The Stack

With the hard-bought help of the fairy queen, I’ve only just made it back to Avalon, and can now travel freely between the two realms. So, back to the main quest. But first, let’s reflect briefly on what I’ve come through.

This game was written at a time when Infocom was still the dominant paradigm for IF, which means there are some gratuitous mechanical puzzles, including at one point a Lights Out. Over the years, I’ve come to dislike Lights Out as a pointless waste of time almost as much as Towers of Hanoi, but at least it’s used in a somewhat clever variation here. And anyway, at least the clarity of intent in such puzzles makes it difficult to get truly stuck. I did spend a good few hours stuck on a couple of puzzles in fairyland, but it was always the environmental ones, where it wasn’t obvious what my options were.

The game is full of folkloric and fairy-tale stuff, with a notable repeated motif of Frank being turned into various animals against his will. It seems to be related to the dehumanizing effects of war, particularly in the climax of the Fairyland chapter. There, a masked and antlered being called the Hunter, who had made attempts on your life earlier, decides to keep you as an attack dog instead. And this is notable for a number of reasons. First, it’s the one transformation that you’re capable of actively resisting. Second, it’s one of the few times that the random misadventures tie together, referring back to earlier events — and not just to the earlier murder attack: unmasked, the Hunter turns out to be an elf woman you’d also encountered in a different context. Pieces suddenly come together to form a story, one of someone who can’t bear to be ignored, who will satisfied with being your killer, lover, or master, as long as she’s your something. And the solution, the way to save yourself from her domination? You first have to witness her. To view her life, her story from childhood onward, rather than relating to her purely as an obstacle. It’s only in these flashbacks that you learn her name.

And that makes me think of what I said in my last post about the little girl who Joe killed. Joe is referenced again in this sequence, as one of many whose mortal remains decorate the Hunter’s lair. I’m starting to suspect that sequence may have been subtler than I gave it credit for.

There’s at least one other young girl who needs rescuing: the Oracle back in Avalon, a seven-year-old manacled to a throne, breathing volcanic fumes and giving cryptic hints on a number of topics. I actually broke sequence on this a little inadvertently: in conversations with True Thomas (the fairy queen’s human lover/advisor, who can only speak the truth), Frank references a dialogue with the Oracle on how to free her that I hadn’t actually had yet. When you do free her, there’s a moment when Frank calls her by name, despite him never having learned it — and for once, the game calls him out on it, makes it clear that this slip-up is deliberate. What is going on?

That initial island with the unicorn and the fairy ring turns out to be smaller than I had thought, and also a smaller portion of the game as a whole than I thought. My experiences since my last post have been defined by a game design pattern you might call One Damn Thing After Another. I know I have goals waiting for me back on Avalon if I ever find my way back there, but in the meantime, everything has been a chain of events where I’m trapped or in danger and have to solve a puzzle or two to get out of that situation and into a different one where I’m also trapped or in danger.

This has included a sequence where Frank returns to reality as a sort of ghost at various points in time, witnessing an environmentally-ravaged future, seeing what terrible things befell the brothers-in-arms who Frank gave his life for. So, there’s the answer to what I was wondering in my last post. It’s here that the influence of Infocom’s Trinity becomes clearest, except that where Trinity is all about inescapable self-causing time loops, the whole point of this section in Once and Future is changing fate. Your interventions into the lives of individual soldiers prove it’s possible, which means you can also do it on the larger scale.

There’s one vignette that I found striking for its priorities and perspective. One of Frank’s buddies, Joe, goes into an irreversible decline after he’s too quick on the trigger and kills a young Vietnamese girl. You have to prevent this from coming to pass. The thing is, this is all framed not as saving the little girl, but as saving Joe. The girl isn’t even given a name, because she fundamentally doesn’t matter except as a bit-player in Joe’s story. The game is basically anti-war, but it still privileges the experience of American soldiers.

After this whole foray into reality, the game breaks the mood by throwing you into Fairyland, which is even more whimsy-magical than Avalon was, and so jam-packed with wonders that it becomes a little monotonous. But this time, the darkness is more exposed. It isn’t just magical, it’s mercurial, and irrational in a threatening way. Frank has to make ill-advised bargains with a witch, and then, to escape the consequences, with a demon. There may be metaphors for Vietnam in that, but even if not, there’s definitely a mood.

But if you want metaphors, here’s a bigger one: The game’s opening makes it seem like it’s providing the main setting that you’ll be exploring, gives you goals that only make sense there. I’ve been torn away from that setting, and I’m starting to doubt if I’ll ever return.

