The Stack

And so my month-and-a-half of IF blogging draws to a close. There were 11 games listed on the IFWiki front page when I started; a twelfth has been added since then. I’ve only posted about ten of them so far. The remaining two are both works of Textfyre ¹Not to be confused with Textfire, a fictional company that was the subject of an April Fool’s Day hoax back in 1998. , a small company that’s trying to make text adventures commercially viable again by catering to a new audience.

There has always been IF marketed for sale by individual creators — Howard Sherman alone would make sure of that, relentless huckster that he is ²This article isn’t really the place to go into detail about Sherman, so I’ll just point you to a blog post by the illustrious Dave Gilbert. — but Textfyre is, to my knowledge, the first serious effort at making a real company that solicits and publishes IF by multiple authors since the brief life of Cascade Mountain Publishing a decade ago. And it can even be called into question whether CMP really counts as a “serious effort”; it apparently started up without much thought about how to gain an audience outside the IF community. I’ll probably go into more detail about CMP in the future, because half of their catalog ³Once and Future, by G. Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. The other half of the catalog was a remake of Doc Dumont’s Wild PARTI by Mike Berlyn, which I had already played at the time. is still on the Stack. I bring them up mainly to contrast them with Textfyre. Although they only started releasing games this summer, Textfyre has been in the planning stages for years, and has a good notion of its market position. Just look at the website, with its “Parents” and “Teachers” tabs. David Cornelson, the company’s founder, understands that he’s competing with videogames, and that, although text games can be enthralling when you’re actually playing them, they can’t hold a candle to today’s graphics for the kind of obvious appeal that makes people look at an ad and say “I want to play that”. And so he’s marketing the games at one remove, overcoming the handicap by replacing the appeal of “I want to play that” with “I want my kids to play that”. How well it works, only time will tell.

The commercial aspect does have one disadvantage for this blog in particular: by the terms of the Oath, I can’t buy them yet. I haven’t gotten anything off the Stack since September, and Steam weekend sales haven’t stopped during that time, so my game budget is all tapped out right now. But there are demos, which I have now played. There are currently two games on offer — Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter, by David Cornelson and Michael Gentry, and The Shadow in the Cathedral, by Ian Finley and Jon Ingold — each meant as the first episode of a series. These are all known names, with a number of titles under their belts, major and minor; just to name a couple, Gentry wrote Anchorhead, which I was commenting on in passing lately, and Ingold wrote Make It Good.

The Secret Letter demo seems satisfactorily solid and lushly detailed, and makes it clear that even in the part that I saw, there are interactions beyond what I tried. In short, it’s the level of professionalism that we demand even of amateur IF these days. Also, it’s very much written to appeal to the target demographic: this is young-adult fantasy to a T, and reminds me a lot of some of Lloyd Alexander’s books, particularly the Westmark trilogy. The setting is a fictional kingdom in something resembling an 18th century. Complications in the royal succession are mentioned enough times to make it clear that it’s going to be a big part of the plot later on, but the player character starts at the bottom of society, as a penniless orphan who spends time filching food from the open-air marketplace and getting into trouble. And is secretly a girl, as we find out towards the end of the opening chapter. By now, you presumably know if this is the sort of story that appeals to you. There are noninteractive text sequences of a length that I think I’d normally consider excessive, but they seem fine here, probably because they keep the story moving, rather than degenerating into infodumps. (The storybook-like interface may even help a little here, changing my expectations of how the text should look.)

The Shadow in the Cathedral is considerably sparer in its prose, preferring to do its world-building through the accumulation of little details mentioned in passing. It’s set in a world that literally worships clockwork and considers it sacred, providing a point of view that seeps all the way down to the player character’s automatic habits and the idioms used to describe the world. This demo seems a lot smaller than the Secret Letter demo, but it has a lot of promise. Specifically, it promises lots of opportunities to interact with elaborate mechanisms, and that’s always fun. It’s also the sort of thing that IF can do really well, much better than it can do interaction with characters. The gameworld is clockwork anyway, so we might as well celebrate it.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words said already about mere demos that you can try for yourself if you want to, so I’ll just conclude by saying that I look forward to playing the full versions of both of these games, once I can afford them.

Ending discussed in some detail below. Let the dance of the spoilers begin!

I recall seeing a joke somewhere that Infocom had planned to follow up their mystery titles Witness and Suspect with the natural completions, Murderer and Victim. I have some ideas for how to do a mystery game where you’re the murder victim — chiefly revolving around struggling, in your final moments, to leave clues in such a way that the murderer won’t be able to dispose of them before the detective arrives — but Murderer has been rendered redundant.

