IFComp 2023: All Hands

This year, there’s been an unusually large number of games written in Texture — or maybe the system has been gaining in popularity over the last couple of years and I just haven’t noticed because I’ve been sitting out the Comp. Regardless, when I say “unusually large number”, I do still mean a number that can be described as “several”. I’m mainly just surprised to see any at all.

To review: In Texture games, interaction takes the form of dragging actions (listed at the bottom of the screen, separate from the output text) onto things within the output text, a UI specifically designed to be mobile-friendly. The default way to conceive this is that the actions are verbs and the things you drag them onto are the objects you’re applying the verbs to, but since the system doesn’t really have a world model with a concept of objects, this conception is a matter of habit rather than constraint.

I don’t know what it is about this UI, but it seems to either encourage hauntingly poetical writing or attract authors already inclined to it. Maybe it’s the way it enforces the use of… let’s not call them objects but foci, things that take the place of objects in a more simulationy game, but makes them as temporary and situational as hyperlinks in Twine. But then you have a piece like this, where a whole bunch of foci are repeated throughout the bulk of the game, a list of rooms that you can visit and which therefore have to be mentioned in the text of every node that gives you the option of leaving. It still winds up pretty poetic. The player character is called by the lure of the sea, and finds a mysterious ship that seems to also be a circus somehow, and it’s clear that the whole thing is unwholesome, a devilish trap for the foolish, but you still can’t keep exploring it. It put me in mind of Toby Fox and Itoki Hana’s Greatest Living Show, except more nautical.

One other thing of note about it: Remember how I said that Texture allows the action list to vary from node to node? This piece doesn’t do that. Apart from a couple of heightened sequences where your options are limited, the action list is always the same — Reflect, Approach, and Take, where “Reflect” essentially means “Examine” — even if one or two of those actions aren’t actually applicable to anything in the current node. It gives the whole thing a feel kind of like an old point-and-click graphic adventure, and the reliable semantics greatly facilitates systematic exploration. I’m not saying that all Texture games can benefit from kind of consistency, but it’s a technique worth bearing in mind.

IFComp 2023: Bali B&B

Every once in a while I see some mention of someone’s plan to quit the 9-to-5 grind and open a little B&B, and I always find it flabbergasting. Your idea of a relaxing retirement is a customer service job? This piece goes a long way toward explaining that mindset to me. It’s essentially a B&B fantasy, from the exotic locale to the incredible financial success of the place before you even get there to the fact that you’re only committed to being responsible for the place for one week.

The author accurately describes it as “cosy” — there’s a sort of action-packed finale involving a minor flood, but even there, it didn’t feel stressful. The game offers you lots of decisions, but I never really felt like it was possible to make unrecoverably wrong ones. (Possibly you could with some effort.) Rather, you typically get a problem and a choice of different ways to solve it, all of which work. When the story relies on something going wrong, it’s never the player’s fault — even when, in one case, it’s the fault of the player character.

Mainly the decisions seem to affect your relationship levels with the various other characters, which are viewable from the stats menu — the game seems to track a lot more stats than it ever uses for conditionals. This includes your rapport with not just the various guests but the cook, the PC’s grandparents who own the place, and a wild monkey that’s taken up residence on the grounds. Occasionally it was clear that I had to choose one character over another, as when a teenage girl has a disagreement with her parents, but the consequences always seemed fairly minor.

So, that’s the fantasy: Making friends, most of them temporary, and impressing them with your competence. Also, adopting a litter of kittens along the way. It’s simply all very pleasant, with just enough easily-manageable chaos to keep it from getting boring.

IFComp 2023: Assembly

Here’s a clever premise, not just at the level of plot but of gameplay: what if magical rituals took the form of Ikea instruction booklets?

Somewhat surprisingly, it doesn’t take this in the direction of instructions being arcane or difficult to follow. Each step in an assembly ritual can pretty much be copy and pasted from the game’s output into its input, and the steps for disassembly (also frequently necessary) are simply the opposite of the forward instructions. (It reminds me a little of the spells in King’s Quest 3 that way, except without the dire consequences for typos.) But the instructions don’t just produce supernatural effects (in fact they usually don’t have any supernatural effects at all, only a few special items do that), they produce furniture, which can have situational uses. This is a game about an ordinary person battling cultists, but it’s mostly about building furniture and breaking it down repeatedly, and it gets a surprising amount of mileage out of just that.

