The Stack

The interesting experiments aren’t always the successful ones. This piece is, in my opinion, not a successful experiment, but it’s an interesting one to look at and describe why.

The story is nothing more than a chase sequence: you on a white motorcycle, trying to deliver a briefcase to the docks while the police try to stop you. An emphasis on speed and quick reactions in the text. My first few attempts were baffling, in that they all failed without, as far as I could tell, my ever having been offered any opportunity to affect the outcome at all. There was just a sequence of passages, each ending in a single text button, the final one saying “It could have been different…”

On maybe my fifth try, I looked at the game’s itch page¹This game is hosted on itch.io, and the comp’s download for it is simply an HTML page with a link to the itch page. There’s no obvious reason for this. As far as I can tell, it’s just HTML5 without any functionality that wouldn’t work locally and offline. So, as usual, I’m complaining. again, and saw the advice “Keep your eyes on the road”, which was enough of a hint to make me realize that the little picture of a motorcycle at the top of the screen was important. At each step of the story, it moves forward for a little while, and the outcome depends on whether you let it come to a stop or pressed the button to advance to the next story fragment first. (It’s possible that there’s more granularity to it than stop or go, but if so, it was too subtle for me to notice.) I had failed to notice this partly because my eyes were generally at the bottom of the screen, where the text comes in. I speculate that putting the motorcycle below the text instead of above it could aid comprehension.

So, now I know there’s time limits on advancing through the story. The result is that I’m no longer really reading the story; I’m skimming it for just enough information to decide whether I need to keep up my speed or come to a sudden stop. I honestly couldn’t tell you what happens towards the end, because it never really passed through my head, apart from a handful of words. This strikes me as not ideal for IF.

Okay then, says my cantankerous brain, what about Wheels of Aurelia? That also forced you to split your attention between reading text and driving, and you thought it worked really well. What’s the difference here?

The difference, I think, is that in this game, the text is about the driving. In Wheels, you’re splitting your attention diegetically: the player character is both driving a car and participating in a conversation, so if you sometimes neglect the conversation to pay attention to the driving, it’s appropriate. It just means she’s doing the same. Here, however, both the text and the little motorcycle on the screen represent the same thing. So you’re trying to read about what the motorcycle is doing, but you can’t, because you keep on being distracted by what the motorcycle is doing. This is as unnatural as it is frustrating.

Here’s another one in the better-than-it-seems-at-first camp. The genre is blatantly D&D-based fantasy, with half-orcs and thieves guilds and everything. There’s no dungeon per se, the story being mainly set in urban environments, apart from a brief foray to find a dragon and, in so doing, set up the rest of the plot.

But it’s not so much combat-based or even puzzle-based as decision-based. Oh, there’s the option to grind monsters for cash if you really want to, but if you play the game like me, trying to do as much as possible in each location before moving to the next, then you’ll be very advanced in the story before you discover this.

And while some of the decisions are purely practical ones, a lot of them are decisions about your character, about what kind of person you want to be. And it’s peculiar, because I mean that in two senses: the same decisions that reflect your personality and moral qualities also affect your character stats, which is to say, your skills in fighting, magic, and thievery. I started off the game thinking I’d be a thief, because that seemed like the skill set that would be most useful in the setting, but wound up having more points in mage, because I kept making decisions that were kind and thoughtful instead of selfish and greedy. It’s like the character creation system from Ultima IV, but spread out over the entire game.

There’s one other CRPG that it reminds me of even more strongly, though, and that’s the PC adaptation of Temple of Elemental Evil. Largely this is because of the way it uses those character stats: with very few exceptions, they’re applied not as modifiers to a random roll, but as prerequisites for an option, which is displayed with a special icon and the required stat threshold. If you don’t meet the requirement, the option is displayed but crossed out, Depression Quest-style. But also, it resembles ToEE in the style of its side quests. This is a game where you can, for example, wind up deciding whether an innkeeper’s wife should stay in a stable but loveless marriage or leave for an uncertain future, and be rewarded with cash either way. (Since there’s no XP, the game uses money as its generic reward.)

The story seems to be set on an unvarying backbone, with player decisions affecting the details. Do someone a favor, and you might find them returning it in a later scene. Why wouldn’t you just do everyone favors? Because many of them are contradictory, forcing you to choose one person over another. The game’s favorite trick, which even forms the basis of the main plot, is that it’ll let you do a quest, and then, just when you’re ready to turn it in and claim your reward, it gives you more information that casts doubt on whether you should.

