The Stack

Apparently this shares a world with Ascension of Limbs by the same author (who also, I am surprised to discover, wrote Fat Fair), although the connection is only made clear in the ending. It’s much more of a conventional text adventure than Limbs — it’s practically a “My House” game with all the requisite implementation of mundane furnishings. Except for one thing: the entity sharing the house with you.

The interesting thing about this being is how indefinite it is. If you try to examine it, the player character simply refuses, unable to bear looking at it. Everything we know about it comes indirectly: it’s repeatedly described as wretched; it wanders the house as it pleases, but never goes outside; it dirties everything it touches; it eats from a dog food bowl in the kitchen; it’s strong enough to demolish the aforementioned scenery objects when it’s in the right frame of mind; the PC desperately wants to be rid of it, but doesn’t know how to kill it. Everything else is left to the imagination, and there’s a virtue to the vagueness. When I think about the advantages that text has over graphics in games, usually I think of text’s ability to go beyond the visual, to tell us more than pictures can. But it also has the power to tell us less, when that suits the author’s purposes.

The endings, too, leave a lot unsaid and a lot more implied. The creature’s arrival seems to be linked to a cursed artifact locked in the shed, left there by an absent husband who’s mentioned occasionally but never seen. Inevitably, you wonder: Is the wretched creature in fact the husband, transformed? Definite answers are not forthcoming. It would fit thematically with the author’s other works, though. Fat Fair gave us a bestial and dehumanized protagonist. Limbs gave us inhumanity as a goal. Wretchedness doesn’t dehumanize the player character, but presents us with someone else who’s become subhuman and asks us to deal with it somehow.

I feel like the word “surreal” gets overapplied in the IF world. I’m as guilty of this as anyone — heck, my very last post used the word when “nonsensical” or “whimsical” would have been more precisely descriptive. So I’m not going to describe The Gift of What You Notice More as surreal, even though the author’s blurb does. Instead let’s call it symbolic. The overstory is about the end of a relationship — the details are left vague, but you’re packing to leave when the curtain rises. But you can’t leave until you’ve done some soul-searching, which takes the form of inventory puzzles in dreamscapes based on important memories accessed through photographs. A party scene turns out to be set on a theater stage, a tiny elephant found in a crevice keeps growing bigger, that sort of thing.

There’s some nice patterning going on. There are three memories you can visit, but your first visit to each leaves a lot of game elements conspicuously unused, leaving me wondering if I had missed something when the narration declared I was finished and kicked me back to reality. It turns out that you visit each of the three memories three times, each time with a different perspective, trying to resolve a different question: first “Where did things go wrong?”, which is at best a starting point but definitely not an adequate resolution, then “What could I have done differently?”, and finally the most practical of questions, “What needs to happen now?” Notably, the difference in what results you can obtain is determined by what inventory items you bring into the memory with you. In the first iteration of the cycle, all you have is a bunch of sticks. The second time, you have stones as well. Sticks and stones! Tools that are proverbially ineffective! No wonder you can’t do anything but dwell on the past until you get something better.

Despite being made of room exploration and inventory puzzles, this is written in Twine. The inventory is constantly present on the screen, and items can be clicked on to reveal situational actions using that item, adding new hyperlinks to the bottom of the node’s text. Most items in most situations are useless, though, and do nothing when clicked. Now, I will admit that there were occasions where I had no idea what to do, and simply went around clicking on every inventory item in every place I could go, hoping something would happen. But when I did have an idea of what to do, it was fairly rewarding to see the new link come up, confirming that I was on the right track.

[Edit, 23 Oct] Come to think of it, sticks and stones aren’t proverbially ineffective, are they? It’s names that will never hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones! So possibly I’m reading too much into things there.

Andrew Schultz is a very familiar name to Comp judges — as this game notes at one incongruously introspective moment, he’s actually managed to surpass Paul Panks in sheer quantity of Comp entries over the years. I’ve only covered a few of his games on this blog, but his general MO is games based entirely around some single sort of wordplay (although he’s also branched out into chess problems recently). You’d think he’d have run out of types of wordplay to exploit by now, but he keeps coming up with new ones.

This time around, the idea is pairs of words that begin with the same letter or letters, and which rhyme with other such pairs. That’s not a very clear description, so I refer you to the title for an example. Every room and object has a two-word name, and can be either transformed or otherwise manipulated by entering two words that rhyme with it. For example, the room called “Bass Bath” has no exits until you enter the command “pass path”, causing pathways to appear. This puts serious constraints on the game content, on what rooms and objects and actions are possible, with the predictable result of wacky surrealism, just like in most of Schultz’s games.

