies of each other, not the same place at three times. You cannot, for example, leave an object in the past and see it show up in the future. Past and future have nothing to do with each other, except in certain hand-authored special cases.

To be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a fundamentally bad game — just that it could be a lot better with some more work put into it. Satisfying time travel mechanics are fairly hard to do, and even the sleight of hand necessary to cover up their absence is kind of tricky.

The premise is that Anita (whoever that is) has died, and you’re trying to get some closure by visiting her one last time in an alternate timeline where she didn’t. This leads to an ironic ending where the Anita who survived doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. It’s an ending that could have been melancholy, but instead the author basically went for cheap shock, which would probably feel insulting in a game where the premise is better-integrated into the gameplay.

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.