The Stack

I’ve just hit two more defense missions in a row and already I’m starting to get tired of them. I want to go exploring! I want the dopamine hit that comes from finding a new resource cache, not the sense of dread from having to carefully husband the resources you already have.

At least they’re changing up the mechanics every time. The first defense mission, the one I described before with the aliens attacking at night while you wait for a dropship to get you out of there, had space marines and some stationary devices, like turrets and force field generators, but you didn’t have control over any of them. You did your best to keep both the marines and the devices from being destroyed, because they were defending you while you defended them, but that was the extent of your interaction. The second defense mission, keeping mercenaries away while your ship undergoes repair, puts the stationary devices in your hands: it starts with a lot of tutorial dialogue explaining how to deploy force fields and so forth. The third, keeping enemies away from a captured base while one of your engineers extracts data from their computers, lets you order around a small group of marines using the game’s usual dialogue system, assigning them positions like “Defend the control room” or “Patrol the front wall”. Just on the basis of combinatorics, I’m guessing there’s going to be one more mission where you have both devices and marines at your disposal.

Come to think of it, I bet it was possible to pick up the force field generators and turrets and redeploy them elsewhere in the first defense mission. It hadn’t been explained to the player yet how to do it, but that doesn’t mean the functionality was disabled. I find that happening a lot in the mission briefings. I’ll pick up a new weapon from a fallen enemy in the course of a mission, and then between missions the tech guy back on the ship will say “I’ve been making some improvements to that weapon you found, now it has an alt-fire mode that does yadda yadda”, but I already know about that functionality, because I experimented with the alt-fire button when I first picked it up. Basically what I’m saying is that the devs didn’t bother making the mechanics fit the story completely and also the tech guy is a liar who takes credit for things he didn’t do.

Despite what I said before, it turns out that the story in Unreal II: The Awakening isn’t simply Humans vs Alien Monsters. The third through fifth missions feature human antagonists. And, although I’ll be very surprised if there are any sympathetic Skaarj, we’ve seen a few aliens on the Terran Colonial Authority side from the very beginning, purportedly as part of an officer exchange program. One, named Ne’ban, even pilots the player’s ship. He’s basically a comic sidekick, mangling his English, being confused about human customs, and generally being childlike in comparison to the humans: short, awkward, with a higher-pitched voice. Characters like this have existed for a long time, but an earlier generation would have made him Chinese or something. I’m not sure whether an alien version is a positive development or not. It strikes me as related to the question of whether the Ferengi are anti-semitic, except less specific.

Also, although the living planet in mission 3 isn’t exactly friendly, it can hardly be called a bad guy. At least, it’s not the aggressor in the situation — that would be the morally questionable human corporation trying to excavate a mysterious macguffin from under its surface. The player doesn’t want them to have it, but the planet doesn’t care about factions — as far as it’s concerned, you’re all part of the same infestation. Hopefully it can just heal over and live in peace now that the artifact is gone, although that kind of depends on whether the corporation was solely interested in the artifact or had other ways to profit from killing a planet. It’s worth noting that the corporation has a Japanese name. Even when the bad guys aren’t aliens, the authors want you to regard them as foreign.

Sometimes Unreal II: The Awakening feels like Quake and sometimes it feels more like Half-Life, but it never really feels like Unreal.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty mild criticism. Also, to be fair, it does have some things tying it to Unreal. It’s still got Skaarj. It still has a weapon that ricochets chaotically, even if it fires energy blasts rather than discs. And, after a fairly mundane beginning setting a bad first impression, the environments may be getting weirder and more alien as it goes — the third mission takes place on a planet covered with a single organism that gives it the appearance of magnified skin, complete with hairs. We’ll see how it goes from there. There’s probably more Unrealisms to come.