So, we’re playing the part of a bad guy. I’m up for that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. It does change things, though. In a typical mystery, your goal is to reveal the truth, and here, that’s the last thing you want. It’s pretty much the opposite of a mystery: you spend your time concealing evidence, fabricating new evidence, creating plausible lies without being caught doing it. In the Infocom mysteries, sending Duffy to take items to the lab was always purely a way to obtain information, and the span he spent away was a liability, eating into your time limit. Here, I frequently sent Joe off on frivolous analysis errands just to get him out of my hair for a while so I could do my dirty work, or to keep him from talking to the suspects. Ultimately, it’s easy enough to destroy all trace of your involvement in the crime, but that’s not enough. For the sake of your career, you have to send someone else to prison.

In fact, you can plant enough evidence to make a good case against two different innocents ¹At least in the sense that they’re innocent of murder. Everyone’s guilty of something., the housemaid Emilia and her boyfriend Anthony. Good enough to make an arrest, that is, but the charge won’t stick without a confession. And that’s the tricky part — extracting a confession from someone who knows it’s a lie, and knows that all they have to do to make your case fall apart is not confess. What would make a person do that?

Love, of course. That and a sense of guilt. Through careful presentation of the right evidence items, and only the right ones, I found I could make Emilia believe that Anthony was the real culprit — and by answering her questions very carefully, I could convince her that she bore responsibility for driving him to it. Once this was accomplished, all I needed to do is arrest Anthony, and Emilia demanded that she be taken instead. It took quite a lot of finagling to get the manipulation of Emilia just right. If she had the least bit of hope left at the end, she would cling to it all the tighter, and all would be lost. This was by far the most troubling part of the game. It’s one thing to say “I’m going to be evil and frame someone for my crimes”, and quite another to methodically break down another person until she’s willing to throw her life away, watching her get more desperate with each lie you tell her. I can imagine a more sensitive person than myself, or a less completist one, giving up in disgust at this point.

Reading a walkthrough afterward, I find that there were major tasks that others assumed to be necessary but which I had skipped: some of Anthony’s clothes lie discarded in Emilia’s bedroom, and I never thought of stashing items in the pockets so that Emilia would find them and think they were Anthony’s. Apparently doing this somehow makes it possible to arrest Emilia directly, too, without tricking her into confessing by arresting Anthony. This would make certain other parts of the game simpler: my solution required court-admissible evidence against both Anthony (to justify his attempted arrest) and Emilia (to make her confession believable), and that made things pretty tight. At any rate, it’s good to know that the game supports multiple solutions. I just hope that other people realize this.

After the collar, there follows an epilogue which provides another twist revelation. Yes, your role in the case isn’t what you thought it was at the beginning, but it also isn’t what you thought it was after you realized that it wasn’t what you thought it was. I’m not sure what to think of this, or what the point of it is. It certainly doesn’t exonerate the PC — you still knowingly sent a woman to prison for a murder she didn’t commit, among other things. I think I’ll take it as commentary on the genre. Mystery games are all about figuring things out from the evidence available, but according to this game, you can’t be sure your assumptions are right even after you’ve rejected your initial assumptions.

It turns out that this game isn’t what it seems at first glance, and more sophisticated than I gave it credit for. It’s impossible to discuss this without spoilers, so spoilers we shall have.

It’s interesting how the big twist works here: there isn’t any particular moment of revelation. Just a whole lot of little hints that you’ll probably ignore or rationalize away at first, because they don’t fit your expectations. For example, the murder weapon. The first time I found it, I sent it back to the lab for fingerprinting, only to be told that I must have handled it without gloves on, because the only clear prints are my own. So I started over, this time taking care to don gloves before handling anything. The lab results were the same. Well, okay, finding useful prints on the weapon would have made the game too easy, but as far as I could tell, there’s no way my own prints could have wound up on there. Clearly someone was tampering with the results — who and why, I could only guess. But if someone on the force didn’t want this case to be solved, it explained why they had assigned an incompetent sot like the player character to investigate it. And that hypothesis seemed good enough, and dramatic enough, that I didn’t even consider the more straightforward but less welcome explanation.

(It’s worth noting in passing an alternate explanation that I considered but rejected: that perhaps the seemingly-inappropriate report was simply a bug in the game. Certainly there are plenty of games where that would have been my first assumption. This is a good example of the benefits of keeping the player’s trust. It lets you get away with suspicious behavior.)

There are several clues of that sort, things that don’t line up until you shift your perspective. Probably the biggest one is the note from the victim to his blackmailer, found in the glove compartment of the detective’s car and described as having shown up in your office yesterday. There’s a nice bit of gating around that: the catch on the compartment is stuck, and the only way to release it is to prod it with a suitable implement from inside the house. ¹Amusingly, the murder weapon can be used for this purpose. But once you enter the house, you’re swept into the investigation and can’t leave until you’ve examined the body, so you don’t get to see the note until you’ve already started to form ideas about the case. I imagine that for a lot of players the note is the breakthrough moment. Me, I found it too early; I wasn’t receptive to its implications yet. It was puzzling, and I felt like I was missing information that I should have, but I assumed it meant that the detective had already been investigating the blackmail case before the murder occurred or something like that.

