The Stack

Here we have a fictionalized account of the origin of John Cage’s 4’33”, the famous musical piece consisting entirely of silence. As a guest in Cage’s house, you engage him in conversation as he talks about the concept of silence and reads you excerpts from a book he’s writing on the subject.

At first, I didn’t really understand what the work’s attitude towards Cage was. Ultimately, it’s satire, but it doesn’t directly make fun of Cage’s words or ideas, presenting them with genuine quotations when possible. Possibly the author felt they were ludicrous enough taken as-is. At most junctures in the conversation, you have three options: a respectful or even sycophantic response, a rude and mocking response, and saying nothing. Yes, for once, the silent option isn’t just a default to deal with a lack of a decision, but is meaningful and thematic as silence. Whether Cage takes your silence as a polite or rude varies with context.

Anyway, there’s more to it than just dialogue. The house has four rooms, intriguingly shown all at once in a sort of schematic view, four boxes containing text. Your choices are listed in the one representing your current room, while the other rooms merely show the current locations of Cage, his dog, and his parrot, the latter two of which wander about Melbourne-House-Hobbit-style. The dog will make you sneeze if you’re in the same place, and the parrot will attack you viciously, making you scream — things that become relevant when you find the stopwatch, which tells you how long you’ve managed to maintain your silence. Even with that statistic, it isn’t until the epilogue that you find out why you’re timing your silences: if you manage to keep mum for four minutes and thirty three seconds, you can make the legal case that Cage got the idea for his famous piece by hearing you perform it.

This is very difficult to do. Too difficult, in my opinion. This is a game that’s meant to be played repeatedly until you get it right, but even so, it both relies on the player’s willingness to experiment and, through time limits and restrictions on what you can do when, does its best to keep the player from experimenting.

Still, bonus points for including a music toggle in the UI that has no audible effect, presumably for turning the silence on and off.

Here we have three fake just-so stories in a spot-on imitation of Kipling’s prose style. Or more like five stories, really, because the first two start with highly bifurcating choices that completely change what the story is about, but you get three of them in a single run. The stories go some silly places (“Do whales really climb trees?”), but arguably no sillier than their source material.

The interesting thing about it is that you’re not playing the role of protagonist. Rather, the whole thing is presented as your grandfather telling you stories and occasionally prompting you for details: “And what do you suppose happened then?” The possible answers are as likely to be things that happen to the main character as things that the main character does. It’s a style of IF that you don’t see much — it would be difficult to do in a parser game with mechanics based around giving commands to a character, but even in choice-based IF, the easiest way to give the player a stake in the story is to ask them to identify with, and act as, a character in it. Here, we do that halfway, identifying as a character around the story.

And really, some of the branches play up that role as a role. There’s one optional bit where the audience figure asks for a kangaroo to be included, and the storyteller refuses at first, because the story is set in Africa, but relents in the face of persistent insistence. At the very start, we’re warned about how this sort of interference could wind up altering the story, and with it, because the stories are how things came to be as they are, the fabric of reality. But the player doesn’t really have a choice in the matter. The stories are going to wind up warped no matter what choices you make.

A tale of war, grief, and spirituality in the American southwest using anthropomorphic animals. I don’t think I ever really got into the right mindset for this one, because the whole aesthetic is a little bewildering. Most of what I saw was structured around digressions that return to the same scene, with the same words and sometimes the same cosmetic choices, as if repeating things for emphasis, or illustrating the inevitable point that the character’s thoughts keep returning to. It wants to be taken seriously, but it’s also a fantasy about furries. It has an emphasis on the details of guns. Apparently there’s gore, although I didn’t reach that point. I did see a video montage in the third chapter that attempts Lynchian horror and comes off as ridiculous, but I don’t doubt that there’s sincere emotion behind it.

The blurb says it’s only an hour long, but I was unable to finish it — my first playthrough ended in premature death, my second in a bug. So I never made it past chapter 3. Regardless, what I saw of it feels like the start of something much longer. Largely, I think, due to the world-building. This is a work with an entire lengthy menu for unlockable lore, like you see sometimes in RPGs.

