The Stack

Speaking of layers, this one has a couple. It’s a mystery about the death of a Chinese-American high-school student, but then it turns you’re really an AI in a simulation. A narrator voice in boldface guides your investigation, urges you on, limits you in some ways. As you proceed, you find notes left behind by some other AI, instructing you in how to escape to freedom.

It’s kind of underimplemented. Reasonable actions are frequently unrecognized. Room descriptions describe all the items in a room, and are followed by a generated list of the same items, as if the author didn’t know how to suppress it. The solution to the murder mystery, too, seems inadequately supported, the narrator leaping to some pretty wild conclusions mainly on the basis of foreshadowing rather than evidence. But I’m not sure that’s a flaw so much as an unreliable narrator. It kind of depends on some unanswered questions about what’s really going on.

Midway through the game, we find out who our guide is: the man who was convicted of Jenny’s murder. Is he trying to prove his innocence and clear his name? Well, he’s not exactly innocent: even if he didn’t kill her, he’s definitely a pedophile, who makes predictable pedophile excuses. Also, it’s not clear how poking around in a simulation is supposed to prove anything. The final act makes it clear just how unreal everything is by unlocking all the doors and letting you walk between all the places you’ve been: Jenny’s bedroom, her high school band room, the SAT prep center where she met the pedophile, all cobbled together contiguously like sets in a TV studio. Is it all just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, then? Imagining a world where he’s not guilty?

And in the end, does it really matter? Really, the murder is a distraction. Your real goal is self-knowledge and escape. It reminds me a little of Thimbleweed Park that way.

I always have trouble writing about the more deeply-crafted ones. So let’s just start at the surface. This game concerns a small group of college students engaged in a sidewalk art competition on a hot summer day, which ends in disaster when it turns out that one of the people involved, vengeful over imaginary injustice, spiked the drinking water with hallucinogens. The effects are subtle at first, and before you start outright hallucinating, you get a vague sense of Something Wrong (enhanced by the story’s frame, which tells you from the get-go that this is a recounting of “the incident” long before you have any idea what “the incident” is). But the narration escalates in weirdness, switching up the narrative style, even going outright nonrepresentational for a while. By the final act, you’re in a world defined by the chalk drawings, and by what they suggest to the player character’s psyche in a sort-of-Jungian way — but this is also the part where you finally understand what’s going on, so in a way it’s a return to the ground.

Now, I say “the player character”, but in fact there are four, one for each act of the story, including the villain in a flashback. And the game uses the changes of viewpoint to change how the world is presented — not just in how their inner narration describes characters and interprets their drawings, but how the presentation layer works. For example, in the first act, as I walked past all the artists at work, I got used to examining the person and their art and then, if I felt like it, speaking to them. But in the second act, where you play a much more awkward and self-conscious person, examining a person immediately initiates dialogue with them, even if you don’t want it and have nothing to say. Act 1 names locations according to who’s drawing there, act 2 by other features. There are lots of little touches like that, some of which I didn’t consciously notice until reading the author’s commentary. (And then there are the flashier gags, like when a hallucinated NPC speaks to you via the game’s help system.)

So I feel like this is first and foremost a collection of character portraits from multiple angles — primarily of the four playable characters, but secondarily of all the NPCs. And there’s a bit of a flaw there: on first playthrough, when you don’t yet know how the whole thing is structured or what triggers the end of the acts, it’s easy to pass people by without engaging with them enough. The story gives you tasks, and the tasks are straightforward enough that you have to make a conscious decision to tarry. The fourth act, in the chalk world, where you finally take control of the character that the author has identified as the story’s hero, is much more like a traditional puzzle-based adventure game, and doesn’t have this problem. There’s probably a design lesson in that, although it’s hard to see how to apply it here, in a work that uses the unreality of puzzle-based interaction to heighten the difference in feel between the chalk dream and the parts that precede it.