Kevin Wilson is today probably best known for his work in board games, with over 100 design credits listed at boardgamegeek.com. Back in the 90s, though, he was a prominent member of the amateur Interactive Fiction community — in fact, he created the annual IFComp in 1995, which has since become an entrenched institution and one of the longest-running regular events in the world of game development. When he first started writing IF, he had grand plans. Adopting the company name Vertigo Software, he teased planned titles on Usenet: one about rationing oxygen in a space emergency, another about a blind person being stalked, another about rebellion against a future dystopia — all themes that have been tackled by IFComp entries, so in a way, he did bring these ideas to fruition. He never released them himself, though. Writing a full-sized game turned out to be a much larger task than he had anticipated, and the only projected Vertigo Software title to be completed was Once and Future (originally titled Avalon in these early announcements), a story of an American soldier in Vietnam transported to a realm of Arthurian magic on his death. Perhaps appropriately, it was one of the two titles to get a physical-media release from Mike Berlyn’s Cascade Mountain Publishing, another of the medium’s great bit-off-more-than-he-could-chew stories.

Today, you can get the game for free from the IF Archive, and indeed, that is the version I’m currently playing. But I did purchase the CD-ROM version back in the day, with its collection of printed feelies: various letters concerning Private Frank Leandro, his death, his relationships back home. These feelies are largely the reason I never played past the game’s intro: I felt like I should read the letters first, and a couple of them are in difficult handwriting — difficult enough to make me put it off for more than twenty years. I shouldn’t have bothered; the letters don’t really add anything to the experience, and seem like an afterthought. On top of that, once you’ve deciphered Frank’s scrawls, the game itself starts with an entire page of its own hard-to-read text: an account of Arthur’s final hours in archaic spelling, like “Take thou here Excalyber, my good swerde, and go wyth hit to yondir watirs syde”. I actually read all the way through Le Morte D’Arthur as a youth — cover to cover, even including the interminable tournament scenes — but the edition I read modernized the spelling, even as it kept the 15th-century grammar and vocabulary. I greatly prefer that approach for texts like this: it preserves the antique flavor without interfering excessively with comprehension.

At any rate, Frank is currently still carrying out his initial reconnoiter of the isle of Avalon, which seems to be grid-based and sparse, like an old Sierra game. Here a fairy ring, there a unicorn, Mordred lounging about insulting you at one juncture. At the very beginning, you’re issued several quests: purify the Holy Grail and recover Excalibur and the sheath and belt that go with it. The whole situation is disconnected enough from Frank’s life that it makes me wonder why he was assigned one in the first place. Why a soldier in Vietnam? I trust the author enough to believe that an answer will be revealed eventually, but it’s obscure right now. Apart from a brief mention of his sweetheart back home, Frank’s character hasn’t been particularly reflected in the room and object descriptions. The only thing indicating that he isn’t a natural part of this setting is the army fatigues and dog tag in his inventory.

April Fools Day has come and gone for the year. I’ve been wanting to start up blogging again after the month’s rest, regarding it as a sort of New Month’s resolution for the year’s dawn, but chose to skip the day itself due to the poisonous expectations the day brings. Entirely by coincidence, however, some comments online recently inspired me to give a second look at a game that apparently has its origins in an April Fools Day joke. As much as I detest the holiday, this is a fine way for games to be born, granting designers the freedom to be audacious they really should be feeling all year round.

Drunken Robot Pornography is a 2014 release by Dejobaan, the same indie outfit that produced the BASE-jumping game AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, as well as The Wonderful End of the World, one of the few blatant Katamari imitations on PC. It’s an abstractish first-person shooter consisting mainly of fighting huge bosses while poinging around on jump pads. There are levels with other goals, like collecting stuff or just shooting at massed drones to reach a target score, but it’s the battles against the Titans, heavily-armed radially-symmetric robots that sit in place and rotate, that form the game’s focus. Sometimes all you have to do in a level is defeat a single Titan. Regardless of a level’s goal, it has to be done within a time limit of just a few minutes, tight enough to force reckless behavior, and thereby excuse it.

It’s got a similar sense of humor to other Dejobaan games: breezy wackiness tinged with apocalyptic desperation. The player character, Reuben Matsumoto, is comically irresponsible, essentially only fighting the robots destroying the metropolitan Boston area to avoid personal blame, probably hoping he can have the whole thing cleared up before anyone notices. “Reuben, do you think the Titans have souls?” queries his intelligent flight suit at one point, with exaggerated care; Reuben brushes him off with a weary “I dunno. Probably.”

