The Stack

Another novel engine: this one was made in Godot, a system not usually used for text adventures, but apparently just as capable of supporting them as any other Turing-complete programming language. Despite using a newish engine, the game is old-school, and the parsing is fairly primitive: you get two-word commands, a mere handful of verbs, and no abbreviations or synonyms whatever — if you want to go north, you have to type “go north” in full, and if you want to examine something, then I’m sorry but the accepted verb is “inspect”. In general, the only words that are available for use at a given moment are ones currently displayed on the screen, either in the output text or in a sidebar containing a verb list and your inventory, in colors indicating their function: blue for verbs, green for takeable objects, brown for inspectable room features, red for directions. Colored words embedded in the output text look enough like hyperlinks that I really want to click on them, but that functionality doesn’t exist. There are some context-specific verbs that only show up when they’re doable, but most object interaction is done with a generic USE.

It’s mainly exploration-based, telling its story environmentally, although there’s a strong temptation to ignore the environmental storytelling and only pay attention to the colored words. The basic idea is that you go to check up on a friend when the radio tower next to his house is hit by lightning, and in the process you discover the mad science stuff he was tinkering with and get attacked by wandering monsters. The monsters at least form an additional game mechanic, based around healing items and ad hoc weapons that can only be used once, forcing you to keep finding more of them. The inflexible two-word parser and the multiple weapons combine in a weird way: you have to phrase your attacks as “attack hatchet” or whatever. I feel like there must be a way of phrasing this that doesn’t make it sound like you’re picking fights with your inventory.

Here we have a sort of religious horror story that’s also a riddle. It’s a translation from Spanish, and it’s a good translation; I have no complaints about the prose. In structure, it’s a series of vignettes. An evil muse makes you relive moments of sin from your past and then write verses about them in a book, delighting in your transgressions. The vignettes are pretty minimal: most require just a single command to complete, although it’s not always obvious at first what that command is. Writing a verse consists of choosing a single word, and any word you type in will be accepted, although picking something meaningful and relevant can provide hints to the larger puzzle of who you are and why you’re in this situation. Here the game uses the parser interface to its strengths, making input completely freeform so as to avoid constraining your guesses.

The same can be said for the ending. There’s no natural ending built into the story: the vignettes cycle after a while, and the only way to escape the cycle is by asking God for forgiveness. This can be done in more than one way, and can be done at any time, including before you’ve seen the entire story. My first play-through ended prematurely when I wrote the word “mercy” into the book, thinking not “Lord, have mercy on me”, but “I was pretty merciless in that last bit. Maybe I can counteract that a little.” Another premature ending happened when I was told to start an animal sacrifice ritual, and had no idea what to do, and thought “Maybe we start with a prayer?” And it’s a bit of a shame that this happens, because ending the game provides revelations that would otherwise be built up to slowly over the course of the story.

This is a decently-put-together short piece that feels like an intriguing first chapter. It follows the same basic pattern as the opening to Curses!, giving the player a deceptively mundane task — moving three boxes to the loading dock — that lead you into something strange and supernatural, involving a mysterious cave under the storage facility. And then the game ends.

That’s my biggest complaint, really: that the balance of content is tilted against the part where it starts getting really interesting. The bulk of the player’s time is spent firmly in the realm of the mundane and mechanical, including some fiddly business about a tight passage and a freight elevator. If the game were much longer, I’d say that this is the sort of interaction that needs to be either circumvented or automated on repeat visits. In fact, the game kind of does that in the end, skipping over the whole thing when you get the final box.

I suppose the real point, though, is in the depiction of place, which is one of the things parser IF is really good at.

Neil deMause is one of the old guard of IF, an entrant in the very first IFComp and author of the acclaimed Lost New York. But it’s a bit of a surprise to see his name crop up here, because his last known IF work was 20 years ago. (Welcome back, Neil!)

Improv: Origins is a prequel to a series of superhero parody games he wrote from 1997 to 2002, featuring the “Frenetic Five”, a team whose questionably-useful powers are all inspired by parser-driven text adventures. The player character, Improv, specializes in using ordinary objects in unusual ways, and he’s supported by a character who can find objects, a character who can guess words for you, and so forth. As such, ParserComp is almost the only venue where they really fit any more, in an IF world that’s increasingly leaving both parsers and puzzles behind. Although the game presents itself at first as an Improv solo adventure, it’s really an origin story for the team, showing how Improv met everyone else.