In short, this game is basically just the story part of a decent story-oriented fantasy RPG. It’s easy to imagine giving it a graphical front end to make it look more like other games of its type, but why would you do that? It’s fine as it is.

I’m not a fan of zombie apocalypse fiction — I wasn’t even fond of it when I was working on it for a living! But this game is on the periphery of the genre, de-emphasizing the zombie in favor of the apocalypse. You encounter just one infected person, at the very end, and the encounter is fairly brief. If you’ve done everything right, they’re even curable. But that one moment of danger is enough to pay off the tension in the rest of the story.

The story: You’re a survivor driving alone through the uninhabited waste, when your car runs out of gas. You find an abandoned gas station, but the pump is locked, and in the course of searching for a key, you find a secret laboratory, also abandoned, that was researching the disease. I very much like the way that it drives the story with implied motivations that make sense in context: you’re not just exploring for exploration’s sake, you’re specifically looking for that key, or, if you remember seeing a corpse nearby that might possibly have a key on it, you’re looking for protective equipment that will allow you to search it without fear of infection.

In the year 2020, that last detail seems a little ripped-from-the-headlines. Avoiding contamination is paramount — even when handled safely, that corpse can contaminate your inventory in a way that reminded me a lot of Michael Fessler’s room in Cragne Manor. This fear of contact is why you’re alone, and why the only other living soul you encounter is a threat. And in the end, how do you handle that threat? You have the option of handling it entirely from a distance: the controls in the lab’s observation room let you simply blast its entire room with fire, minimizing risk. But doing this in the obvious way also destroys the machine capable of synthesizing the cure. This is the kind of ironic ending that’s completely appropriate to the genre, but it’s not your only option. It’s just that the other option involves putting yourself at risk.

Anyway, it’s a neat little game that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. One aspect I appreciated that doesn’t have a lot to do with the story’s themes: quite a few of the puzzles focus on the spatial relations between multiple rooms, making you think about more than just where you are at a given moment.

Playing this game made me uncomfortable, mostly in small ways. The map is just a little bit confusing, in a way that sent me stumbling into the same wrong rooms repeatedly. Progress in the story is often dependent on focusing on things that didn’t stand out as important, either scenery objects or nouns mentioned offhand in conversation. And it’s written in the third person. The protagonist is a dim but amiable man named Reginald, and there are enough encounters with enough different NPCs that when the output mentioned Reginald by name, I often thought for just a moment that it was talking about someone else, and consequently tried talking to Reginald or whatever. This wasn’t a sticking point, but it did remind me repeatedly that my thoughts weren’t where the author wanted them.

The third-person narration is linked to a conceit that you’re “a voice in Reginald’s head”, telling him what to do, an idea that is never really addressed after the very beginning. The game starts out by just throwing away your first several commands, as Reginald reacts to suddenly having a voice in his head, which sets us wrong-footed from the get-go. When the story started talking about summoning demons, the connection seemed obvious: I’m a demon possessing Reginald, right? But no, the story never draws that connection. I’m not sure it even occurred to the author. I mean, it seemed pretty obvious to me, but we’ve already established that their headspace is unlike mine.

The summoning of a bona fide demon seems like it would be momentous, something that would rock Reginald’s world, but once that episode is over, it’s over. He goes back to just running errands for his cult leader afterward as if nothing happened.

Yes, Reginald is a member of a cult. That’s clear from the very beginning. The entire setting of the game is a cult compound, but it’s presented from Reginald’s point of view, without conspicuous irony, and he’s so reluctant to recognize it as a cult that I started to wonder if the author knew, and ask if my sympathies were supposed to lie with the cult. Part of the problem here is that this is a story of betrayal, where the player has to make multiple difficult choices about what side to take, who to trust and whose trust he should abuse. It’s presented as a light-hearted comedy.

This is an authorized sequel to Alias: The Magpie, a heist game from 2018 that I haven’t played (except for the very beginning, for comparison purposes, in preparation for this blog post). I thought perhaps I had played it, but I was confusing it with various other humorous heist-based adventure games. The character known as The Magpie distinguishes himself as a gentleman thief and master of disguise in an Agatha-Christie-ish setting — the first Magpie game even has its own ridiculous-named Poirot imitation. So setting the sequel on a train makes a certain amount of sense.

