The Stack

There’s always one, isn’t there? The lazy self-criticizing joke game. This one is your basic “You get arrested and put on trial for acting on the game’s affordances” gag, which may have been fresh and new when Chrono Trigger did it 25 years ago, although even if not, Chrono Trigger at least made it a fairly small part of a much larger work, and here it’s pretty much the entire story.

The Chrono Trigger comparison is especially apt because this game was created in RPG Maker, and as a result, is unusually slick for a joke games. Just using RPG Maker gives it a professional-quality UI pretty much automatically, and voluminous libraries of highly detailed sprites and tiles. So there’s a lot of highly visible effort on display — just not the effort of the game’s author. I suppose that’s always true at root: when you write a joke game in Inform, you get to take advantage of other people’s effort crafting the Inform language, the parser and library, the VM it runs on, the font and the OS and so forth. Maybe it’s just context that makes RPG Maker stand out. Still, the context is part of my experience, and stand out it does, due to the contrast between the craft poured into the system and the story it’s put in service of, and that’s why I’m singling it out for attention.

Date-preparation in wacky mode. The bulk of the game is spent trying to get rid of a single hair growing between the breasts of Theophila, the player character. Her razor is missing, so she resorts to various other household items. All fail, and, in the process, inflict minor bruises and lacerations that you’d think would be more unsightly than the hair. Still, she’s undeterred until she runs out of options.

I frankly find this whole process distasteful. Somehow, the petty injuries seen here bother me more than exaggerated slapstick would. And once you’ve made one attempt, you pretty much know how the rest are going to play out, but have to keep inflicting more harm on Theo anyway. I seriously hesitated to continue once an electric fan got involved, and wished I could just talk her out of it.

The game’s saving grace is Marigold, Theo’s gynoid housemate and secondary player character. A robot of mystery, Marigold spends her time at a listening console, monitoring for extradimensional intruders — in fact, the entire house is called “listening station” in the room descriptions. To be clear: the intruders are definitely real, even if humans can’t perceive them, and may well be responsible for the disappearance of Theo’s razors. There’s a suggestion of a larger and more fantastical story that even Marigold herself is only partially aware of. You can switch control to Marigold at will, and, as in Suspended, her narrative voice and perspective are entirely different from Theo’s — among other things, she prepends every comment with a header like “Subjective knowledge (external):” or “Inferential knowledge:”, to emphasize her roboticness even when she’s offering opinions or expressing emotion.

And she’s in love with Theo. No, that’s not quite right. She has the hots for Theo. No, still not quite right. She yearns for Theo. It’s a desire clearly unreciprocated, and it comes off as ridiculous when you’re playing from Theo’s perspective, putting up with Marigold’s clumsy come-ons. But it all seems different when you’re Marigold. She never talks about Theo at length, even when asked about her directly, but keeps reminding us of her hopeless obsession in little ways, in offhand comments that show how she can’t stop thinking about her. There’s frustration, too, at how Theo tries to show respect for her by treating her like a human, which, to Marigold, is denying her nature and thus not truly respecting her at all. It’s a complicated and heartbreaking relationship and it all culminates in a long story-ending cutscene that can be described as erotic mechanical maintenance — maintenance made necessary by harm she suffers in her brave and selfless efforts to defend the listening station from extradimensional intruders, throwing Theo’s cosmetic struggles into a dim light by comparison.

In short, Marigold is a precious little rabbit who I want to protect and nurture, and it’s worth putting up with Theo’s self-harm to get to meet her.

Subtitled “A Transit Nightmare”, and I can’t think of a better description. It starts off sedately, with the sort of snafu that we’ve all experienced. A bus is delayed, and you have decide what to do about it — wait twenty minutes, take a different bus that comes sooner but takes you to a different place where you’ll have to transfer to a train, walk to a different station that has different options, that sort of thing. Every choice leads to more problems: schedule changes, missed stops, buses that zoom past without stopping. Before long, things start getting weird. You wind up on a bus or rail line you’ve never heard of before, with stops you’re sure don’t exist, or glimpses of bizarre prodigies out the window, or passengers that aren’t human. You wind up irrevocably lost — in an alternate universe, or in Hades, or just circling the tracks endlessly, unable to get off. There are ten endings. Is there an ending where you actually reach your intended destination? I don’t know. There doesn’t need to be.