But the main joke is in the gameplay. See, the Titans are a sort of boss usually seen in danmaku shooters: the kind where each weapon has its own hit box, and has to be destroyed individually. Except that bosses of this sort usually require a whole bunch of concerted fire at each piece to destroy it, and that’s not the case here. Weapons just sort of flake off, shed like autumn leaves at the barest touch. They compensate for this by having lots and lots of weapons. Destroying them feels less like blowing things up in a typical shooter than carving or shaving them off with strokes from your gun, paring off layer after layer of lethal ordnance to expose the fragile core. Their entire design is a laughable mismatch between power and vulnerability, and it’s something of a revelation that this makes for not only a viable game but, once you’re past the first dozen or so levels, actually a very hard one.

Hard enough that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to finish it. I think I’m about halfway to the end now, and I keep hitting walls.

I’ve talked a little about the emerging genre of puzzle-packages, a genre so new that there isn’t really an accepted name for it yet. My experience of the thing is mainly of boutique indie experiences with small runs, but more mass-market versions exist. I recently played through one that’s so mass-market, it’s sold (exclusively) at Target: Box One, presented by Neil Patrick Harris.

Now, I’m hesitant to describe this work in much detail, in part because the post-game content is so insistent that I not reveal any of its secrets. So let’s start off with vague generalities. Escape rooms and puzzle hunts are usually best solved by teams, in part because it lets the hints be vague enough to go over some people’s heads. Box One, however, explicitly bills itself as a game for one player, and that seems like the right amount to me. In fact, it may be ideally suited for half a player — that is, a player who has other stuff going on and isn’t giving the game their full attention. I’ll get into why I say this in a bit, but it’s spoilery.

Materials in and around the game put forth the narrative that “single player” was the game’s central innovation — that it was conceived not as an escape-room-in-a-box or a puzzle-hunt-at-home, but as a party-game-by-yourself, essentially a solitaire version of the previous “presented by Neil Patrick Harris” game, Amazed (which I know nothing about). This raises the question: Do the designers not know of the genre they’re participating in? I find their ignorance unlikely, but they’re not assuming that the player knows about it. (Spoilers turn up one notch every paragraph from this point onward.)

Now, as someone who was aware of the genre, and was expecting a puzzle-package, opening the box was initially disappointing to me, as it seemed that all it contained was a tall deck of “challenge cards” (to be drawn and acted on one by one, Pandemic Legacy-style), a notepad, a pen, and a large spacer to fill out the box. There ultimately turns out to be more to it, but the first phase of the game, in which you just draw cards and answer interlinked trivia questions, lasted long enough for me to genuinely think that this was all there was going to be. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised when the twist occurred, even though I had gone in expecting it. That’s a feat pulled off well.

The game turns out to have a substantial online component, which always seems a little like cheating to me. I bought this box as an alternative to playing videogames, darn it. It gives Neil Patrick Harris the opportunity for a little screen time, though, and he’s always a treat to watch. He’s basically in Doctor Horrible mode here, playing himself as a comically self-centered heavy against the story’s true hero, played by an actor who does a lot more acting than NPH but doesn’t get his name on the box. It seems a little unfair, but it’s an unfairness that’s at least in line with the story.

Everything funnels into what is essentially an escape room turned inside-out, the player using the game’s website to remotely help the hero escape captivity. But before you can get started at that, there’s a built-in delay of 24 hours. I suppose the intended effect was to split the game into two episodes — you were supposed to hit the “Come back tomorrow” and actually put the box aside and do something else. This is the game’s biggest misstep, at least for a player such as myself. For why would I stop poking around and seeking secrets, just because one avenue of progress is blocked? That’s not how you play adventure games! (And yes, I was pretty much thinking of it as an adventure game by this point.) As a result, I found most of the game’s secrets before the game led me to them, and that’s a shame, because it meant I missed out on some of the showmanship of the reveals, the “omg it was there all along and I didn’t see it until you pointed it out” factor.

For all that, it’s a pretty satisfying experience. It’s basically all about hiding information in as many ways as possible. It’s just optimized for a player who’s willing to sit down and follow directions sometimes — something it actually emphasizes in the beginning of the challenge cards. To its credit, it is also fully resettable, provided you take care not to damage the components.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Supergiant’s Hades over the last few months, but I don’t intend to do a full series of posts about it. I feel like it’s been getting enough attention lately that reiterating every little thing about it would be unnecessary. But I do have a few stray observations I’d like to get down.