The train gives the author an excuse to constrain the action: this is essentially a one-room puzzle game. The goal is to brazenly pluck a jewel from the lapel of a sharp old lady, without attracting her attention, or that of her attendant, or her parrot, or the other master thief sharing a car with her. This mainly means a lot of environmental manipulation, most of which I discovered by exploratory prodding rather than goal-oriented behavior.

You have the aid of a suitcaseful of disguises, enabling you to pass yourself off as anything from an aristocrat to a maintenance worker to a parrot groomer — the Magpie is easily capable of changing costume in the time it takes the train to go through a tunnel. I frankly don’t think the game took good advantage of this. The main way it affects you is that some actions are only available to certain personae, which means you have to wait for the train to go through a tunnel and change before you can do them. This is amusingly novel at first, but the dependencies feel more constraining than enabling, and it’s basically a puzzle solution that has to be executed multiple times without variation after you’ve figured it out. I could imagine a game that makes more of the mechanic — say, where you have to execute multiple outfit-dependent actions in a row without an opportunity to change, and there’s some intersection between what the outfits enable, to force you to think about what combinations of abilities you need. Maybe the original Magpie game does this.

Or maybe someone else will make a Magpie game that does it. Heck, maybe I’ll give it a try — the fact that this is an authorized sequel by a different author than the original sets an interesting precedent. The idea of different authors doing their own takes on the same characters or settings is ubiquitous in commercial games, but hasn’t been indulged much in the amateur IF world, outside of the occasional collaborative work.

One last thing worth noting: the treatment of dialogue. The first Magpie game had a system where it suggested topics for you to ask people about. This game puts a rigid formality around that. You have an inventory of things you can say, and to simplify matters, each thing can be said to exactly one person. Once you’ve said a thing, it’s used up and cannot be said again, unless circumstances renew it — the most common case being introducing yourself to people again after putting on a new disguise. So, you don’t have a lot of freedom in conversaion, but on the other hand, you also don’t waste time guessing who can be usefully asked about what topics. It’s a bit like picking choices from a menu-based interface that way, except regularized. You can take a look at your topic list at any time, and see which ones are currently available. I wouldn’t recommend such a system for every game, but it works pretty well here, where the emphasis is on physical puzzles, but talking to people is sometimes a component of those puzzles.

Here’s a lovely bit of high-concept gameplay. The player character is an incorporeal demon who can’t interact directly with physical things. Instead, your main way of interacting with the world is by manipulating people’s intentions. Find someone who wants to Explore, for example, and you can take that away from them, keep the “Explore” intention in your inventory, and give it to someone else. (A possible avenue for exploration: this mechanic without a player character…) It reminds me a little of PataNoir and a little of Coloratura. It even reminds me a wee bit of Counterfeit Monkey, due to the wordplay involved: sometimes an intention has multiple different contextual meanings, as when you extract “play” from a musician and attach it to a child or a gambler. After the first act, your palette expands to include adverbs that modify the intentions, creating a combinatorial explosion that really should eliminate the utility of random guesswork, but I still wound up using random guesswork a lot of the time — mainly, my process was to try verbs until I found something that produced a special response, then iterate through the adverbs, effectively reducing the combinations from m*n to m+n.

Like the protagonist of Coloratura, the demon here basically treats humans less as people than as things to be acted on, even to the point of using “it” as the pronoun for every human character. Treating people as things has been identified as the essence of evil by wiser minds than mine, and it’s a bit distressing to casually extract a child’s urge to play and see him just stand there listlessly afterward. And yet, the demon’s narration is quite amiable, chatting with the player with candor, even though he clearly regards you as human — he knows you’re not used to thinking in terms of spiritual essences, and frequently pauses to explain things in terms humans would understand.

I suspect that my willingness to cut him slack has to do with the fact that manipulating humans is not his primary goal. He’s not here as a tempter, but as a sort of spiritual secret agent, hunting for pieces of a non-material codebook to decrypt an intercepted celestial communique. The setting is a hotel and casino where there’s an international diplomatic conference going on, giving it that cold-war spy story vibe on two levels, one of which isn’t his concern, but which he’s willing to exploit in service of the larger, more important cold war. Quite a few of the humans are various burglars, hackers, goons, and so forth, engaged in skulduggery of their own, excusing your exploitation somewhat. They know what kind of game they’re playing. They just don’t know all the players.