I always find games of this sort fairly compelling, as they exercise my word-brain in unaccustomed ways. But this frankly seems like one of the lesser ones. The “pass path” puzzle is one of the most straightforward ones, where there’s an obvious connection between your goals and the commands you have to type. Most of the game isn’t like that. Sure, the game draws connections after the fact, but mostly I just typed in any rhyme I could find just in case it did something. And in fact the game encourages this behavior: if you enter a rhyme that’s wrong but that it recognizes as a good guess, made of valid and meaningful words that just happen to not be among the ones it’s looking for, it slowly adds charges to a cheat device you can use to find effective rhymes instantly. So this is basically a game about wild guessing, with enough formal constraint to make it feasible.

Here we have an adventure-game-cum-murder-mystery, the sort where your attention is less on figuring out whodunnit and more on the physical problem of getting access to places and not getting caught with things you shouldn’t have. The whole thing is set up to constrain you, but not absolutely. You’re not the main suspect, but neither are you above suspicion. It’s set on a sort of fantastical flying steamship, a smallish and isolated environment where it’s hard to avoid the rest of the crew. Your ability to cooperate with the investigation is hampered by a language barrier: the only people on the ship who speak your language are the chief suspect, locked away in a brig you never get to see, and the victim.

The really notable thing about it is the NPC behavior. There are seven characters you can encounter, each autonomously going about their routine, whether that means patrolling the hallways or rushing off to any part of the ship that needs emergency repairs. And I feel like there’s a bit of a misstep here. The first two NPCs encounters are all about avoidance, the puzzle of one being “don’t get caught where you’re not supposed to be” and the other being “don’t get caught with things you’re not supposed to have”. That’s enough to set expectations, to put the player into a mindset of “NPCs are obstacles”. But then, to progress, you have to shift into a mindset of instead exploiting NPC behavior to overcome obstacles. Mercifully, the story can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion (several different satisfactory conclusions, in fact) without solving all the puzzles or figuring out absolutely everything that’s going on. But you can’t get much of anywhere without this fundamental shift of attitude. I personally needed hints to get that far. I was using the hints a lot by the end.

At least the hints are really good! In fact, the best part of the hints isn’t even in the hints per se (which are external to the game proper, part of its website), but in an in-game tablet, where you can review notes about the ship, the people, and the investigation, and which, most importantly, contains a tasks list. Just being told what the author thinks you should be working on is often a great help. Ideally, it shouldn’t be necessary — the game content itself should be enough to communicate your goals. But when that fails, it’s good to have an explicit quest log to fall back on.

It’s early yet, but the most engaging piece I’ve played so far this Comp is One Does Not Simply Fry, a text-heavy Choicescript-based mashup of The Lord of the Rings and competitive cooking shows like Iron Chef. It’s a combination that reminds me of the classic Narnia/Anthony Bourdain crossover fic, although that had a great deal more to say about both of its subjects than this does. No, this piece mashes its subjects together largely for the sake of shallow pun-based humor, although some of those puns wind up being the basis of characterization — a contestant named Sour Ron, for example, is pretty much sour about everything.

The thing that really strikes my interest, though, is the structure, the way it takes advantage of the cooking show format. You know more or less what’s going to happen from the beginning, and that lets you strategize somewhat. I’ve always thought the second Lord of the Rings film had the best battle scene, because it had characters describing in some detail exactly how they expected the battle to go, and then it showed the battle happening exactly as anticipated. Something of the same effect happens here. Depending on your initial choice of character, you might be good at cooking or you might be better at sabotaging the other contestants. Some of the challenges come down to “Which of your character stats do you want to apply to the situation?” — which, given that you know what your character is good and bad at, basically just makes it “Do you want to succeed at this challenge or not?”, although there’s some humor to be had from picking the wrong choices.

And ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whether you win the actual competition or not. The characters here have ulterior motives, concerning “the On(e)ion Ring”, a comestible of great power. Win or lose, someone’s going to wind up crafting it and triggering the real conflict at the game’s finale. A clever trick, this: the bulk of the story directs the player’s attention towards a ludic element that doesn’t make a whit of difference to the ending. And this in a game that explicitly encourages replay! On second play, you know what’s going on, but you’re probably going to try to win the competition anyway.