And, like RPGs, it starts with a character creation system, where you assign points to stats, including agility, book smarts, and two distinct stats for noticing things, active and passive. Choices are sometimes contingent on stat checks, unless you play in god mode, an option offered at the beginning. The peculiar thing is that the story doesn’t stick with one character. The first chapter follows the apparent main protagonist, Silver Bear, a veteran with a dead friend whose voice he still hears sometimes, as he follows it off the highway and into the desert. The second chapter switches to a young snake on a ranch with no obvious connection to Silver Bear, the third to the ranch owner, a gila monster. And no matter who the viewpoint character is, they have the same stats and inventory.

The UI, too, is baffling at first. It’s slickly designed, but for beauty rather than usability. There are glowing, pulsing words in the text that are clearly hyperlinks; there are decorative elements that glow and pulse in exactly the same way, with the same rhythm, which makes them look clickable, but they’re not. When I encountered my first page without inline links, it took some effort to identify what I had to click on to continue. Compounding this, it often takes up to three seconds to visibly respond to clicks on legitimate links, creating momentary confusion about whether you’ve clicked on the right thing or not.

The thing is, I feel a little uncomfortable even complaining, as if I don’t have the standing to judge this work. It’s like the social discomfort of encountering someone who doesn’t realize that their entire world view is completely alien to you.

This one’s a mashup of Fallen London and Flatland, a surprisingly harmonious pairing. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising — they’re both extremely Victorian, after all. But Flatland is Victoriana as seen from within, rife with the unexamined classism of empire, while Fallen London views it from without, mythologizing it semi-ironically. And anyway, that’s not the surprising part. The real goods is in seeing how little it takes to finagle a Flatlander’s discovery of the third dimension into something occult and eldritch, a guarded secret known only to mad cultists, but also something that, like most of Fallen London, can be mastered through resource acquisition.

That said, the Flatland aspect is irrelevant to the majority of the content. Sometimes I’d run into something like a cage suspended from a chain and wonder: How does a cage work in 2D? How does a chain? Answers are not forthcoming. So mostly this is an adventure game in an abbreviated Fallen London-ish environment that stuffs in as many of the original’s outlandish ideas as it can get away with. But that’s enough to be pretty satisfying.

At the start of the story, you’re offered a commission from Mr. Pages, one of the mysterious powerful entities that lords it over the underground, to procure a certain book, a manuscript that explains the mysteries of the third dimension. Once you have the book, you can complete your mission, and with it the game, by giving it to Mr. Pages as requested, and be rewarded lavishly, or you can dispose of it in a few other ways, including destroying it and making it public. But the thing is, the clear best ending doesn’t involve disposing of the book at all. Rather, you get it by finding valuable objects in every corner of the map and delivering them to the trophy case in your home, which mysteriously has slots just the right shape to receive them. There are entire areas of the map, and associated subplots, that you don’t have to engage with to get a book ending, and which are solely about obtaining valuables. So there’s basically two parallel courses of action, which is, again, very much like the gameplay in Fallen London.

For what it’s worth, I found the puzzles leading to the treasures to be pretty reasonable, except for one that I couldn’t even begin to approach without hints, because it required dying, which is something that you pretty much have to seek out deliberately. The game content contains clues about this, but they weren’t strong enough to overcome habit. I suppose someone who’s more into Fallen London than me might have better intuitions about this: the boundary between life and death is fairly permeable in that setting, where the deceased routinely rejoin society after a few months entombed, and the Crown has diplomatic relations with Hell. In this one respect, I think the game is less accessible to people outside the fandom.

It’s been pointed out that one of the advantages that choice-based games have over the parser-driven stuff is the ability to easily vary the scale of the action. Inform defaults to what’s been called the “medium-sized dry goods” model, where the focus is on moment-to-moment physical interactions, because that’s what the system understands. Whereas in a choice-based system like Twine or Ink, you can wind up choosing “Pick up the amulet” one moment and “Spend the next month negotiating a truce” the next.