First, others have observed that Hades bears a lot of resemblance to Slay the Spire at the large scale, despite being a completely different genre: Spire is a turn-based deck-building game, Hades a fast-paced action-RPG. But both games are all about battling your way upward, through three main layers of guarded rooms followed by a smaller fourth containing the final boss, in one-sitting sallies where you’re expected to fail most of the time, Roguelike-style. Now, I said before that one of the notable things about Slay the Spire is that it manages to make each layer of its hierarchy of goals — beating the first tier, beating all three main tiers, doing the same with the three main classes, unlocking the final encounter and actually slaying the spire — feel like a real victory when you first manage it. Well, Hades does this even harder. When I escaped the underworld for the first time, I thought “Yeah! I beat the game!” When I escaped the underworld enough times to complete the main plot, and the credits rolled, I again thought “Yeah! I beat the game!” In both cases, it was accompanied by story elements that made it clear that I wasn’t really finished. Even when the credits roll, anyone familiar with the myth of Persephone knows that we’re only halfway through that story. I’m currently trying to help her complete it. I wonder what happens then? The game has got to run out of story eventually.

Speaking of familiarity with myth, I hadn’t heard of Zagreus (the player character) before playing the game, and somehow it didn’t occur to me to look him up and find out if he had any precedent in myth until I was very far into the game. Now, there’s a minor sub-plot in the game where Zagreus and Dionysus prank Orpheus by telling him that they’re really the same person, and spinning tall tales about this combined person’s exploits. Later, Zagreus tries to come clean, but Orpheus refuses to believe him, calling it false modesty and continuing to spread his lies through song. The point is, reading the opening lines of the Wikipedia article on Zagreus retroactively made that at least 20% funnier. I suspect there are subtler mythology gags that I haven’t even noticed.

One thing this game has really impressed upon me is just how many different gods of the dead there are in the Greek pantheon, and how many psychopomps. I assume that this is the result of different traditions merging: This group says Hermes takes your soul to the afterlife, that group says it’s Charon, these other guys say Thanatos, but now they’re all part of the same group so someone comes up with a big retcon in which they can all be right simultaneously.

The game has multiple kinds of in-game currency, and the interesting thing about them is that they’re mostly but not entirely separate. There’s gemstones, which mainly buys cosmetic enhancements to the main house, and shards of pure darkness (which is somehow purple), which you use to upgrade your character, and nectar, which you gift to other characters to improve your relationship, and titan blood, which upgrades weapons. To some extent, these are convertible, but I found I generally wanted to use my gems as gems rather than using them to buy some other resource, even though I didn’t really care much about changing the house decor for its own sake. But the weird part really comes in with the diamonds. Diamonds are normally gained by defeating the level 2 boss, which you can do only once per sally. You only ever have a few of them at a time. I’ve found two main uses for them: buying out the contracts that Hades made with certain characters, and some of the more expensive pieces of furniture. The former affects story (and can have mechanical rewards as a side effect), the latter might sometimes affect the story but usually doesn’t. And yet, I find myself sometimes splurging on the cosmetic effects, rather than saving up to help my friends! The closest I can come to justifying this is by calling it curiosity.

The game starts in media res, leaving out any opening cutscene in favor of getting right into the action. A lot of what you learn about the backstory is learned through suggestion and implication rather than stated outright, at least at first — you suspect that Zagreus is deceiving the Olympians long before this is stated outright. And in some cases, the secrets that eventually come out are ones that the player is likely to know already, even when the player character doesn’t. The very fact that Zagreus doesn’t know that Demeter is Persephone’s mother, even after talking to each of them independently multiple times, is itself one of those bits of backstory that the player learns by implication.

Orpheus repeatedly refers to Eurydice as his “muse”. When you finally meet Eurydice, she informs you that in fact she wrote most of Orpheus’ material. But when you think about it, isn’t that what he said? The poets of antiquity invoked the muses in terms like “Speak through me” and “Whisper into my ear”. They always gave the muses full credit as the real authors of their works, the artist being merely a vessel. Something to bear in mind whenever an artist calls someone “my muse” in real life.

I’ve said before that I use my Steam wishlist less as a wishlist and more as an “I’ll have to remember to give that another look when it has more reviews” list. But there’s one way even Steam itself implicitly acknowledges that they’re not really wishlists: it lets you add free-to-play games to them. Although even that’s a kind of wish: “I wish I had time to play this”. I’ve accumulated a sizeable stack of such recorded intentions there over the years, and we’ve been in weirdly vague national quarantine so long now that over the weekend I decided it was finally time to give some of them a try.