One small UI matter I think is work commenting on: Although Choicescript normally presents choices as separate buttons at the bottom of the page, this piece always has just one button to advance, with any choices taking the form of radio buttons within the page. I wonder why? Maybe Choicescript makes this approach easier when the story is basically linear, the choices applying inline variation rather than branching?

This year on this blog feels like it’s been mostly delays and excuses. Well, here’s today’s: I’ve been sick, and I didn’t want to judge Comp games while my physical misery had the potential to skew my judgment. That said, it’s Comp season and I am ready to start judging!

I wasn’t sure I’d do this. For the last two years, I’ve been putting the main Comp aside while I look at alternatives like Spring Thing and ParserComp. But I feel like there’s just something more… solid about the Comp itself. It’s an entrenched institution, sponsored by the IFTF, with its own purpose-built infrastructure. Little comps these days tend to run as itch.io jams, which no doubt makes them easier to set up, but makes me acutely aware that they’re dependent on a third-party platform that doesn’t really care about them. The Comp was around before all the popular commercial websites, and will probably be around after most of them are gone.

There are 75 entries this year. If I count correctly, 29 are labeled by their authors as parser games, 42 as choice-based, and four have been placed in the intriguing “other” category. I do not know how many I’ll be posting about here. Definitely not all of them.

Today is the end of the judging period of the 27th annual IF Comp. I have not been posting about it. What’s up with that?

Last year, after playing over a hundred entries, I said that I’d probably skip the Comp if it kept growing at the rate it had been. By September, I even had an alternative in mind, for people who want IF reviews: earlier in the year, the talented and prolific IF author Ryan Veeder announced “club wooby“, a metagame, rewards program, and attention-getting scheme where you earn “buttons” by playing and producing transcripts of his games, and trade them in for Veeder-branded tchotchkes and/or one-of-a-kind handmade felt dinosaur dolls. Although I ignored this at first, dedicating a month to it seemed like a good Comp substitute. I may still do that at some point.

As it turned out, the Comp didn’t grow this year: there were only about 70 entries, a number I would have considered huge a few years ago but which now seems modest and manageable. Aim at playing two a day and you’d easily get through them all within the deadline. So I had a choice to make — or I would have, if I hadn’t suffered a fairly severe wrist injury at the end of September that prevented me from typing or using a mouse with my dominant hand. Playing any form of IF, let alone writing reviews, became too difficult to consider.

I still haven’t fully recovered. Obviously I’m typing now (with both hands, even!), but my capacity for using a mouse right-handed is limited. This has hampered my ability ability to play games, but not eliminated it. I just have to be selective.

One thing I’ve been playing a lot, if you can call it “playing”, is the seminal idle game Cookie Clicker: I’ve made a few goes at it in the past, but its recent Steam release put it back on my radar, and it’s gotten a significant amount of new content since the last time I paid attention to it. The title of the game is a bit misleading: it is not, for the most part, about rapidly clicking on things, and never requires it. Mostly it’s about waiting to afford upgrades to your passive income. It can be played in a more active style, where you’re waiting to click on randomly-appearing “golden cookies” that only last a short time, or it can be played more passively — there are mechanics that reward choosing one play style or the other and sticking to it. And passive mode is basically perfect for satisfying one’s craving for numbers-go-up while other games are unplayable.

I also got back into A Monster’s Expedition, which has the virtue that it can be played perfectly adequately with just the left hand, requiring nothing more than WASD plus Z for undo and R for reset. I had already reached the ending, but I hadn’t found my way to all the optional islands, and in addition, there was an update that added even more islands. This was a little consternating, as I had no way to differentiate the new content from the old-but-unsolved. It’s all just mixed together in the same map. Now, I posted before about how the retreat of the clouds aids completion, showing exactly where the remaining islands are. The new content makes this less of an issue: islands are basically everywhere! I’ve actually found it easier to start over from scratch, carving the cloud cover out of only the immediate vicinity of where I’ve been, as this makes it easier to see which unvisited islands are close enough to bear consideration. Possibly re-solving everything has helped me relearn how the game works, too. Whatever the case, I got severely stuck when just trying to continue from my old save, and have easily outpaced it from the new.

To some extent, I’ve been able to use a controller: unlike keyboards and mice, you essentially operate controllers with your wrists in a fixed pose. In this way, I’ve managed to play most of Teslagrad, a rather good puzzle-oriented Metroidvania themed around magnetism in a Russian-ish steampunky setting. However, as your range of actions increases over the course of the game, eventually it gets to the point where you’re using chords of face buttons and shoulder buttons that would probably be a little awkward even when they’re not actively painful. I want to finish it at some point, but it’ll have to wait until I get my grip strength back.

