The Stack

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.

I had been thinking of skipping IFComp this year, especially if it seemed too big to fit into my suddenly-busy schedule. I was contemplating playing the remaining text adventures on my Stack instead — Once and Future, Demoniak — as something more manageable but still seasonally IF-related. And when it was announced that the number of entries this year had broken three digits for the first time, well! That seemed to settle it. There’s no way I could get through that many games in six weeks and still be enjoying the experience by the end.

But the same announcement extends the deadline to eight weeks, and also pleads with us to participate in judging despite the intimidating size, to help keep the judge-to-entry ratio up. People enter the Comp to get their works noticed, but we’re getting to the point where it’s not good for that any more: works can get lost in the vast numbers of Comp entries. Judges aren’t required to play all the games, and indeed probably very few will this year. So it’ll take more judges to give every game adequate attention.

Why the increase in entries? It must be pointed out that this has been the trend for a number of years now. I’ve attributed it to the Comp’s embrace of Twine in the past. A colleague also suggests that Narrascope has increased participation by making the ELO more aware of what the IF community has been doing.

So what the heck, let’s give this a go. I’m probably not going to play all the entries. I’m definitely not going to post about them all. But we’ll see what happens.

I’ve found myself devoting more time to A Monster’s Expedition. Not as much as Steam thinks I have, mind you. This is a game without urgency, and that seems to make me willing to alt-tab out and leave it running in the background while I check my email, or watch a movie, or take a nap. But also, I’m still finding passages to new islands frequently enough to make mere wandering around appealing.

One big way the game encourages this behavior: After you’ve won, it inverts its cloud policy. At the start of the game, there’s cloud cover obscuring your view of the world everywhere except for the islands you’ve visited and the sea lanes you’ve passed, and a little margin around that. Sometimes, if an island is close enough, you can barely glimpse its edges through the mist. Sometimes they’re completely obscured until you find them. But after you’ve won the game, the rule changes from “Clouds everywhere, except known islands” to “Clouds only over unknown islands”. The map is now mostly clear, except in spots that, because of the clouds, you know must have islands in them. This gives the game a certain Pac-Man-like appeal as you try to clear the board of every last crumb of cloud, but it also provides guidance. If I think I might be able to build and launch a raft in some spot, I can trace where it would go and decide if it’s going to hit anything of interest or not before I spend time trying.

I’m at the point where most of the remaining puzzles are probably the larger sort, involving multiple islands together. I haven’t been keeping good track of this, but I’m pretty sure that some of the puzzles I’ve solved have required time travel, in the sense of solving an island one way, then resetting it and solving it another way that uses a log or raft or even just an alternate entrance that you used the first solution to obtain. Checking puzzle dependencies on a thing of this size must have been a large undertaking. But the clouds make it all seem just a little bit more approachable.

So, it turns out that the backstory of Stephen’s Sausage Roll totally goes there, but not quite in the way I had expected. The feel is less squick than melancholy. Sadness at the passing of a civilization, at the loss not just of its physical forms, its buildings reduced to ruins and its people grotesquely dehumanized, but of its past, as all the knowledge that the people sought to preserve all their lives vanishes with no one to remember it. Like Link on Koholint, it’s questionable whether anything that happens on the island is anything more than a dream — a lingering dream of the doomed and dead, that confuses and combines the old celebratory feasts with the funeral rites that dominated their final days. Preparing the dead meat for its final rest.

This concern with legacy even informs the final few puzzles. The final chapter is largely concerned with puzzles that have mobile components other than sausages, and one of the things you notice as you go along is that they’re only mobile in puzzle mode. Once you’ve solved the puzzle, they’re frozen in their final positions. Some places take advantage of this to control exploration: solving a puzzle might require pushing some blocks to form a bridge to the grill, and once you’re outside the puzzle and the rest of the world comes back, you use the same bridge to advance to the next puzzle. But this isn’t something you really have to think about until the last few puzzles, where you can easily cook all the sausages and still leave things arranged wrong, blocking off further progress. It isn’t enough to deal with the remnants of the past. You now have to think about the future as well. This is the game’s last big twist.

The climactic puzzle makes it almost inevitable that you’ll mess this up at first. I honestly thought it was just a victory lap, a puzzle in name only that just gives you a whole bunch of sausages in an open space with nothing preventing you from cooking them, as a reward for getting through everything else. I should have known SSR would never do anything that friendly. It is, instead, a puzzle that’s all about setting things up so you can climb a spire after the puzzle is closed. The sausages are basically irrelevant. The game had the power to make difficult non-sausage-based puzzles all along and is only now pointing this out.