Of those I tried, the one that pleased me most was Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt, a one-sitting retro action-JRPG from 2014. Well, not exactly J, really — it’s clearly in the same genre as Final Fantasy, but the developer is Swedish. In fact, the developer is Ludosity, the quirky and prolific indie studio responsible for such games as Ittle Dew, Bob Came in Pieces, and Card City Nights. If you haven’t heard of Card City Nights: It’s a little bit like if you spun off the collectible card game from Final Fantasy 8 into its own game, except that instead of being themed after FF8 characters, it’s themed after the Ludosity back catalog. And that’s where I first heard of Princess Remedy.

The high concept here is that instead of killing, you’re healing. Princess Remedy is a trained medical professional, and the encounters that earn you loot are with sick or injured people who need your help. And a lot of the people you’re healing are monsters. That’s part of the joke: you go into a cave and walk up to a skeleton or a giant spider or whatever, and instead of attacking you, it tells you about its problems and you help it. In a way, it anticipated Undertale.

Now, I’ve mused before about the idea of an RPG that puts more detail into healing than hurting. That’s how it is in real life, after all. Medicine is far more complicated than combat. And yet, combat-based RPGs pretend the reverse, giving you all sorts of options for special moves in fights while reducing all healing to just saying magic words and/or administering a nostrum. So I think there’s some unused potential in the idea of a game that takes healing seriously.

Princess Remedy is not such a game. It is a very silly game, and its healing sequences are just combat with minimal window dressing: you shoot bullets that look like bandages, pills, or syringes, while attacked by the enemies that are, I suppose, representations of the ailments you’re curing. So the healing theme is skin-deep, but as skin-deep themes go, it’s still a fairly significant one! You get to do all this shooting and still, in the end, feel like you helped absolutely everyone and hurt no one. And anyway, a more convincing depiction of healing would probably work against the feel of the thing. If an injury has a realistic remedy, that means it was a real injury, and someone was really hurt. This game is too lighthearted to ever acknowledge that real hurt even exists. Quite a few of the complaints you cure are explicitly imaginary.

The end boss is very much an imitation of Final Fantasy end bosses, and in particular the final fight from Final Fantasy 6: rising up a sort of pillar of illuminated-manuscript grotesquery made flesh, towards a mock-angelic peak. Except the graphical style of the whole game is a generation or two more primitive than even Final Fantasy 1. It’s more C64-ish, made mainly of monochrome sprites in different colors on a black background. There should be a word for this kind of mixed retro. Maybe “mixed retro” will do.

Said last fight is against the myriad ailments of a very sick prince, who you’re told in advance is Princess Remedy’s age (wink, wink). And yet, afterward, when the inhabitants of Hurtland declare you queen in gratitude, you don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to. You can instead marry literally anyone in the game, regardless of gender or species, and just load into the final save and pick someone else if you change your mind. I personally married the prince’s servant on my first try, basically just because he was the closest person who wasn’t the prince, but I think the best choice is to get back together with Remedy’s ex-girlfriend from medical school, who spends the game hiding in a secret area, suffering from a broken heart, which you can cure like any other ailment. Although I can also respect any Ittle Dew fans who choose Ittle, who makes a cameo here. Sure, Ittle is entirely too young to marry, but that’s where the underlying “not taking any of this at all seriously” attitude kicks in. The effect of your choice is utterly minimal, changing just a sprite and a couple of lines in the outro cutscene, but feels important nonetheless.

I understand there’s a non-free sequel. I’ll have to give that a look.

The Shade is free. Some images shown over the closing credits show him being taken in by a family of trolls and, in a word, humanized. No longer a solitary weirdo, he’s one weirdo among many. The King, meanwhile, has crumbled into rubble with the last of his kingdom. I’ve gone and looked up videos on Youtube of the other endings, and this one is clearly the best, the one that the developers consider to be the real ending. Actually waking the King is not in any way rewarded.

And, having looked up said videos, I have to ask: Was it worth it? Worth playing, rather than just reading about to appreciate the concept and/or watching videos of the exciting bits?

You can ask that of any game, I guess, but it’s a more pressing question when asked of a game where you spend so much time not doing anything. Much of what this game has to teach us could be communicated more efficiently. I do think that the final hours in particular were best appreciated interactively. When the old man finally walked onto the screen, confirming my suspicions of how this was going to play out, that moment felt monumental, a culmination of increasingly intense anticipation. They made a solid choice when they decided to make the player spend the ending actively waiting, watching for a time-limited opportunity to seize, rather than just checking in to see if enough time had passed yet.