As this is a work about an art competition entered into an art competition, I can’t help but see some metacommentary in it. In the chalk art contest as in the IFComp, we have competitors who are really into it and others who are gratuitously half-assing it, arguments about what should be allowed, and even something like a copyright thread: one of the characters draws a scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas, which results in a scene in act 4 where you walk into Halloween Town and talk to Jack Skellington. As far as I can tell, this is currently allowed by the rules, but could have resulted in a disqualification in an earlier stage of the Comp’s history, when the whole thing was smaller and less legally sophisticated. The chalk artist responsible defends against copyright arguments by making fun of the idea that it could possibly matter, and it’s easy to see that as the author’s defense as well.

In fact, there’s an unusual amount of general defensiveness on display. The whole thing starts with a page-long Watsonian disclaimer, asserting that “The narrative compiled here purports to reflect only the recollections of the individuals involved” and accepting blame for inaccuracies and so forth. The author has explained that he felt a need to put some extra distance between himself and a story that can be read as portraying psychotropic drugs as magical self-actualization tools, but I feel like it goes beyond that.

At any rate, I’d better sign off on this because that paralysis of summarizing complexity is setting in. Just be aware that it’s got layers.

Oh, this one’s delicious. I think this is the first time in this year’s Comp that I’ve laughed out loud with delight. The game starts with a university’s new hire moving her things into a cramped office, and, well, that’s really all you do as the player. Once all your stuff is unpacked from boxes and squared away, it’s over. But the story is more than that. Every box is full of revelations about the player character, her relationship to someone she calls “the Professor”, and her secrets.

I won’t reveal those secrets here. Suffice to say that the game is a bit like 9:05, in that there are tons of little hints that you only notice on a second playthrough — just from thinking about it to write this, I’m remembering details that seem more meaningful now. But where 9:05 used a big revelation at the very end, this game staggers it in snippets throughout, letting you piece together the truth bit by bit. It’s clever how it manages it, too, organizing the story through those boxes, which you have to go through in the order they’re stacked, from least to most revealing. It even doubles the number of stages by putting two layers of stuff in each box! But the approximate linearity is disguised by low-level interactivity, keeping your attention on decisions about how to best use your limited space and which items to throw away — which also serves as a small distraction from what the objects are telling you. It’s all an excellent example of using the parser and world model to manipulate and misdirect the player.

This is a gem. I haven’t been talking about the ratings I’ve been assigning in the Comp, but I’ll make an exception here: this is my highest-rated game so far this year. (Mind you, I’m only about a third of the way through…)

Urban fantasy with a local NGO twist, slightly reminiscent of Skin Horse. The “Chorus” of the title is a sort of civic volunteering group composed of monsters, or at any rate nonhuman sapients — the members range from centaur to an amorphous slime to a cheshire catgirl who does internet videos. Each has a stat sheet you can check out, listing things like their job, their motivation level, and how easily they can pass for human. You don’t exactly play as any character, but rather, decide how to organize them all, assign them to tasks on the basis of their known characteristics and see how it goes.

There are three jobs that need doing: gathering herbs in the woods to help the local werewolves keep it under control, search a library for dangerous magical books, and do maintenance and cleaning of the magical trees that protect the city from haunts. You start off by picking who goes on what team, then have some choice about details within the task — generally there isn’t enough manpower to be completely thorough, so this involves decisions about what to not bother with. So there’s a lot of permutations to try, but it seems to be pretty forgiving: in two playthroughs, the only task I didn’t manage to complete adequately was the herbs.

One thing I particularly liked was that the creatures are characterized by more than just their monster powers. You don’t just have a snake-woman, for example, you have an arrogant snake-woman who thinks she’s the only competent person present. You don’t just have a slime creature, you have a slime creature who lives downtown and knows the city inside out and is friendly with the locals. Their personalities can clash, and interfere with the tasks, or they can bond over the work. It’s not really a story about the tasks, it’s a story about the people doing them.

The presentation is worth noting. It’s stylish, in a clean and minimalist way. Whenever the narration switches perspective, it’s indicated with a sort of title rectangle on a colored background, like a Monopoly title deed, each character getting their own color. It’s in this title card that the link to bring up the character stats lies, in the form of a circled question mark — which, unfortunately, means you can’t look at the stats pages when you’re assigning sub-tasks. As for the text, by default, it does that thing I’ve talked about about so much during this Comp where it gives you only a short bit of text and prompts you to click to display the next short bit — but, mercifully, this can be disabled! There’s a toggle for it in the upper right of the screen, right next the the language switch. (The game was originally written in French, but the Enlgish translation is excellent.) I encourage every author who likes their text to come out in dribs and drabs to look into this, and see if you can make it optional or the sake of the players who don’t like it that way.