This is one of those ideas that seems so elemental, I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen it done before. In fact, maybe I have — just as a single element of a game, rather than the entirety. The ride into the fantastic seems like it would make a good first chapter, a way to get into the otherworld where the bulk of a game takes place. But this work gives it focus, explores that liminal experience of getting lost in a sort of vehicular labyrinth, without subordinating it to something else. Making it about the journey, not the destination.

The setting isn’t positively identified, but of all the municipal transit systems I’ve experienced, it mainly reminds me of Boston.

I guess the obvious comparison here is Cultist Simulator, in both content and form. In form, because it’s simulationy and abstract in presentation, in a card-game-like way, and emphasizes accumulating resources, or working to avoid losing them. In content, because it’s a story of pursuing arcane secrets, and even descending into madness and murder — or at least, it can be. You can also just try to make your newly-acquired antiques shop into a financial success and get a win condition that way.

The game presents you with a list of verbs and nouns that are currently available to you, with the nouns split further into categories, like people currently in your shop and artifacts currently on display. Some of the nouns are abstractions like “mind” or “infamy”, basically representing stats, but examinable. A command consists of selecting a verb and a noun from this list — although that’s a bit of a lie, because you do occasionally need supply a direct object, but you do this on the next command line. This is the same solution that many of the two-word-parser games of the 1970s and 80s came up with, but those games were struggling with their limitations, and this one embraces them as an aesthetic. The verb list is small. One of the game’s basic tricks is effects that temporarily disable specific verbs, forcing you to either forgo certain actions until the effect times out or, if possible, use a different verb to accomplish the same thing: WRECK a piece of unwanted junk instead of DISCARDing it, for example. Another is that some verbs change in meaning with the category of thing they’re applied to, sometimes in ways you have to discover on your own.

Even though the input is severely restricted, the output is fluid prose, sometimes dreamlike in the nonsensical exaggeration of magical effects. Nonetheless, I think of this game mainly as a sterling example of narrative through game mechanics. My one suggestion to improve it is to make the word lists clickable.

Here we have the story of a wealthy European family in 1920, when the Great War is a recent memory and Catalonian independence is a hot issue. It’s told in brief vignettes, like a storylet system except not randomized, and the viewpoint shifts from vignette to vignette, giving us control of different family members. The interesting thing about this is that, depending on the player’s choices, they can wind up keeping secrets from each other. The mother has an affair with a boy from the village; the father sleeps with the daughter’s fiancé; the daughter befriends a dangerous ghost; the son throws in with anarchists striking against the father’s factory. That last one even leads to the different player characters working at cross-purposes. You can hire a detective as the father and then get beat up by that detective as the son.

This inconsistency of character goals leaves open the question of what the player’s goals are. In my first playthrough, I basically went with every opportunity to amp up the drama, with the result that the family fell apart and lost everything. There’s a climactic scene, the only one where you can switch characters on purpose, where everyone’s naughty secrets can come to light if you want. But if you want to preserve the family and its fortune, that’s not hard either. All you have to do is make everyone act dutifully. That’s the story’s central conflict, I suppose: whether people should sacrifice their interests to the interests of the family. But it’s notable that doing so just results in less story. It’s like choosing the Genocide route in Undertale that way, and as such, is clearly the wrong path to take.

The interactivity is peculiar. You have two and only two sorts of actions: moving from room to room, and engaging other characters in choice-based conversations, both of which are accomplished via hyperlinks. The act of room-to-room navigation makes it feel a little like an adventure game, but there’s no inventory or puzzles. The old mansion, with its ballroom and its artificial cave and its historical origins, reminded me a bit of the board game Clue, and, as in Clue, it all seemed a bit pointless at first. In the opening scenes, you’re basically just instructed where to go to advance the story, and moving about manually seemed like mere busywork. Eventually, though, it starts using the rooms to represent choices. You see the father sneaking off to the chapel; do you spy on him, or do you just go back to your bedroom and forget about it? The real function of the opening tour was to familiarize the player with the house and grounds, so you could navigate the later sections more easily. It would be easy to hide secrets this way, putting special encounters in places the player is unlikely to visit at a given moment. But if this game does that, I haven’t seen any sign of it. It’s fairly minimalist, content-wise.