The whole game takes place in a single room, a sort of comically adventure-gamey bank vault, containing an impossible-to-open safe that you’ve been hired to open. Some of the puzzles are quite difficult even with the hints you can get from the other heroes; I know I’m not the only one to get stuck on the puzzle to find duct tape, which, given the power to locate objects, is really just a puzzle to realize that you should be looking for it. (I have some complaints about that power, by the way. It doesn’t seem to work on rubber bands, and you need a lot of rubber bands.) Still, it’s satisfying to make use of everyone’s powers, even (especially!) the less obviously useful ones.

The prose is generally good — there’s a repeated gag I particularly liked of Lexicon, the word hero, responding directly to narration — but much of the humor is based around casually mentioning absurd superheero names, which I suppose is consistent with the original Frenetic Five games, but it feels to me rather played-out by now, the same old joke about a subject that isn’t what it was 20 years ago — heck, the superhero parody genre has moved on. We’re in the age of One Punch Man now and this game is still imitating The Tick.

Okay, we’re not off to an auspicious start here. Lantern is a Windows app with a hybrid hypertext/command-line interface in a graphical display, written in a Lua-driven engine called LÖVE, which doesn’t seem to be designed primarily for parser IF. The first thing we’re told is “The story is about a blind man carrying a lantern, trying to solve the mystery of his blindness. As he walks around the only sense is hearing, smell, touch, and taste.” Interactive fiction has historically had a substantial following among blind people, as it’s one of the few forms of computer game that they can play, provided it’s in a format that’s friendly with text-to-speech software. This game isn’t.

It starts with your basic amnesia plot: you’re stuck in three rooms (that I could find), with no idea how you got there, and puzzled by the fact that “your sense of sight is missing”. Except I’m more puzzled by why the player character thinks that. If I found myself in a strange room and unable to see anything, I wouldn’t think “I must be blind”, I’d think “Gee, it’s completely dark in here”. I suppose the lit lantern in your hands is supposed to address this, but even with that, I really think my first thought would be “There’s something wrong with this lantern. It’s giving off heat but not light. Is there some kind of cover I have to open?”

I struggled a bit with the UI. The introductory instructions are longer than the screen, and at first I thought it was impossible to scroll — it doesn’t recognize scrollwheel or arrow keys, but can be dragged with the mouse. If you type a command and press enter, and the command isn’t one that the game understands, absolutely nothing happens — no error message, not even clearing the command line. To make it worse, what commands are recognized is highly contextual, even for things that shouldn’t be. You can’t refer to objects that aren’t currently named on the screen — and pretty much every command response has its own screen, because output is all based around nodes, like a Twine game. So if you, say, examine an object, the response acts like a modal pop-up, blocking all other interaction until it’s closed.

In fact, what this scoping suggests is that typed commands are simply mapped onto highlighted keywords or pairs of keywords from the output text, including the sense organs (“fingers”, “ears”, etc.) and so forth that are (otherwise bafflingly) included in your inventory listing. Verbs are effectively fake: “touch” is a synonym for “fingers” and so forth. Thus, in contradiction to the spirit of ParserComp and possibly its actual rules as well, the game seems to be primarily built for mouse input, with the command line as an afterthought. The parsing is lousy enough that I’m not convinced that it’s even happening — the game recognizes so few commands that the game could very well just be looking up the entire command string in a table. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that adding an extra space between words is enough to turn a valid command into an invalid one.

It’s a difficult game to communicate with — the whole premise is that it’s giving you less information than you want, and it doesn’t make it easy to make your intentions known via input either. After a few hours of just exhaustively trying all the possible combinations of keywords, I’m giving up on it. I solved a bunch of inventory puzzles but I haven’t solved the mystery of blindness. I don’t know what proportion of the game I’ve seen. I’ve seen enough.