And it’s admirably short. This is a parsimonious game, that explores a single idea thoroughly and without waste, getting a few very nice puzzles in along the way, and then knows when it’s done. In the context of the Comp, that is a very good thing.

IFComp 2023: Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head

This one’s a little complicated to explain. The idea is that you’re a professional puppeteer raiding a former workplace, the workshop and studio of Malcolm Newsome, a Jim Henson-like visionary who recently died, with the goal of sneaking out as many puppets as you can to preserve them before the whole site gets demolished by its new corporate owners. But the only good way to carry the puppets around is by wearing them on your hands, at which point they start talking to you.

So basically it’s a treasure hunt where the treasures are characters, who comment on their surroundings and banter with any puppet on your other hand (albeit only when they first see each other; the game wants to encourage you to keep at least one hand free most of the time). Not all the puppets do this, mind you. There are supernumerary puppets that are basically mute and inert. But the major characters, the ones with Kermit-level importance, not only have voices, they have special abilities that help you overcome obstacles and avoid hazards. In a slightly Five Nights at Freddy’s-like touch, those hazards take the form of freakish automated puppets repurposed as security bots by the parent company.

There’s a lot of world-building, and the world it builds is largely a realistic one, except in that the puppets seem to have independent minds. They definitely display knowledge and abilities that the player character doesn’t possess, something that the player character only remarks on as strange once the night is over. By the end, this knowledge included the real facts about Newsome’s death (the official story being marked as suspicious from the get-go). I won’t go into details about that, except to note that it doesn’t go in the direction that it seems like it’s going to. The whole thing is really kind of a character portrait of Newsome, observed largely indirectly, through the characters he created. My one complaint is that the truly interactive portion is sandwiched between a longish static intro sequence and an even longer epilogue, because there’s more to Newsome’s story than could be easily fit into the middle.

IFComp 2023: Lake Adventure

Here’s some pretty strong nostalgia-bait. It’s presented (at first) as an AGT game written by a 13-year-old in 1993, basically a “My House” game with embellishments, supplemented by running commentary from the same fictional author in 2020 as he shows it off to someone else. Laughing at his younger self’s naive design decisions, explaining the context in his life, helping us through the worse puzzles. It turns out to not quite be the game he remembered making: he altered portions of the game throughout his teen years and forgot about it. But it all adds up to a character portrait of a fictional author over the course of years via multi-layered narrative. In the end, via in-game time machine, we get to take a look at his childish fantasies about his future, and contrast them with what really happened.

I call it nostalgia-bait not just because the whole premise is one of looking back at our past and saying “Remember those goofy amateurish adventure games we used to play and write when we were kids and our standards were lower?”, but because the layered narrative feels like the kind of formal experiment that we used to see a lot more of when modern IF was in its infancy. That is, it isn’t just the goofy AGT that hearkens back to games of yore, but the framing device as well. But I may be reaching here. To a lot of people, all parser-based IF looks nostalgia-driven. Still, the backstory we learn involves a sister who died in childhood, which, in the context of decades-old IF, immediately makes me think of Adam Cadre. I briefly entertained the notion while playing that this was in fact written by Cadre under a pseudonym, which would have some precedent, but I find it unlikely. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was meant to deliberately evoke him, though.

IFComp 2023: Dr Ludwig and the Devil

The premise: You’re a Frankenstein-like mad scientist who, after repeated failures to create life in a laboratory, summons Satan to ask him for spoilers. This is a game of very clever puzzles, the sort where you really have to think about your situation and what your goals are and how things can be exploited. I did resort to hints a few times, but isn’t that kind of in keeping with the premise? Other times, an in-game to-do list was enough to get me thinking along the right lines.