We start with the wry premise of a world where jurassic parks are cheap and plentiful but not always reputable or well-run. The player takes the role of an entry-level employee at such a zoo, earning minimum wage by throwing buckets of fish to the dinos, but it doesn’t take long before a dinosaur rights extremist gets at the button opens all the electronic locks and sets everything free. Chaos and carnage ensue. The rest of the story is spent dodging large predators in a choice-based interface, usually three or so options at a time, often including backing off to try other routes: go through the cloning labs where scientists are menaced by what the game calls “velociraptors” (although they’re considerably larger than the real thing), or head for the docks and leap from boat to boat as a mosasaur smashes them, or whatever.

In a way, it reminds me of a certain genre of game I remember from my youth: dreadful little branching peril dungeons written in BASIC by bored middle-school students. That is, there are lots of choices that lead to immediate death, without much of a way to predict which ones they are other than by replaying it. It’s more entertaining than those, though, and also has a more of a world model. Come back to an area later and it’ll be in a more advanced state of devastation. If it works, anyway — at one or two points, I repeated an action and found myself stuck, without any choices to select. This frustrated me enough to give up before completing the game, even though it’s apparently fairly short. I imagine such glitches will be fixed before long, though, as the author solicits bug reports on the Twitch page housing the game. (Yes, this game is hosted externally, and the Comp’s “Download” link just gives you a page with a hyperlink to Twitch instead of the actual game content, even though it’s ultimately just made of HTML and Javascript and doesn’t require a server or anything. And yes, I’m going to gripe about this every time it happens.)

Now this is what I call an Adventure Game. The very first thing that happens is that the player character, a master hacker, menaced by corporate thugs, is forced to flee across the city sky on a stolen hoverbike. After that, it’s all about pulling a daring data heist in cyberspace playgrounds. This is cyberpunk in wish-fulfillment mode. Last year’s Comp saw more than one thoughtful cyberpunk piece that asked hard questions about technology and society, extrapolating things to nightmarish extremes. Shadow Operative has you uncover some secrets that make a throwaway gesture in that direction, but it’s basically all about the power fantasy of doing what you want while powerful people try and fail to stop you.

It uses the Vorple library to provide a hybrid parser/hypertext interface, with a big menu of verbs on the left side. It’s reminiscent of the UI in some of the games by Legend Entertainment, and, just like in those games, I found I preferred to type in commands most of the time — the exception being clicking on object names in the output text to examine them.

I don’t think the resemblance to Legend’s UI is coincidental, either: the two cyberspace sequences reminded me a bit of Gateway, even pulling one of the same tricks, letting you complete a mission too easily only to discover afterward that you’re still in the sim. Cyberspace in this game takes the form of shared fantasy worlds: you get one D&D-ish medieval fantasy and one Samurai fantasy, little mini-adventures that aren’t under the same obligation of in-world plausibility as their cyberpunk frame. They’re still in basically the same mold as the frame-story, but a little more self-aware.

It keeps the pace brisk and does what it sets out to do. My only complaint is that there are some menu-based conversations where you have only one option of what to say, prompts without interactivity.

Here we have a mixed-media short story in the Southern Gothic mold, where you investigate creepiness from your family’s past. It’s decently written, and has an intriguing central idea, “Looking at a thing uses it up”, that motivates the creep’s creepy behavior — hiding from sight, wearing masks — and provides a clear metaphor for the value of bringing secrets to light, to defeat darkness and danger with an unflinching gaze.

But it’s barely interactive. There are bits where you choose which of your deceased mother’s old snapshots to examine. So you have some control over the order in which bits of backstory are elaborated on, but no agency beyond that. Instead, it’s mainly using Twine to govern presentation: sound cues, fade-ins, and the like. The sort of gimmickry that I always complain about because it interferes with engagement with and immersion in the text. And of course it has an excess of forward links, often showing only a sentence or two at a time, sometimes even just a sentence fragment, with a solitary link on the last few words to show more. This is a style that the Twine community at large seems to have embraced, but it’s always bothered me. What’s wrong with just putting in a paragraph break?

It’s even innovated new ways to annoy me! In addition to text that fades in after a delay, we now have text that fades out after a delay. It does some clever things with it, fading out all but certain words, as if revealing meanings that were lurking there unobserved all along, like Babyface in his creepy house. But it also has the effect, probably unintended, that once I knew it could happen, I wound up rushing through reading passages from that point onward, just in case they started disappearing before I was finished. I suppose individual passages aren’t all that important in a work that works more from building up a cumulative effect. But that’s what I did nonetheless.