And after you’ve done that, then comes the real victory lap: the grills throughout the world light up outside of puzzle mode. Finally, you can cook the remaining overworld sausages! I observed before that you always have the ability to walk all the way back to the beginning of the game, if you’re so inclined, and now the game motivates you to do so. To revisit in reverse all the places where you spent so much time. The people of the island strove to preserve their memories and memorials, and now you have memories of your own associated with the island. So of course you share their fate in the end. In another game, this would come off as cheap irony, but here, it’s really the only possible way to cap off the game’s themes.

I’m still in what I believe to be the final stretch. It’s a long stretch, and the puzzles are getting monumentally difficult. Clearing just one per session feels like an accomplishment.

The DROD fandom uses the word “lynchpin” for a puzzle’s crucial insight, the non-obvious realization that enables you to solve the whole thing. A lot of DROD puzzles consist of a lynchpin plus a bunch of tactical maneuvering. I’m finding that a lot of the later puzzles in SSR have multiple lynchpins. You tinker with a puzzle for a while without getting anywhere, and then you realize “Wait, I can push this thing over by this ladder and stick my fork in this gap and lift the whole thing out of the water!” or whatever, and that opens up new possibilities, but it doesn’t solve the puzzle. It just gives you the tools you need to start thinking about the real puzzle. I’ve also seen a puzzle or two that are just outright multi-stage affairs, where you have to get a sausage from its starting position to the grill with a series of unrelated mini-puzzles along the way.

Once again, this stands in contrast to A Monster’s Expedition, where every island is small and elegant. Ah, but AME has larger puzzles that span multiple islands. I suppose the difference in feel has to do with the sense of what the smallest unit of puzzle is. In AME, where boundaries are fluid and every change persists, you can frequently think of the different parts of a compound puzzle as separate puzzles. SSR doesn’t allow that. Puzzles are sharply defined, with discrete conditions for entering the puzzle and leaving it, and if you leave without solving all of it, you haven’t solved any of it.

Heavy spoiler for puzzle content continue here. This is one of those games that it’s impossible to talk about in any depth without spoiling puzzles. It’s a game of twists and turns, and the twists and turns take the form of breakthroughs in solving puzzles.

I’ve been describing the levels in SSR as being grouped into “worlds”, but in another sense, it’s all one world: one environment, with puzzles embedded in it. You can just walk all the way back to the beginning whenever you want. Individual puzzles, however, are self-contained. When you activate one, the rest of the world literally falls away, sinking into the water to temporarily isolate you. Two other changes happen at the same time: the grills light up, and certain immovable pink boxes with their own special shader turn into sausages. When you grill all the sausages, some unseen force eats them, removing the pink boxes from the overworld. There are also green boxes that turn into sausages when you complete all the puzzles in what I’ve been calling a “world”. The green box sausages are thus available in the overworld between the puzzles, and are used to reach the next world, typically by pushing them into a gap so you can walk across it.

That’s the pattern for the first five worlds, but the sixth breaks it in all kinds of ways. It all starts with a puzzle that appears to be absolutely impossible, because it gives you a sausage to grill and no grill to do it with. This puzzle is actually accessible from world 5, but can’t be solved until you you’ve solved all the world 5 puzzles and, by so doing, have a green box sausage that isn’t on bridge duty. That’s the first twist: that you can bring sausages into puzzles just by physically bringing them into the puzzle and leaving them lying on non-sinking ground. Suddenly the puzzles aren’t self-contained any more. The second twist is that you can keep stuff from sinking by wedging a sausage under it. It has to be a very specific sort of terrain feature: something with an overhead protrusion right next to the puzzle, so that a single sausage can lie half on the puzzle ground and half under the thing you want it to hold up. Up to this point, the sinking of the ground around the puzzle seemed like just a graphical flourish, but this twist establishes it as something physically real, and capable of physical interactions with puzzle elements.

And once your habits and assumptions have been so thoroughly upset, this immediately becomes the theme for all of the following puzzles. I had been thinking of the unlocking of green boxes as the thing that defines the boundaries between worlds, but now, every single puzzle unlocks one or more green boxes, giving you overworld sausages to use in the next puzzle.

Will there be more twists that alter the basic nature of the game in even bigger ways? Maybe not. Several things suggest that it’s all coming to a climax. For one thing, I’ve reached a point where the island curves back on itself, so that I can see the little wrecked boat where the game starts. That seems like an endgame thing. For another, there’s the plaques. Each world has an informational plaque or two in a prominent place, giving a little piece of the island’s history. In this gauntlet of green boxes, where every puzzle lets you go a little farther, there’s a plaque after every puzzle, giving you backstory at a much faster but still maddeningly slow rate. Right now, I’m at a point that seems like it’s just short of confirming all my worst suspicions, and it casts a lingering sense of dread over the whole game. It’s like A Monster’s Expedition crossed with Silent Hill 2.