But at this point, I’m thinking that I’m enjoying it the most when it’s more Half-Life-y. When there’s an emphasis on set-pieces, environmental obstacles, huge machinery, and sub-goals with more variety than just getting from point A to point B. There’s one set-piece that I thought was particularly effective, and it plays a lot like those defense sequences from Half-Life 2 (which was still in development when this was released, so maybe the influence goes the other way?): waiting for extraction for five minutes straight in the dark of night while fending off waves of baddies, with the help of three ultra-macho space marine NPCs. I’ve seen space marines in games criticized as cribbing their design heavily from the movie Aliens while entirely missing the point of them there: that all their tough-guy swagger was useless when the xenomorphs came. Nonetheless, this scene, with its sense of tension enhanced by poor visibility, was an excellent portrayal of “Aliens but the space marines win”.

The more I think about this, the more I start to wonder if Half-Life was the main design paradigm for the whole game, like if the project lead was a big Half-Life fan and thought that obviously the best way to improve on Unreal was not to build on its own strengths but to make it more like Half-Life. Such things happen in the games industry. Or, if not the whole game, then at least the second mission is really extremely Half-Life-inspired: it takes place in a weapons research facility where an experiment went wrong, you spend a certain amount of time crawling through air ducts, and the main enemies are small leaping arthropods. That’s enough similarity to elevate it from imitation to homage. If I try, I can convince myself that mission 1 is similarly based on Quake or Doom, in architectural style if nothing else. But how this pattern extends to the hair-covered hills of mission 3, I have no idea.

I’ve been toying with Unreal Engine lately — I figure that even if I never make a game with it, it’s good to understand what it does and how it does it. And after poking at it for a while, my thoughts drifted to the FPS it was initially made for. The original Unreal is not on the Stack — I played it to completion many years ago. But I have its little-regarded immediate sequel on disc.

(If I didn’t have it on disc? Oddly enough, both Unreal and Unreal II: The Awakening are available on GOG and Steam, but not on the Epic Store, even though Epic is responsible for their existence. As far as the Epic Store is concerned, the series starts with Unreal Tournament. I wonder why? My guess is some kind of contractual thing.)

Before I get into Unreal II, for comparison purposes, here’s what I remember about the original Unreal:

• It was more about environment than story. Your initial situation, escaping from a prison ship after it crashes, is just kind of forgotten about once the ship is out of sight.
• For all the coarseness of the meshes, the visuals were lovely and weird. All alien environments with with highly effective use of colored light sources and well-integrated particle effects.
• It basically alternated between exterior and interior scenes. You’d get a sequence where you cross a ravine or climb a mountain or whatever, then go into a large building or tunnel to reach the next biome. I liked that; it gave a nice sense of progression.
• The main enemy was aliens called the Skaarj, which look a bit like the Predator. Their main novelty was that they could dodge-roll like a Dark Souls player, and tended to do so whenever you pointed a gun at them, forcing you to aim twice in rapid succession.
• There was a weapon that shot razor discs that ricocheted off walls and made a huge chaotic mess. It was pretty obviously inspired by the disc guns that were a popular toy at the time.
• There was another weapon where the primary fire was a beam and the secondary fire was an exploding projectile, and the most effective way to use it was to shoot the projectile with the beam, creating a far more powerful explosion. This, more than anything else, characterizes the Unreal experience for me.
• There was a sort of overcharge device that turned the basic zap gun into the most powerful weapon in the game for a limited time. It was clearly intended to be used, and used up, near where you found it, but it was possible to hoard it, and use it to make the final boss fight downright trivial.

Now, my first pass at Unreal II, nearly two decades ago, was short. I didn’t even really get into the game proper, because it was failing to meet my expectations in the intro and mission briefing sections simply by having intro and mission briefing sections. Before you get into the action, you have to engage NPCs in choice-based dialogue, which struck me as sullying the purity of the thing. Perhaps we can blame the involvement of Legend Entertainment, a company founded to make adventure games.

The visuals are definitely more technically advanced, with lots of smooth curves where the first game would have sharp angles, but at the same time less inspiring, more typical of the FPS genre, more beige. This extends to the characters: where Unreal made you an escaped prisoner (and never stated what it was you were imprisoned for), Unreal II takes the default route and makes you a space marine. Or technically a former space marine, now working for something called the “Colonial Authority”, which to my mind puts you on the wrong side of history. But accepting it on its own terms, this is a story where the good guys are humans and the bad guys are aliens, unlike the first game, which took place in a totally alien environment where both the good guys and the bad guys were aliens, and anything smacking of human authority is best avoided lest they put you back in space prison.