There’s one gag that I quite liked, though: at one point, the text describes a fly bothering the protagonist while it plays an animation of a fly landing on the screen, silhouetted by the monitor’s glow. Somehow, the effect here was that I kind of filtered out the fly’s buzz until I reached the point in the text where it’s mentioned, triggering the shock of recognition.

This one’s baffling. It’s a small one-room puzzle game set in a wizard’s laboratory, which is the sort of setting that seems highly conducive to one-room puzzle games. But it’s written in Twine, which isn’t. And instead of packing the room with massed detail to build puzzles out of, the environment is almost barren. There’s a macguffin you have to unlock, and there’s a bookshelf containing a small collection of fairy tales twisted to a villain’s perspective (really the piece’s highlight), and there’s an alchemy workbench where you can mix ingredients with fanciful names like “knook bile” and “haint juice” and “tungsten”. The puzzle is to select the right ingredients in the right order to unlock the macguffin.

The problem is that there aren’t any clues. I say that with some confidence: it’s a tiny game, and there just aren’t many places for clues to hide. You might think that the bookshelf would be the likeliest place, but it explicitly tells you not to waste your time looking for hints there. And a combination consists of five picks from a set of 15 ingredients with repeats allowed, for a total of 759375 possible combinations, well beyond easily brute-forcing. Each wrong guess results in death, with some randomized details about what kills you and how.

I don’t think I’ve ever sneaked a look at a Twine game’s source code to solve it before. Here, I mainly just wanted confirmation that winning was possible, that it wasn’t just a story about having no information and guessing wrong and dying. It turns out that there are in fact two combinations, one that wins the game and one that gives you a series of nonsense words that I assumed to be a hint for the winning combination, but if so, it’s a highly obscure one. Even knowing the answers, I had no idea how the puzzle could be solved. The macguffin is referred to as “the Knot”, so maybe it’s meant to be a Gordian one, only untanglable by breaking the implicit rules? The game’s blurb says “Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual source.” (emphasis mine) — maybe reading the source was the right idea? It wouldn’t be the first game I had played where cheating was part of the intended solution, but that didn’t explain the solitary inscrutable hint. And after you enter the solution, what happens? You get a view of a grid with some cells marked, clearly part of another puzzle. But it’s just a passive image, with no way to apply it.

It was only after submitting my rating, and fussing with the clue some more, and moving on, that I looked at that Comp’s game list and noticed two other games that, although submitted under different names, have suspiciously similar cover art and descriptions, with some shared made-up vocabulary, like “Chirlu” and “Willershins” and, most of all, all containing that line about no knot untying itself and seeking aid from an unusual source.

In other words, it looks like we’ve got another hat mystery on our hands, albeit one that’s more obvious about it. I just wish I had noticed this before the two-hour mark, when my rating locks in. As it is, I rated the game rather lower than I would have if I had noticed the rest of it. I may rate the other parts higher to compensate.

Here we have the tale of an American teenager in the 1980s, horny and rebellious but still bound by high school and absent parents. It starts with his unsuccessful attempts to dissuade a friend from making a fool of himself over a crush, then proceeds into discovering a possible kidnapping — and that’s as far as I got in two hours. I say “possible” because Tom himself isn’t completely sure if it’s anything more than someone messing with him, and also because it would invest the first part with more meaning if he’s making a fool of himself over flights of fancy too.

It’s got some very silly moments, but it’s not dominated by them. The overall mood is one of frustration at difficulties, especially avoidable ones, exacerbated by the protagonist’s sense of loyalty, his dutiful persistence about not letting his friends down. He doesn’t give up, he always knows what he needs to make happen, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell the player. That’s really the most striking thing about the work: the degree to which it leads the player by the nose. If Tom is asked to deliver a note, he’ll talk about possibly reading it, but balks if you actually try. If he decides that you need to search a house, you don’t get to leave until you’ve inspected every room. The very first thing that happens to him is that he gets an inexplicable urge to check his locker. It makes me wonder a little if parser-based was the right way to go with this story — but then, it does get a lot out of scenery and object descriptions, using them to convey character.