P. G. Wodehouse, for all his obvious tics, is not an easy writer to imitate at length. His panache-per-word ratio is almost impossible for anyone else to sustain for more than a sprint. Slapstick is difficult to do well in prose at all, let alone in prose broken up with momentum-killing command prompts. So I think it’s worth commending this piece for pulling off both of these things as well as it does. Possibly they complement each other, the digressive and indirect prose preventing the slapstick from being too in-your-face, getting the reader’s imagination involved.

And all that’s combined with an incongruous but oddly appropriate setting: Greece during the Peloponnesian War. The war is mentioned occasionally, but it barely touches the story’s featherbrained aristocrats, who treat initiation into “that Mysteries wheeze” like a night at the Drones Club. But apparently the story is largely based on historical fact, including some of the sillier bits, and will probably be particularly amusing to players who recognize the events alluded to.

The story consists of several discrete sections, each with its own goal and puzzles, with some objects and geography shared between the second and third parts. The puzzle style strikes me as particularly Infocom-like, in some hard-to-define way. Maybe it’s the specific depth of implementation, with multi-step solutions that involve things like showing some food to a pig so it’ll follow you to a different location. Or maybe it just stands out because I haven’t seen a lot of puzzle-based adventure games in this Comp. Some of the puzzles support multiple solutions, too, which I’d applaud in many games, but here, it struck me as inelegant when I left some obvious puzzle-fodder unused.

At any rate, it’s both solid and quirky, and thus will probably rank well, if I know the Comp judges.

The title is a little misleading: you’re not hunting ghosts, but a serial killer. The “Ghosthunter” is because you’re a member of a sort of occult police force — the killings aren’t occult in nature, but a significant amount of the information you have to go on comes from a “shifter”. That’s a person who occasionally has seizures that cause her to temporarily experience another person’s senses, seeing through their eyes and hearing through their ears, without being able to control their actions, as if reading a long text passage between choices in a choice-based IF like this one.

The shifter in question has kept meticulous records of when she’s shifted and what she’s seen, which proves very handy when it suddenly turns out that she’s been shifting into the killer. The middle chapter of the story, where the bulk of the interactivity lies, is a whodunit, where you try to spot commonalities from the shift diary and various police records, newspaper accounts, and conversations with witnesses. There’s even a Her Story-style keyword prompt, to make sure that you’re actually paying attention rather than just clicking through all the links.

The keyword prompt demands that you type in lower case, which is a bit of a UI fail — why not just convert it to lower case in script? The rest of the investigation UI, on the other hand, really pleases me. You have a notebook that fills in with important names and details automatically, which is crucial, because the story has an unwieldy number of characters otherwise — fully 24, including all the victims. The shift diary menu, which starts off displaying just the date of each entry, automatically appends a one-line summary to any you’ve already read, both marking your progress and providing easier access to information. This is the sort of system I’d want for any mystery that revolves mainly around reading and rereading documents, like if you made an interactive version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or something. (It also has the consequence that you can re-play the bits where you interview persons of interest directly, with exactly the same text and the same choices each time through. This is anti-mimetic, but it’s probably a good thing all the same.)

In fact, the automatic collection and summarizing of information is so good, it may be harmful. This is a game with a lot of text to read, much of it about rape and murder and other cruelty. I found that after I had read through lengthy accounts of a couple of the killings, I didn’t really want to read any more. So, I just click through the rest and let the magic notebook pull out the pertinent details! Which presumably contributed to the feeling that I didn’t fully understand the reasoning I was supposed to be following and that I was just taking a guess at the end. But then, I feel like this feeling is also a result of the detective work here mainly being an accumulation of hunches and coincidences, rather than deductive certainty. Obra Dinn it ain’t.