Time to reconnect to my roots a little. The voting period for ParserComp 2022 started just yesterday. Like the Spring Thing, this is an alternative to the annual IFComp, and a newish one at that — apparently the first ParserComp was run in 2015, but that was a one-off until it was revived last year. The main thing distinguishing it from the main Comp is that only entries with a text parser are allowed — so no Twine or Choicescript or other choice-based or hypertext works. In other words, it’s an attempt at addressing the problem of judging parser games and hypertext games together, and doing it without kicking Twine out of the main Comp. I slept through it last year, but I’m told there was some good stuff in it.

There are 20 entries this year, which seems to me a very comfortable quantity. I could play one a day and comment on them all here and be finished before Narrascope.

Spring Thing 2022 has been over for a little while now. I said I’d post about all six of the Back Garden submissions, and I’ve only done five. That’s because I wanted to actually get all the way through the last of them, Manifest No, before commenting on it. But I think I have to admit at this point that it simply isn’t going to happen. It’s tough to get through. Much of the text is simply portentious and agonized word salad like:

Steerless plunging scratching the scoffing subterranean enforcement seal with fingernails to scrawl illiterate runes, wept named rebellion, in the wheedling yaw submission to the infinite. Encaged horror broke free in the recognition and beat my bones like war drums. Under the ceiling’s concavity hidden doctrines groaned themselves buttresses, spectral stems extending from what had once been sequestered; we ignore what we know until our touch knows. Acidic repetition, I cried out! Who had I been to be a cracked mirror? Where might I pray, where were the ashen hills that called out in pious grime?

It goes on in that vein for a whopping twenty-seven chapters. What makes it especially fatiguing is that it isn’t entirely meaningless. There’s a story in there, but it takes some effort to extract. There’s a setting involving a dock and a bar that exist in some relationship to a Tower (always capitalized). There’s a set of miserable characters who argue and toss insults back and forth and sometimes kill each other, but aren’t really distinguishable unless you take careful notes — sometimes the narrative viewpoint switches from one character to another between chapters and it isn’t clear at first that this has happened. At one point, a sea-captain recruits a crew for an expedition to find a legendary lost Tower, but I have no idea if the narration after that follows the expedition or not. Sometimes it’s unclear if a passage was meant literally or metaphorically.

I’d be inclined to think that the author is underestimating the difficulty of their text, has internalized their own worldbuilding and style so much that they’ve lost sight of how it looks to others less familiar with their thought processes, as so often happens… except that the blurb and disclaimers at the beginning suggest that the difficulty of understanding is deliberate, part of an effect that the author values for its own sake. And why shouldn’t the text require effort? Isn’t this part of what we like about IF, that it involves us in more than just passive reading? I’m sure there’s an audience that will appreciate this work, even if it doesn’t include me, and I hope it finds them.

One note on the interactivity: Pages are fairly long, which is how I like them, and each will have links on a few random words. Sometimes following a link will take you to a page with some obvious connection to that word, but just as often there will be no apparent connection at all; the choices all advance the story, but not in a way that’s under the first-time reader’s deliberate control. So there’s no meaningful sense of agency in the choices. Figuring out the story from the murky prose is the only source of agency.

Here we have a story about stories — a sort of cross between Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and The Lathe of Heaven in a Russian-ish setting and Visual Novel format. (I’ve always found the VN presentation somewhat bothersome, but it’s a step up from Twine imitating VN presentation, in that you can click-to-advance anywhere on the screen.) You play as a server at an inn during a time of monsters and bizarre prodigies. People come in for a drink and tell you stories of the latest folkloric wonders they’ve seen, and these stories are interactive, offering one or three choices that affect how they end. The binding conceit, though, is that the interactivity is something the player character is doing. You enter a sort of trance while listening, and at the end, you might find that the storyteller has been altered by the choices you just made for them in their past.

The implications are disturbing, and the changes you make are not appreciated by certain magical creatures of the forest who can tell what you’re doing, and who come by in the night to complain and threaten you. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it. Even if you want to leave a story unaltered, you have no way of knowing what choices will do that. There’s some interlinking of the stories — definitely some repeated motifs, and possibly some decisions that affect later stories as well. In one, I had an argument with a werewolf about moral philosophy; in a later one, men are killed by a werewolf, possibly as a result of what I said. The protagonist’s strange power of interacting with fiction is thus portrayed as a curse — a peculiar perspective to put before interactive fiction enthusiasts!