But also, it strikes me that an awful lot of the game is simply irrelevant to getting the best ending. So much of the content is devoted to improving your home so time will pass faster there, but how do you escape? Not by waiting for weeks to pass. If you know what you’re doing, you can speedrun the game in just a few hours. I can think of no greater violation of the spirit of the thing, but it’s doable. I personally deliberately put off escaping when I was pretty sure I knew how (correctly, it turns out) just because I wanted to see more of what the caves had to offer. But is that what the Shade would want?

At this point, I’m actually going through with what I identified as the proper approach in my last post: camping in one spot for 24 hours, waiting to see if anything happens. Specifically, I’m at the blocked entrance to the caves, which I’ve seen people walk past in dreams. If I see an old man go by, he’s headed for the nearby well, which I’m thinking I can use to escape once he lowers a bucket in.

Obviously this isn’t an activity that occupies my full attention, but it does require steady vigilance. Or perhaps not: I probably don’t need to keep a close watch during the nighttime, because it’s always sunny in the dreams, and besides, who fetches water in the dead of night? Also, every daily event I’ve seen so far happens at the top of the hour, so I very likely only need to check in then. Nonetheless, I’m keeping a window open, just in case. But for all I know, fetching water might not even be a daily event. Maybe it only happens weekly. Maybe it only happens once. Maybe I have to wait out the full 400 days for it to happen.

And really, this uncertain waiting is something I’m subjecting myself to. I could give up and go for either of two other endings. First, I could just wait out the 400 days and wake up the King. This wouldn’t take long — I’m at less than 40 game-days to the deadline, and the time ratio at home is at about 20:1. But I’m reluctant to give the King what he wants, for reasons I’ve already gone into. Secondly, there’s the secret, the one you unlock by following those cryptic clues I’ve been obsessing over. I’ve gotten that to the point of opening up a portal with light streaming from it, which apparently leads to a secret ending. But I took so many hints to get it that far, essentially playing the game out of a wiki by the end, that it would feel cheaty to accept it as my ending. I want an ending that I earned.

And in this game, you earn things by waiting for them.

Having seen the “birthday present”, I did wind up taking mild hints on the mysterious door. I don’t feel too bad about this because it’s clear that this whole endeavor is optional, unrelated to the project of escape. There were two parts I was stuck on — obtaining the key, and finding the door again — and both of them turned out to be linked to transient events that occur once in every 24-hour cycle. That’s 24 hours game time, which means that if you know when the events are scheduled to occur, you can spend most of the wait at home, where time goes faster. But without hints, the only way to know when the events occur is to observe them. So the honest way to solve these puzzles would be to think “This seems like an important place. Let’s just sit here for an entire day and see if anything happens.” Which might be unreasonable for a critical path puzzle, even in a game themed around waiting, but, again, this is all in pursuit of an optional secret.

The mysterious door leads to a small room, essentially just a forgotten storage closet, containing a couple more books, a large portrait of the King which presumably goes in the Shade’s home with all the other decorations, and a tall crystal that by now I recognize as the important thing for the secret. More importantly, however, it pulls another prank on the player, like the business with breaking your first mattock. The mysterious door only appears for a little while. It might be possible for the prepared player to go through, grab all the loot, and leave before the door vanishes again, but it’s really set up to take you by surprise and leave you stranded in a doorless closet for 24 real-world hours until the door reappears again. The Shade himself, reacting with his customary sense of resignation, recognizes this as basically just a miniature version of the rest of his life.

And this whole adventure made me realize: If there’s one thing that I’ve come to admire about this game, it’s the devotion to exploring its theme. It doesn’t just make you wait for 400 days, it comes up with various different kinds of waiting, with different feels. Waiting in different contexts, for different purposes; waits of minutes, hours, weeks; one-time waits and repeated waits; waits that you can shorten and waits that you can’t; waits where you can go and do other stuff while you’re waiting, and waits where you have to stay in once place; waits you initiate deliberately and waits that are forced on you. It’s a style of game design we’ve all seen before — Nintendo in particular has been praised for their ability to create entire game franchises out of the appeal of a single verb, starting by filling in the blank in the sentence “It’s fun to _____”. Mario is based on the verb “jump”, Zelda on “explore”, Pokémon on “collect”. But The Longing chooses the verb “wait”, which isn’t ordinarily regarded as fun at all.