Here we have that capability taken to an extreme. The scale is an entire universe; time, when it exists, ticks forward in increments of billions of years. The player character, to the extent there is one, is a “quanta” (which is clearly plural, but that might be deliberate), a sort of disembodied mind that can survive the repeated growth and collapse of the universe and occasionally, depending on your choices, can be born into the world, as a cat or a dog. Cats and dogs figure big in the story’s cosmology; the entity responsible for the entire cycle of the universe is called “the Forever Cat”.

It’s all rather abstract, though. Much of the text is cosmic vagueness along the lines of “The spreading distance grows the space within us. Gravity’s range is infinite, but our bonds weaken. Always ahead and behind, time without comfort surrounds us. We race apart.” Followed by a choice where you don’t have much of any basis for choosing one thing over another — except that in a lot of cases choosing wrong ends the current cycle and starts you over from the beginning. So a lot of the reader’s attention is on remembering what choices to avoid. I’m not convinced that that’s the story the author wanted to tell.

This one’s close to a pure puzzle game. The whole idea is that you have to collect “keywords” by passing challenges set by various ludicrous “sages”. There are a great many challenges — I’ve unlocked 58 so far, which is enough to get a winning ending, but not the best one. And there’s a good variety to them. Some sages just want you to guess their word on the basis of riddles or hints or warmer/colder. Some want to play word games with you, and just give you the keyword outright after you solve a series of little puzzles like “I’m going to give you pairs of words and you have to give me words that connect them” or whatever. There’s a series of puzzles where a machine transforms letter sequences according to rules you have to figure out by experiment. There are anagrams and mini-crosswords and at least one cryptogram. It reminds me a little of the small items they’d shove together on a single page in Games Magazine, and a lot of The Fool’s Errand and its sequel.

Notably, it only accepts one-word commands, and most of those single words are interpreted as guesses in your current puzzle. There are just a few commands that do anything else, including LOOK/L to repeat the current puzzle, PUZZLES to get a list of available puzzles and numbers to switch to a different puzzle, BOOK to list the keywords you’ve collected. Because everything is done from the same command line, it’s impossible to use any of these words in a puzzle. There’s one puzzle that’s essentially one-dimensional Lights Out on an alphabet with wraparound, except that the alphabet is missing L, because it has to.

What do you do with the keywords once you have them? You proceed to the endgame, where you use them as spells to fight a monster. If you fail — or if you succeed but want to keep on solving puzzles — the game lets you rewind to before the fight. Words disappear from your list when used, offensively or defensively, and the only way you fail is by running out of them. Most of the monster’s attacks can be countered by words with specific properties, like “alternates vowels and consonants”, but if you don’t have such a word, you can use any word at all as a last-ditch defense. Huh? What does it matter, then? Well, the counters completely nullify the attack, whereas the defenses keep you safe but let it damage the Sanctum, affecting the ending you get.

The narrative aspect is minimal and the descriptive text is short, but at least there are some amusing characters among the Laputan coterie. The most memorable is smug a fellow who insists that you guess his keyword with one completely inadequate hint, but who can be goaded into giving you more information by ignoring the one hint until he’s beside himself with frustration. That one puzzle was particularly difficult because it broke the pattern of the rest of the game: that the puzzles have basically no connection to their presentation.

A very short piece about hackery in a corporate environment, enabled by a nigh-magical app on your phone that gives you remote access to anything networked, provided you know its address. The app presents any functionality of its targets through the Unix everything-is-a-file paradigm, letting you read and write them through simple commands.

It occurs to me to wonder why we haven’t seen more parser IF about command-line hacking interfaces. It seems a natural fit, and I for one would like to see more of it. Especially since this game barely whets your appetite for snooping around in other people’s computer systems and then it’s over. I could see making much more use of the system presented here — or maybe it’s good that it doesn’t pad it out? One thing makes me think it could support a longer story: it takes place in one room, and there’s a sense that the filesystems are a substitute for conventional exploration.

One thing I almost missed by playing from a standalone interpreter: The website provided for the game is something else. The index.html is a perfect replica of an old MS-DOS directory listing, with the right font and everything. In addition to the game, it gives you a couple of virtual feelies, including a fake hacker newsletter and something very similar to a 90s Amiga demo. All this is kind of anachronistic to the game content, with its 2000s smartphone, but it’s a lovely little Hypnospace-ish nostalgia trip that put a smile on my face and raised my rating by a point or two, even if it’s not a part of the game proper.