At any rate, I’m getting better. In fact, over the last two weeks, I managed to do a two-part stream of Return of the Obra Dinn, a game that I had completed before, but which I wanted to solve better. The whole game is about figuring out the grisly fates of the crew of an abandoned Regency-era sailing vessel, using observation and deduction. The game has a way of letting you know you when you have enough information to know someone’s identity, and I wanted to see if I could find the necessary reasoning as soon as the game thought it was possible. (I mostly succeeded, but not entirely.) You can still see the recordings on Twitch if you’re interested. Anyway, this is a first-person game, controlled via mouse and keyboard, and I realized after the first stream that it had been a bad idea: even in a sedate non-action game where you can spend a lot of time standing still and going over your notes, and even using the mouse left-handed where I could, my hand was wrecked by the end. I went ahead with the second stream anyway, hoping that an extra week of healing would make it better, but I’m not doing it again soon.

And that’s a wrap! There were 104 entries, initially. One was disqualified for having been released previously. Three were one game in disguise. And there’s one I wasn’t allowed to vote on because I had beta-tested it. That left a nice round 100 games for me to judge, and I actually managed to judge them all, and post about half of them. I didn’t say this before, because I wanted the freedom to change my mind if it didn’t work well, but I had a system for this: I’d play two items from my randomized list, and then choose one of them to write about before proceeding to the next two. I actually think taking them in pairs like this helped me to choose votes, but I also think that the sheer size of the list meant that my standards drifted over the span of it. But that’s why we randomize.

Some notable trends observed this year: Multiple games where you play as a disembodied spirit. Multiple games that don’t have a player character in the conventional sense at all. An unusual amount of Asian representation compared to previous Comps. More serial killer stories than I’d like. Two games where you gradually discover evidence that you’re a vampire, which struck me as a funny coincidence considering how different those two games are otherwise. Several games based on semi-abstract card-game-like rule systems, replacing the player freedom of a full-on parser and the authorial freedom of hypertext with a small but consistent set of actions, where the player spends the first half of the game figuring out the rules and the second half applying them to optimize numbers. It’s worth noting that this experience is basically what the first text adventures were like before we all got used to their conventions.

One trend I find particularly interesting is the number of games that use Twine, or another choice-based interface, to make old-school adventure games based around puzzles, inventory, and free exploration of multiple rooms. It’s not a combination I would have expected to be popular. I always sort of thought that this specific form of description and interaction, the “medium-sized dry goods” model, ubiquitous in games but not particularly in non-interactive fiction, is a product of the underlying technology in ways that don’t really apply to Twine. But apparently people like that model enough to go to some effort to produce it in places where it’s neither necessary nor automatic. And when you see what they’re doing with the combination, it has clear advantages! Eliminating the parser helps to keep the interactivity focused on the meaningful and contextually appropriate. It’s clearly still an area where the basics are still being experimented with, though.

I haven’t more than glanced at other people’s reviews yet, so I don’t have a good sense of what the winner will be. My own top-rated games were Academic Pursuits and The Impossible Bottle, but Pursuits is far more accessible, so that’s my guess. The main thing limiting it is that it’s shorter than Comp-winners tend to be. A Rope of Chalk and A Murder in Fairyland are also strong contenders. Anyway, we’ll have answers soon enough. My prediction for the Golden Banana of Discord (the unofficial award for the game whose ratings have the highest standard deviation) is either Amazing Quest or You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf, both of which I expect to be polarizing.

I’ve spent a substantial chunk of this year judging this Comp and neglecting other projects to do it. I will very likely skip next year, especially if growth trends continue and it winds up in the neighborhood of 120 entries. Maybe I’ll blog the Spring Thing instead. That’s still relatively small.

The Comp is on its last day. Let’s take one last look at a game that I previously judged without knowing its full extent. You won’t find The Knot in the list of entries, because it’s spread out over three games: “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane” by Willershin Rill, “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!” by Tarquin Segundo, and the one I had written up previously, “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” by Gevelle Formicore. (The title The Knot is used in the closing credits for the whole.) Note that the author names are part of the title. The putative authors are just as fictional as the game content; each nonsense word they’re composed of, “Willershin” and “Formicore” and so forth, is used in the other two games in some other capacity, as the name of a fantastic creature or a lost civilization or whatever.