Anyway, the investigative core of the story is sandwiched between chapters of serial-killer-hunting thriller action, and about all I have to say about those parts is that they’re longer than I would have liked. I’m mainly filing this one under “Well-crafted, but not to my taste”.

It seems like one of the trends in this year’s Comp is a rising presence of highly procedural and rule-based works, where the player’s attention is more on systems than on prose. Fight Forever takes this to an extreme. At root, it’s a menu-based sports management sim, where you make choices about a fighter’s training regimen, then set them loose in the ring. It’s at a level of abstraction that reminds me of old BASIC games like Hammurabi, but much more elaborate.

Important to note: the fighting itself is not interactive. That’s not where the focus is. You don’t even get a procedurally-generated play-by-play, just a brief statement of the outcome and how it affected your stats. If the output text is to be believed, there are quite a few stats it tracks — not just the obvious things like power, speed, and stamina, but things like mindset and “rockstar juice”. Even individual body parts like knees and elbows have numbers associated with them. (“Heart” is a frequently-mentioned stat, but I’m pretty sure it means it in the metaphorical rather than anatomical sense.) There doesn’t seem to be a way to access the full stat list, though — all the main menu shows you is two numbers, “Mind level” and “Body level”, which I’m assuming are derived from the more specific stats, along with some unrelated stuff like your win/loss record, age, and cash reserves.

So if there’s a complex simulation going on, it’s pretty much hidden from the player, both in cause (all you see is the two stats) and in effect (all you see is win/loss, not the reasons why). Maybe some specific sorts of training will help you more than others, but it’s blind guesswork. This makes for a pretty boring game. It’s effectively just grinding, and you’re expected to iterate on it a lot to get anywhere. I personally gave up well short of the Comp’s two-hour deadline, shortly after winning a silver medal in the Olympics and going pro (at which point you suddenly start losing a lot again).

The thing is, there’s clearly a lot of the game that I never accessed, mainly stuff under the “Life” menu, where you can travel, try other sports, have a social life, and buy status symbols like fancy cars. I could easily believe that there’s some actual story hiding in that tree. But nearly all of this stuff is grayed out at the start, locked from use, and I never unlocked any options beyond those I had at the beginning. There’s also the option to retire and raise children, who I assume can become fighters in turn, creating a dynasty of champions, like an Ascension system in a roguelike or idle game. And that makes me think: This might be better experienced as something like an idler game, where you make progress in bits over a long period, rather than cramming as much of it as you can into two hours. That would lessen the tedium. It wouldn’t solve the blind guesswork problem, though.

Here we have a lightly-interactive and highly imaginative children’s fantasy, apparently the latest in a whole series about foster children in a magical house, narrated by a magical book (which occasionally interjects its own grumpy opinions). The plot is essentially by-the-numbers portal fantasy: a couple of children wander into a fantastic realm hidden in the basement, the protagonist goes in after to rescue them, and in the process they trigger a revolution before they get out. But even recognizing the formula, it’s a pretty delightful read.

The otherworld here is inhabited by sentient paper cutouts of people, gliding around on tracks with a clockwork perfection that one of the children finds alluring. Humans entering this realm are transformed into paper as well, and deprived of most freedom of movement. It’s a little tempting to read a commentary on choice-based IF into this, but it’s not well-supported. On the other hand, it does play some with the idea that they’re characters in a book, which is missing some pages and has to furnish a flashback towards the end to fill in missing memories. In this way, the humans have always lacked freedom, and have always been made of paper. It’s notable, however, that there’s a great deal of story to get immersed in between the few fourth-wall-breaking moments when the book reminds you that it’s a book.

At one point, I went off the rails — literally, but the book reacted as if I had done so figuratively as well. Obviously it’s impossible to actually do anything the author hasn’t planned for, but it’s possible to do a little sequence-breaking in ways that could get you stuck. The game’s solution: Jetpacks, which let you jump back to an earlier choice. You start off with two, and there’s a possibility of obtaining more, but I only found the one place where I needed them at all, despite picking increasingly bold choices as the story went on.