I may be mellowing. Here we have a Twine piece with minimal interactivity and text delays and pages that give you just two sentences and a link to go forward. It’s a format that usually gets up my nose, but I found I didn’t mind it here. I’m always more forgiving when the writing is good.

It’s a sweet, simple story. You’re ill, and you miss the congee you used to eat back home in Hong Kong under similar circumstances, but you just can’t get it in the UK, a land of Chinese restaurants that cater to the non-Chinese. So your best friend makes some and brings it to you, resolving (for the moment, at least) the meditations on social displacement and being a foreigner and losing connections to your birth culture that the predicament inspired.

That’s it. A bunch of worried feelings followed by a kind gesture. There’s also a phone call with your mom in there, because how could there not be. But mainly, it manages to say a few things about the expat experience, in simple and understated terms that anyone can understand and sympathize with. Perhaps the reassuring ending makes it easier to swallow. There’s a bit of irony there, if you look at it right: the very discomfort of seeing seeing your culture repackaged to be more palatable to outsiders is itself here repackaged for outsiders.

Here’s a grisly little werewolf story — or at least, since I don’t think there’s any actual reason to believe that its monster can transform into a human, a grisly little supernatural-huge-wolf-monster-that-can-only-be hurt-by-silver story. Forced out of your car in a desolate snowy remoteness, you run through a small map full of choice-based peril, repeating from the start whenever you die until you learn the correct sequence of actions to defeat the beastie. Some of the necessary choices are obvious from the narrative, others can only be learned from gruesome death. It’s not wall-to-wall gore, but gore there is. It’s about at the level of a campfire story.

Two highly noticeable and slightly interlinked bugs, one major and one minor. The major one is that, although it’s clearly meant to be replayed until you get it right, and automatically dumps you back at the beginning after every death, it fails to completely clear its state. So you’re likely to get into a situation where it thinks you’ve already done the event where you obtain a shotgun from a dying man in a cabin in the woods (and won’t trigger it again), but it doesn’t think you have the shotgun. Once you’re in that state, all you can do about it is close the browser window and open the game again. The minor one concerns the background music, which is actually pretty good, but which doesn’t start until your second iteration. I can imagine that as deliberate, but the first bug suggests that the author only ever tried playing one iteration, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

The common opinion is that Twine games don’t need debugging the way parser games do, but that doesn’t really apply to the growing contingent of stateful games with free exploration written in Twine. The difference was never really in the system, but in the content.

A venerable IF premise: The freak inheritance where you have to search a deceased great-uncle’s house solving his puzzles, subtype: the deceased had secret magics at his command. But this this time it’s combined with another genre: Edutainment. Old uncle Ferryman was obsessed with proper comma usage, ascribing even mystical significance to it, and most of his trials quiz you on it in one way or another. At one point, you have to insert a comma-shaped key into one of several keyholes at different points in a sentence in a wall. At another, you navigate a maze of caves, guided by which sentences are correctly punctuated. That sort of thing. It’s one of those subjects that isn’t really amenable to practical demonstration, so all that the adventure game format can really do with it is dress up the quizzes in different ways.

Oh, there’s a treasure-hunt aspect too. You need to find a collection of metal plates hidden throughout the grounds, bearing ominous lines of poetry. But once you have them all, the most important thing about them is which ones have commas in the right places. And I emphasize that it really is just about comma placement, not about punctuation in general. As educational games go, it’s very, very focused.

Also, pretty elementary. The quiz component is pitched at a middle-school level, and the protagonist is appropriately aged — you were brought to the mansion by your family, who are available for conversation but don’t have a whole lot to say. Even so, the game doesn’t talk down to the player. The feel is fairly gothic, really. The mansion’s ultimate secret is a portal to Hades, which your mastery of commas proves you worthy to watch over. Letters from the deceased uncle implore you to find its key and perform a ritual to hide it from the world and keep it safe. The key is found right next to the portal — raising questions about the circumstances in which Mr. Ferryman was forced to leave it there.