As seems to frequently be the case in high-concept games, the parts where it falls down are the parts unrelated to the concept. There’s a handful of puzzles that don’t involve manipulating intentions, and those were consistently the puzzles where I got stuck, because they took my puzzle-brain out of the groove it was in. Also, the ending throws a win-or-die time limit at you for the first time in the game without warning you to save first — I still haven’t actually won, because my last save was a considerable distance back and I haven’t felt like replaying from that point. Nonetheless, the overall experience was pleasant enough to keep me playing well beyond the Comp’s two hours.

OK so you have to bring a cabbage, a sheep, and for some reason a bear to your grandmother, who lives on the other side of a river, and there’s boat but you can only bring yes it’s that one. The only complication here beyond the classic brain-teaser is that the sheep isn’t completely compliant.

To an old-timer like me, this game immediately brings to mind Fox, Fowl, and Feed from the 2007 Comp (the very first Comp to be covered in this blog!), which does exactly the same thing in considerably more depth. I’m assuming that the author wasn’t aware that the idea had been done before — which is fair, it’s not a reasonable thing to expect people to know! I’ll say this much for the comparison: Sheep Crossing is more reasonably completable. The solution to FF&F involved ripping a hole in the grain sack so you could get some grain to feed the goose, which violated the explicit instructions that all three things be delivered intact. Sheep Crossing does no such thing. On the other hand, it also has only one puzzle, other than the classic one, which hardly counts as a puzzle any more.

Here’s a suggestion for any future authors of river-crossing-puzzle-based IF: Why not use a different river-crossing puzzle? Adapt the Missionaries and Cannibals problem or the Flashlight puzzle or something. Heck, come up with your own original variant. I guess this would change the nature of the game, make it less of a commentary on a ubiquitously-known folk puzzle. So ignore this suggestion if you want. Just be aware that there are other similar puzzles out there that haven’t been given the IF treatment yet.

Sir Isaac Newton finds himself mysteriously transported to the year 2020. This is a very short work, and barely interactive, in a way more often seen in Twine than in a parser-driven work like this one. And it’s rather silly, in sort of a Bill & Ted way, but without the self-awareness. I don’t want to be too mean here — that’s not why I’m singling it out for attention — but I can’t let it go unsaid.

Why am I singling it out for attention, then? Because of the implied time travel mechanics. In 2020, Newton finds a world where his own Principia is unknown, presumably because he hadn’t written it yet when he left 1673. Instead, Einstein wound up having to spend years doing the same work instead of coming up with general relativity. So Newton winds up stealing a copy of Einstein’s Principia from a public library and plagiarizing it in the past: standing on the shoulders not just of the giants that came before him, but those who came after as well.

It’s implied in a few places that he’s doing this to restore the timeline to its proper state — the witch who initiates the story talks about “something wrong with the future”. But what caused this wrongness? Was it just that Newton was absent from the timeline? But the only reason for his absence was that he had gone into the future to see what was wrong so he could correct it, so that’s kind of circular. And the end result consists of not of removing alterations to the timeline and restoring it to its natural state, but introducing an alteration of his own. The story frequently makes mention of how smart Newton is, but the implication of the time shenanigans, if you follow them that far, is that he really wasn’t smart enough to do the things he’s remembered for. It really casts him in a poor light. But in that case, we somehow have a natural timeline that’s “wrong”, and an altered timeline that’s “correct”.

But I suppose it’s best not to give it any more thought than the author did.

Here we’ve got a broad-gestured boffo environment: the mansion of a famous stage magician/superhero, laden with puzzles and secret passages, populated by caricatures like a robot butler, a gardener who’s a clown, an opera singer in full Valkyrie getup. The magician is absent, kidnapped by one of his numerous enemies, and you, his lovely assistant, have to navigate the puzzles to find him, guided by taunting messages the villain left behind.

The puzzle design is pleasingly cartoonish — at one point, you have to bring a large object downstairs by sawing a hole in the floor under it — and also distinctly old-school, the sort where every inventory object has exactly one use and can be discarded once you’ve discovered it. Unfortunately, the parsing is a bit old-school too, and it really needs to handle more commands sometimes. There were times when I gave up on what turned out to be the correct approach because none of my attempts were phrased the way it expected. There’s an in-game hint source, a crystal ball, that occasionally helped me recognize when this was happening, but mostly it was just as prone to not understanding me as the puzzles.