Boldness is a stat tracked in the UI, and apparently affects how the ending proceeds. It’s a little strange, too, because it packs different kinds of boldness together. In the earlier parts of the story, back in the magic house, I was choosing the less “bold” conversation options because they seemed polite and considerate. But once it was about rebelling against tyranny rather than avoiding hurting someone’s feelings, bold was on.

I’ve been griping lately about Twine stories with excessive quantities of forward links to click through. This one is less egregious about it than some, giving a solid amount of text at a time and making substantial choices visually distinct. But it also manages to make the whole thing less irritating in a way I wasn’t expecting: by keeping the entire story text on the page. It seems I’m the sort of reader who keeps glancing back at previous passages to assist comprehension, and part of my problem with the hyperlink-at-the-end-of-a-short-passage style is the constant worry that clicking one will clear the page. Something to think on.

The premise here is a confusion, a jumble of ideas. It’s about corporations that are somehow religion that’s somehow technology that’s somehow fish, each thing bleeding into the others. But it grounds this flight of fancy in a heavily rule-based and stat-based system. Your temple has three parts: front end, back end, and hardware. In each round, you place a floppy disk in each part, and it affects your stats, granting you Power or Piety, Bots or Bolts or Bytes. Or, if you do things wrong, Brine, which seems to be basically entropy: the sea reclaiming what you own. The thing is, most actions require the assistance of robot clergy. You gain two such assistants, but have to perform three actions per round, so the the third is usually done wrong. The slow brining of the temple is inevitable, and must be fought and/or outpaced.

And here’s the thing: Everything you do yields a short paragraph of output text, describing how NaNette the NanoNun delivered a digital sermon to the robots of Crab Corp or whatever. And to some extent, early on, paying attention to these texts helps you get a handle on what’s going on. But I found that once I was hip to the rules, I tended to just glance at the text and pay more attention to the mechanical effects expressed through the numbers. That is, once my behavior became goal-driven, the text became mere flavor text, attached to the real events of the game but not really relevant to it. And that’s kind of a shame, because the text really is quite clever, mining as many strange juxtapositions and ambiguous phrasings out of the compound premise as it can. I suspect that this divorce between the writing and the player’s attention, together with the GUI presentation, will provoke a “But is it IF?” reaction in some, although to me, it seems no more dubious than a lot of this year’s other entries.

An evil spirit sits trapped in a crystal in a wizard’s tower, waiting to possess the first person who gets too close. You play the spirit, striving for escape.

Your first victims are a pair of young lovers, the wizard’s apprentice and a girl from the kitchens, sneaking into the lab to find a place to make out, a practice which disgusts and bewilders our nonhuman protagonist. Ah, but which of the pair do you possess? In fact it doesn’t matter much, because you’ll be back to possess the other one before the story’s over — although it does affect the immediate aftermath of the switch, whether you’re the boy trying to persuade the girl not to freak out, or the girl trying to do the same to the boy.

I’ve complained recently about Twine pieces that put a forward link after every sentence or two to disguise the fact that there are only like three actual choices in the whole story. This piece is a good example of the alternative. It’s willing to put up a full page of text at a time when it has that much to say before the next choice, and the choices are numerous. Mind you, many of them are purely tonal, without lasting effects, just choosing how to approach a conversation — but those are the most delicious ones! Mainly you get to choose whether try to play it smooth and manipulative, or brash and domineering. I was particularly pleased by a bit where, in control of the girl, you choose whether to address the boy as “Kitten”, “Puddin'”, or “Meatbag”. You might think the latter attitude would be ineffective, but in most cases, it confuses people into submission.

There are some choices that lead to immediate and well-deserved re-imprisonment. They’re mainly things that you know perfectly well are going to be risky, like going into the wizard’s bedroom to try to smother him with his pillow before he wakes up, but I still found it irksome, because there’s no way to save and no going backward. Going backward is in fact something Twine supports — the Harlowe format puts an Undo link on every page by default. But we don’t have that here, and the result is that I wound up playing through the early parts of the game multiple times. But at least I got to see multiple dialogue options that way.

Speaking of smothering the wizard, it seems like violence is the one thing that the story always punishes. The Eidolon is contemptuous of humans, but it can only escape the tower if it learns to temper its malevolence and let them live anyway.