The three games are in different genres: fantasy, space opera, Indiana-Jones-style tomb raiding. But they’re exceedingly similar, fitting their content into the same patterns, even reusing essentially the same intro text and room description, just swapping out some words to fit the genre. The connection between them couldn’t be clearer, and the only reason that I missed it when I played Atelier is that I hadn’t even noticed the existence of the other two games yet. The titles even strive to minimize this possibility of this happening: because they all start with quotation marks, they get listed together when alphabetized. But my IFComp account is set up to randomize the order by default (the better to give every game a fair shake), and the unprecedentedly large number of entries made it easy to lose sight of them. So, bad luck there.

The reuse of names had me wondering if the three works were set in the same world at three points in time. Is Dr. Chirlu, the “action scientist” who worked on creating a powerful energy source known as the Knot, the same person as Autarch Chirlu, who rules his world with an iron fist, using a mysterious artifact known as the Knot to maintain his immortality? I don’t think that works, though, because the same words are sometimes used with completely different meanings. “Ilfane”, for example, is a legendary hero in one game, an invading alien race in another, and the device housing the Knot in the third. There is, however, some suggestion of connections between the worlds beyond just the presence of an immensely powerful object called the Knot. Like when the tomb of Ilfane contains a representation of the solar system where the spaceship Teresten is. And it is these connections that form the basis of the puzzles.

As with the fact that the games are connected, the game goes out of its way to make the puzzle clues really, really obvious, to the point of putting “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CLUE” in flashing letters at the top of the page and saying “Perhaps you should take a note of this if you ever come across [situation found in another game]” afterward. I have a better suggestion than taking notes, though: these games are best played simultaneously, in three browser tabs or, even better, if you have enough screen space, three browser windows, side by side. That way, when you find a clue, you can keep it on the screen while you play the other two games, looking for the puzzle it’s a clue for.

Anyway, there’s not a lot of game past the point of noticing the connections I’ve just described, completely spoiling the experience of discovering them. Two of the games don’t properly end in themselves, just leaving you hanging on a page with a final clue that you need to reach the ending of all three stories in the third. This goes a step beyond the Hat Mystery and into Broken Age territory: a story that needs to exploit the meta to conclude, its characters sharing information through the player that they have no possible in-world source for — unless you consider that they’re sharing it via the one thing they all have access to, the Knot. Which fits at the meta level as well, because, as I’ve said, the Knot is the name for the conjunction of the three games. It’s been said that the ultimate goal of every game is to destroy the world by bringing it to a successful conclusion. Here, the Knot, the in-world manifestation of the trilogy of games, solves all of its protagonists’ problems by deleting itself from their worlds, right at the point where the player’s interactivity ends.

A young woman (“I’d been 16 for a couple years now”) returns to the fictional city of Gotomomi, on Tokyo Bay, to lie low after some unpleasantness abroad, bearing a horrible new scar and a story she’d rather not tell. She has no place to stay, and there’s a years-long wait list for even the seediest of apartments, so she immediately turns to crime. A tenement by the docks has a tenant who just died, and the caretaker will let you unofficially take her place if you can dispose of the body discreetly. And after that, there are opportunities to move up to better apartments by doing more shady favors.

It’s the sort of story where nearly everyone’s out for themselves, and operating at least slightly outside the law, from the wretched souls picking over the trash illegally dumped in the bay to the well-heeled operators of a clandestine casino. Mix in a few heavy doses of social satire, like when you can’t call in a rescue for a stranded seaman without providing his health insurance number, which he doesn’t have, because he’s American. That’s the flavor of this piece. It takes place in a system with deep problems, where the protagonist gets ahead, and gets closer to a personal agenda that even the player doesn’t know about until near the end, by acting as problem-solver.

And that means it’s a puzzle-based adventure game. It’s pretty neatly designed, with a tight little core map with some larger mazy sequences dangling from it. The constraint in the early game makes it easy to get going, and the progress upward from floor to floor of the tenement is a good way to mark your progress in the story. I do think the puzzles get a little too obscure in the middle, where you have to think of making a Molotov cocktail on the basis of too-vague prompting, and then are expected to have some real-world knowledge of how they’re made. But overall, it’s well-built.

I’m a little leery of the fact that the puzzles make our Japanese teenager protagonist undress on multiple occasions, sometimes in the presence of a Russian motorboat pilot. That seems fetishy, but at least it doesn’t dwell on it.