That much will be fairly easy for the author to fix in a post-comp release, if they care to. All they need is to get some player transcripts and implement the things the people tried that should have worked but didn’t. But there’s another problem that would take some actual redesign: that it’s easy to get ahead of things in ways that undermine my faith. For example, at one point, I made a cat leave a room. This solved a puzzle, but I hadn’t even noticed the puzzle it solved; I was just poking around at things, and hadn’t interacted with the cat at all, so its sudden unavailability left me feeling like I had done something wrong. Also, that trail of messages I mentioned also seemed to just abruptly run cold. It starts with a note in the initial room, which tells you to go to the attic. The message in the attic, which takes a little solving to find, tells you to go to the library. I went to the library, solved a puzzle, and didn’t find any more messages. So after that, I went around solving puzzles just because they were there, until I stumbled into another message very near the end of the game. Looking at the walkthrough afterward, it seems that I really only missed one message, but missing that one bit of guidance mean that I spent most of the game feeling like I was missing something I was supposed to have.

The main point of interest here is the UI, and how it affects the way you read the story.

Choice-based works usually take one of two forms: either the choices are separated from the text (usually placed after it), as in Choicescript or a paper gamebook, or they’re hyperlinks embedded in the text, as in Twine. This is one of the few works I’ve seen that does both, distinctly and with different meanings. The player character is cybernetically enhanced, and links within the text are, in effect, consultations with autonomous subsystems. You’ll see someone smile, for example, the word “smile” will be highlilghted; clicking it, you get a report from your vision system in a little popup in the space to the right of the story, giving a microexpression analysis telling you that the smile is forced and the person is probably under stress.

Other systems include the rest of the senses (hearing, touch, smell, taste), internal diagnostics, memory, and, most intriguingly, wifi. Each subsystem has its own attractive glowy color used in both the links and the popups. What’s more, if the information provided by the popup suggests additional actions, it’ll add them to the choice list under the story text, in the same color — frequently, there are no choices at all until you unveil them in this way. Usually the color is enough to tell which suggestions come from which popups, but in addition, hovering the cursor over a choice lightly highlights the popup, and vice versa. It’s all very nicely put together, especially in that you don’t have to fully understand the rules of the system to use it.

To an extent, it’s busywork. It could just as well skip all the clicking and just show you all the popups automatically. Certainly there were times when I just clicked on all the links before reading a page at all, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t perform any destructive actions, which can’t be the approach the author intended. But it didn’t really bother me, possibly just because it looked so nice.

And anyway, it uses the medium of the popups to paint a picture of the fictional technology behind them. The systems give you superhuman clarity, and an enviable ability to read people’s emotional and physiological state, but don’t always produce good suggestions. Indeed, sometimes they don’t produce suggestions at all; the memory system in particular is prone to spouting useless trivia that you can’t act on. Sometimes every single system will suggest the same action except one that dissents, which, to my mind, clearly means that that’s the option I have to pick.

And this brings us to the actual story. The protagonist is a sex worker, who uses her special abilities to better do her job. It’s surprisingly sensitive about the subject, too, humanizing her and her coworkers. The opening is all about setting boundaries with a client who imposes on your free time, implicitly treating you as worth a little less than him. And that’s the part I just described, where all of the systems except one tell you to put his needs above your own. It’s a clever use of the medium to show the pressures she’s under, and how she’s internalized them.

And as much as the narration takes care to humanize her in the main story window, the robot hive-mind in her skull is somewhat inhuman in perspective. As much as her enhancements are a superpower, it also suggests a mind that’s fragmented, as if she’s mentally ill. Then there’s the treatment of the wifi, her least human trait. Uniquely, wifi doesn’t just suggest actions, but makes them possible, letting you control devices remotely. But it also essentially involves your consciousness leaving your body, described in terms that make it sound like a dissociative episode. Here, I don’t know enough to know whether it’s being handled with sensitivity or not.

Anyway, I’m making it sound symbolic and allegorical, but the story is largely pulp. There’s the beginnings of a mystery, then a fight scene with another enhanced individual that raises more questions. And then the game ends without resolving anything, being just the first chapter of a larger work. That’s always unsatisfying in the Comp, but I wish the author well in completing it.