One thing I really appreciate: Characters will ask after you, and, while you have the option of lying or deflecting, you also have the option of just telling them everything. Too many stories where the protagonist has some weird experience or develops a strange power have them simply decide to keep it a secret for no good reason. I’m glad this game didn’t force me down that path, particularly as the preponderance of weird experiences in the setting makes any secrecy seem a little pointless. Still, clamming up is offered as an option, and the fact that it was offered made me all the happier to be able to reject it.

There’s one element of the premise that I don’t think was handled well: in addition to everything else, the sun is gone and no one knows why. The problem with this is that it’s presented obliquely enough that it didn’t actually register for me until the end of the first chapter. There’s a line early on about “before the sun stopped making its way across the sky”, but that just made me think “before sunset”. There’s a mention of going to the inn in darkness every day, but that just made me think that I have an early-morning shift. And then it just stops being relevant for a long time. I might think it’s a deliberate effect, that the player is meant to spend the first day without full knowledge of conditions, if it weren’t for the blurb, which I hadn’t read before playing, stating outright that it takes place “two weeks after the sun stopped rising”.

The blurb also tells me that this is a demo for a larger game, in which you’re out in the cold having strange encounters directly, and that the whole storytelling conceit was just a way to wrap up a bunch of unrelated storylets for the demo. This surprises me. Despite being basically disjointed, it seemed too cohesive for that.

I’m hesitant to write anything about this at all. It’s another demo for a work in progress, but it’s essentially a non-interactive demo. Just a sequence of pages, each with two or three sentences, a picture (mostly lush, pastoral photographs), and a single link to the next page. You get to the point where your quest begins, rescuing a young country witch who you have a crush on from some unknown danger, and that’s the end of the demo. It’s a teaser trailer, not so much a game as an advertisement for one. And I can’t begrudge its presence here — this sort of thing is what the Back Garden is for! But when I set out to post about everything in the Back Garden, it was with the intention of reviewing games, not ads.

But let’s at least talk a little about what the ad promises. The writing is amiable and, when it isn’t focused on the nervousness of young love, has that the-author-really-wants-to-live-in-this-world tone you see in a lot of fanfic. The photographic illustrations are very pleasant, at least when they’re outdoors, but a scene of a ransacked room has an unnatural collage-like aspect, and the interior views of the witch’s rustic thatched cottage clearly don’t fit inside the exterior — although that’s probably just magic at work. The overall feel reminds me a lot of the narrative component of hidden object games.

The blurb calls this an “interactive poem”, and I totally agree with that categorization. It consists of seven stanzas, each seven lines long, where each line has seven variations for the reader to choose from, flipping through possible combinations until you’ve formed something you’re satisfied with. The acknowledgements cite Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems as a formal inspiration, although I suspect the UI changes the experience somewhat. Phenomena is in Twine/Sugar Cube, and uses “cycling choices”, changing lines when you click on them, which means the options for each line are revealed in a specific order. Sometimes a line will be an obvious continuation of a previous-seen alternative, or a comment on it, which doesn’t quite fit into the notion that the poem is just the finished product of your choices. It’s more like the poem flows in two dimensions. (Perhaps it aims at three, what with the three layers of sevens, but two is my experience of it.)

Extracting meaning from such a work requires effort — enough effort that I’d probably resent it in a more demanding context, like the Comp. It starts off with a close encounter with a flying saucer, then spins off into tangents obliquely describing different ways of relating to UFOs: as omens and portents, as strangers to our world, as something apocalyptic and transforming. One stanza is just a disjointed series of individual words, and might not have any real meaning beyond that feeling of fragmentation. The final stanza, titled “I GUESS THIS WAS NEVER REALLY ABOUT UFOS, HAHA”, digs into the author’s intentions a bit, explicitly connecting it all to death and to “everything the night is a metaphor for”, but still keeps up the scattering of vague but portentious imagery. It makes me wonder if this is simply an inevitable product of the chosen format.