In short, my basic impression of Unreal II so far, after playing through the first sequence of levels to a major cutscene break, is just that it’s disappointingly typical. The first game was something special and strange and this one isn’t. But I’ll keep playing it.

Spring Thing 2022 has been over for a little while now. I said I’d post about all six of the Back Garden submissions, and I’ve only done five. That’s because I wanted to actually get all the way through the last of them, Manifest No, before commenting on it. But I think I have to admit at this point that it simply isn’t going to happen. It’s tough to get through. Much of the text is simply portentious and agonized word salad like:

Steerless plunging scratching the scoffing subterranean enforcement seal with fingernails to scrawl illiterate runes, wept named rebellion, in the wheedling yaw submission to the infinite. Encaged horror broke free in the recognition and beat my bones like war drums. Under the ceiling’s concavity hidden doctrines groaned themselves buttresses, spectral stems extending from what had once been sequestered; we ignore what we know until our touch knows. Acidic repetition, I cried out! Who had I been to be a cracked mirror? Where might I pray, where were the ashen hills that called out in pious grime?

It goes on in that vein for a whopping twenty-seven chapters. What makes it especially fatiguing is that it isn’t entirely meaningless. There’s a story in there, but it takes some effort to extract. There’s a setting involving a dock and a bar that exist in some relationship to a Tower (always capitalized). There’s a set of miserable characters who argue and toss insults back and forth and sometimes kill each other, but aren’t really distinguishable unless you take careful notes — sometimes the narrative viewpoint switches from one character to another between chapters and it isn’t clear at first that this has happened. At one point, a sea-captain recruits a crew for an expedition to find a legendary lost Tower, but I have no idea if the narration after that follows the expedition or not. Sometimes it’s unclear if a passage was meant literally or metaphorically.

I’d be inclined to think that the author is underestimating the difficulty of their text, has internalized their own worldbuilding and style so much that they’ve lost sight of how it looks to others less familiar with their thought processes, as so often happens… except that the blurb and disclaimers at the beginning suggest that the difficulty of understanding is deliberate, part of an effect that the author values for its own sake. And why shouldn’t the text require effort? Isn’t this part of what we like about IF, that it involves us in more than just passive reading? I’m sure there’s an audience that will appreciate this work, even if it doesn’t include me, and I hope it finds them.

One note on the interactivity: Pages are fairly long, which is how I like them, and each will have links on a few random words. Sometimes following a link will take you to a page with some obvious connection to that word, but just as often there will be no apparent connection at all; the choices all advance the story, but not in a way that’s under the first-time reader’s deliberate control. So there’s no meaningful sense of agency in the choices. Figuring out the story from the murky prose is the only source of agency.

Here we have a story about stories — a sort of cross between Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and The Lathe of Heaven in a Russian-ish setting and Visual Novel format. (I’ve always found the VN presentation somewhat bothersome, but it’s a step up from Twine imitating VN presentation, in that you can click-to-advance anywhere on the screen.) You play as a server at an inn during a time of monsters and bizarre prodigies. People come in for a drink and tell you stories of the latest folkloric wonders they’ve seen, and these stories are interactive, offering one or three choices that affect how they end. The binding conceit, though, is that the interactivity is something the player character is doing. You enter a sort of trance while listening, and at the end, you might find that the storyteller has been altered by the choices you just made for them in their past.

The implications are disturbing, and the changes you make are not appreciated by certain magical creatures of the forest who can tell what you’re doing, and who come by in the night to complain and threaten you. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it. Even if you want to leave a story unaltered, you have no way of knowing what choices will do that. There’s some interlinking of the stories — definitely some repeated motifs, and possibly some decisions that affect later stories as well. In one, I had an argument with a werewolf about moral philosophy; in a later one, men are killed by a werewolf, possibly as a result of what I said. The protagonist’s strange power of interacting with fiction is thus portrayed as a curse — a peculiar perspective to put before interactive fiction enthusiasts!