Still, the evidence kept mounting until I had to develop some suspicion of the truth. Strangely, the thing that finally changed suspicion to certainty for me wasn’t directly related to the case at all. Like the Infocom mysteries, this game supports an “ACCUSE” command for confronting suspects. With all I had seen, I experimentally applied it to myself. The response:

You’re guilty of enough – spending a whole month’s advance on tequila, beating to death that Indian kid in the cell in January, being a crummy cop and not solving a single case for a good long while. You don’t need accusations, you’ve got a string of them. You need to sort it out.

Oh my. The detective isn’t a good person at all. He’s not just struggling with alcoholism that adversely affects his work performance, as I had believed. He’s a very bad person, capable of committing manslaughter and then brushing it off like it’s a minor character flaw. And with that thought, I was through with finding excuses for him, and willing to accept more evidence of wrongdoing on his part at face value.

In my last post, I said that everyone seemed to be harboring dark secrets. I thought it was a pretty big deal that this might include the policeman sidekick, but now it turns out to include the protagonist and the author as well. This isn’t the first game I’ve played where the player character withheld important information from the player — I can think of a few examples offhand, but obviously I can’t list them here without spoiling them. However, I’m hard-pressed to think of a game that pulls this kind of unreliable-narrator stuff and still leaves so much game after the big revelation. I mean, in a sense, figuring out the twist is just the beginning here, because it means you’re suddenly playing a different game, with different goals — one less like Witness and more like Varicella. I’ll get into that more in my next post.

Make It Good is a hard-boiled-ish murder mystery, modeled after the old Infocom mystery titles (particularly Witness), but more elaborate, with deep scenery and tangled characters. An accountant is viciously stabbed in his suburban home. He has no obvious enemies, but everyone around him seems to have something to hide.

If the traditional adventure game is a treasure hunt, the traditional mystery game is not far removed. There’s loads of nice juicy evidence items to be found here, mainly stashed in locked containers and other places where people didn’t expect me to find them. Little did they suspect that I’d have so much help from the game system! It really gives you a great deal of guidance towards the important parts of the scenes, moreso even than the typical adventure game. Infocom games, and consequently much modern IF, have a concept of “brief” and “verbose” modes, where “verbose” mode automatically displays the full room description every time you enter a room, and “brief” mode only does so on first entry. Make It Good does something similar to “brief” mode, but instead of just displaying the room name on re-entry, it gives a highly abbreviated description of its major contents:

Master Bedroom
Bed, mirrored dresser, window. Door. Yucca. Blood, lots of it.

It’s like the item list in a Scott Adams game, but a little more mannered. And it fulfills the same function as it does in the Scott Adams games: it lets you know at a glance what to interact with. In the Infocom games, a lot of players switch “verbose” immediately so as to keep information as visible as possible. Make it Good doesn’t actually provide that option, but even if it did, I wouldn’t want to miss the brief descriptions’ more focused information.

But as much as the game guides the player towards finding evidence, the significance of the evidence is up to the player to discover. The maid’s boyfriend, I learn, is taking prescription painkillers due to a recent injury — but when analyzed, they turn out to be mere sugar pills. Whuh? As is often the case, the beginning of the game is a bit overwhelming, with information flooding in faster than it can be easily processed, and I’ll probably need multiple playthroughs to figure out how to best manage my limited time and solve the case.

Limited time? Yes. This is another thing inherited from Infocom mysteries. (Infocom even named their first mystery game after its time limit.) I suppose it’s the simplest way to provide for a schedule of character actions, and provides a motivation to try to limit your actions to things that are useful for cracking the case, but I’ve never liked the pressure it puts on the player, even when the limit is large. Make It Good at least provides a dramatically interesting reason why you have to finish the investigation in a hurry: the detective is basically a failure, a washed-up alcoholic who’s dangerously close to being kicked off the force. Your superiors are impatient with you, and this case is your last chance to “make it good”. Although the hard-drinking detective is a genre stereotype, it’s a real departure from the Infocom model. In those games, the detective was The Detective, a kind of definitive impersonal force of detection. There was always an assistant as well, named Sergeant Duffy but otherwise as traitless as the Detective, existing only to take things back to the lab on your orders. (And the lab would take precious time to complete its analyses.) Here, there’s a policeman named Joe who fills that function, but he yells at you, makes sarcastic comments, blames you for contaminating evidence, and shows genuine surprise when you actually manage to make useful discoveries. I have to wonder if there’s a reason that a detective held in such low esteem was assigned to this particular case. Perhaps someone on the force doesn’t want it solved. Maybe my earlier assertion that everyone in the game has something to hide applies even to Joe.