One thing I really appreciate: Characters will ask after you, and, while you have the option of lying or deflecting, you also have the option of just telling them everything. Too many stories where the protagonist has some weird experience or develops a strange power have them simply decide to keep it a secret for no good reason. I’m glad this game didn’t force me down that path, particularly as the preponderance of weird experiences in the setting makes any secrecy seem a little pointless. Still, clamming up is offered as an option, and the fact that it was offered made me all the happier to be able to reject it.

There’s one element of the premise that I don’t think was handled well: in addition to everything else, the sun is gone and no one knows why. The problem with this is that it’s presented obliquely enough that it didn’t actually register for me until the end of the first chapter. There’s a line early on about “before the sun stopped making its way across the sky”, but that just made me think “before sunset”. There’s a mention of going to the inn in darkness every day, but that just made me think that I have an early-morning shift. And then it just stops being relevant for a long time. I might think it’s a deliberate effect, that the player is meant to spend the first day without full knowledge of conditions, if it weren’t for the blurb, which I hadn’t read before playing, stating outright that it takes place “two weeks after the sun stopped rising”.

The blurb also tells me that this is a demo for a larger game, in which you’re out in the cold having strange encounters directly, and that the whole storytelling conceit was just a way to wrap up a bunch of unrelated storylets for the demo. This surprises me. Despite being basically disjointed, it seemed too cohesive for that.

I’m hesitant to write anything about this at all. It’s another demo for a work in progress, but it’s essentially a non-interactive demo. Just a sequence of pages, each with two or three sentences, a picture (mostly lush, pastoral photographs), and a single link to the next page. You get to the point where your quest begins, rescuing a young country witch who you have a crush on from some unknown danger, and that’s the end of the demo. It’s a teaser trailer, not so much a game as an advertisement for one. And I can’t begrudge its presence here — this sort of thing is what the Back Garden is for! But when I set out to post about everything in the Back Garden, it was with the intention of reviewing games, not ads.

But let’s at least talk a little about what the ad promises. The writing is amiable and, when it isn’t focused on the nervousness of young love, has that the-author-really-wants-to-live-in-this-world tone you see in a lot of fanfic. The photographic illustrations are very pleasant, at least when they’re outdoors, but a scene of a ransacked room has an unnatural collage-like aspect, and the interior views of the witch’s rustic thatched cottage clearly don’t fit inside the exterior — although that’s probably just magic at work. The overall feel reminds me a lot of the narrative component of hidden object games.

The blurb calls this an “interactive poem”, and I totally agree with that categorization. It consists of seven stanzas, each seven lines long, where each line has seven variations for the reader to choose from, flipping through possible combinations until you’ve formed something you’re satisfied with. The acknowledgements cite Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems as a formal inspiration, although I suspect the UI changes the experience somewhat. Phenomena is in Twine/Sugar Cube, and uses “cycling choices”, changing lines when you click on them, which means the options for each line are revealed in a specific order. Sometimes a line will be an obvious continuation of a previous-seen alternative, or a comment on it, which doesn’t quite fit into the notion that the poem is just the finished product of your choices. It’s more like the poem flows in two dimensions. (Perhaps it aims at three, what with the three layers of sevens, but two is my experience of it.)

Extracting meaning from such a work requires effort — enough effort that I’d probably resent it in a more demanding context, like the Comp. It starts off with a close encounter with a flying saucer, then spins off into tangents obliquely describing different ways of relating to UFOs: as omens and portents, as strangers to our world, as something apocalyptic and transforming. One stanza is just a disjointed series of individual words, and might not have any real meaning beyond that feeling of fragmentation. The final stanza, titled “I GUESS THIS WAS NEVER REALLY ABOUT UFOS, HAHA”, digs into the author’s intentions a bit, explicitly connecting it all to death and to “everything the night is a metaphor for”, but still keeps up the scattering of vague but portentious imagery. It makes me wonder if this is simply an inevitable product of the chosen format.

I said before that the Back Garden is for experimental stuff, but it’s also explicitly for works in progress — basically, if the author feels that it shouldn’t be competing in the Main Festival, for whatever reason, it goes here. ADRIFT is in the latter category. The ending brings the initial crisis to a more-or-less satisfying resolution, but it’s very short, and the author has indicated a desire to expand it in a post-festival release.

That initial crisis: You’re a Soviet cosmonaut and you’ve come untethered from your spacecraft. Getting back to safety involves some light parser-based puzzle-solving with an apparent time limit imposed by your oxygen level. A little experimentation shows that the time limit is fake, that a warning about 15 minutes remaining is the last event, but it uses the warnings to create a little tension in a sequence where you have to excruciatingly wait for an object to drift within reach. (After which, in accordance with the same design philosophy, it never drifts out of reach.) This is the work of a first-time author, and I find it pleasing that the utility of this kind of fakery is already within their grasp.

The story is accompanied by pictures, and the pictures are stylistically 1980s-era in a way that I strangely haven’t seen imitated elsewhere. It’s not the artful, well-chosen pixel art popular in indie game nostalgia. It’s photographs color-reduced to the point of stylization so they can be forced into a palette they’re not suited for. I can only hope that people recognize what it’s going for: the look of pictures downloaded from pre-web BBSes.

My one suggestion to the author is to add more synonyms and alternate commands. Get some first-time players to send you transcripts of their sessions to see what people are trying that should work but doesn’t.

This is essentially a proof-of-concept for a somewhat novel approach to computerizing a solo Dungeons & Dragons adventure. The player is expected to provide their own character, between levels 1 and 4. (Options for characters up to level 7 are purportedly going to be added in later versions.) The player is also expected to come furnished with an understanding of the rules of 5th edition D&D: much of the game is executed by hand, and, although the game gives you some assistance in tracking positions and HP, most of the relevant state is external to the game, in the player’s head.

In that regard, it has much in common with certain gamebooks I’ve seen, some of them specifically D&D-based. Occasionally such books get ported to computers, and it’s always an open question just how much the computer will automate and how much will be executed by the player. Does the computer roll dice for you? Make combat decisions for enemies? The guiding principle behind 5e Arena is to make the player do anything that the player, rather than the DM, would do in a tabletop D&D session. Thus, you roll the dice for your own attacks and skill checks, but the enemy’s attacks are automated. But even the automated rolls are interpreted by the player. You decide whether it hit. Just like a solo adventure in print, it all runs on the honor system, and you can just decide to tell it that you’ve won (or lost) a fight if you want. (The whole thing is even written in Twine Harlowe, which means there’s a “go back” button on each page. The author is clearly not concerned about cheating.) Furthermore, it trusts you to handle enemy movement, which would normally be done by the DM — after all, for all it knows, you might be casting spells that affect it. It’s placing no limits on what you can do. It even incorporates rules for rolling dice to simulate DM judgment about questionable effects.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, yes, if you want to handle the full range of possible player actions, including improvised ones, there’s only so much structure you can put into the system. But I’m not entirely convinced that this system hits the best compromise between structure and freedom. Perhaps it would be better if the system provided overridable defaults for NPC movement — or maybe that would just complicate the UI to no good purpose. It’s positioned as a solo D&D adventure, after all, not as a CRPG.

The story is basically just “Challenge a sequence of three opponents in gladiatorial combat”, with a choice of different levels of enemies. I played through honestly with a level 2 character that I just happened to have been playing recently with my regular D&D group, who lost in round 3 due to his slow speed and lack of ranged attacks, then simply browsed the rest of the scenarios. It actually stretches the minimal plot pretty far, throwing in twists like “Your opponent isn’t what it seems” and “Someone offers you money to take a dive, but you have to make Performance checks to sell it”. There’s enough material around the edges of the barely-a-combat-system to make it clear that the format would be viable for a fuller adventure.