It is of course a comedy, and it’s surprisingly good-natured: just because the player character is a mad scientist doesn’t make him mean. There’s a major mid-game puzzle sequence where the game is pretty clearly leading you towards tricking Hans, an illiterate NPC from the torches-and-pitchforks brigade, into signing the infernal contract in your place, but when it comes down to it, the mad scientist is unwilling to do it until he’s figured out a way to shield the Hans from the consequences, no matter how antagonistic their relationship. (You can also ask Hans on a date if you feel like it. Some people form angry mobs just because they want you to notice them.)

The other main thing I notice about it is a pattern of sudden last-minute complications. You’re all ready to get the contract signed, but then it turns out you need special infernal ink, which you have to concoct from hard-to-find ingredients. You think you know how to banish the devil from your laboratory afterward, but it turns out that you don’t know how to pronounce the magic words correctly, forcing you to come up with a fresh trick. The game could have been a lot shorter, really. Just let the straightforward approach work sometimes. This suggests an approach to designing adventure games: start with something simple, then insert arbitrary complications until you have a game of the desired length. But also, it’s a design pattern that suggests a characterization, a hard-luck PC who’s laboring to meet the unjust demands and moving goalposts of a power that just wants to see him suffer. Game designer as devil.

IFComp 2023: Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando

Once again, we have a game for two players, but very different from the last such recorded here. It’s networked this time, with one player hosting the game. More significantly, the two players aren’t playing their parts of the game independently, but experiencing it in tandem, going to the same places and reading the same text. The two players control two different characters, which results in some variation in the dialogue options they’re given, but the differences don’t seem very substantial. Major decisions are not acted on until both players agree on them.

In format, it’s basically a variation on the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective gamebooks. You have a murder to solve, and you have a number of people and places relevant to the case, and investigating them turns up additional leads that may or may not go anywhere useful. On top of that, you have a deadline, and can’t afford to waste too much time on red herrings. When time is up, you answer some questions about whodunit and why and so forth. In short, it’s close enough to the SHCD formula to share most of its problems. The gameplay is basically guesswork, the intended deductions obscure, and the player’s ability to look for corroborating evidence about theories is severely limited. It does take some advantage of the true interactivity that SHCD lacks, varying the available dialogue options on the basis of what you’ve discovered, but I felt like it didn’t do this nearly enough. Sometimes I’d discover the same information twice, in different passages. I even encountered some minor sequence-breaking, references to information I hadn’t learned yet. This stuff was more or less inevitable in SHCD‘s static printed text, but here?

In fact, now that I think about it, the specific details of the case are a close match to the first case in SHCD, “The Munitions Magnate”, down to things like finding an expensive and exclusive cigarette at the crime scene and getting a list of clients from the manufacturer. I wish I had noticed this while playing the game — I might have been able to solve it then! Perhaps the author intended for the story to be recognized, although it is disguised a bit. This version is set in a variant of the present day, and all the characters’ names are changed, and changed whimsically at that: everyone is either a historical figure or a movie star. As the title indicates, the two player characters are detectives Marc Antony and Cleopatra, and the victim is Marlon Brando, a defense contractor whose employees include James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, and Vitruvius Pollio. It’s all rather silly, but I appreciated the way it helped me remember the characters. I’m bad with names, and tend to have difficulty remembering who all the characters are in mystery games. Giving everyone strong pre-existing associations helps.

The big question to me is: What does this piece gain from requiring two players? Mechanically, it’s effectively a single-player game. At first glance, I had thought that the two player characters could go their separate ways and investigate different scenes independently, but this turned out not to be the case. The one thing I can think of that it gains is that it forces discussion. Two players have to agree on where to go and who to talk to, and ultimately who to accuse, and that makes you put a little more thought into it than you might if you were just clicking your way through the story. On the downside, though, it adds various little anxieties to the experience: Am I reading too slowly and making my partner wait? If I click on a dialogue option, does my partner feel like I’m rushing them? Single-player experiences do not have this factor.

Ultimately, I feel like the author’s main reason for making it two-player wasn’t that they had an idea for a game that could take advantage of being two-player, but simply because they wanted to show off some new two-player IF tech. And as tech demos go, it’s far from the worst I’ve seen in the Comp.

IFComp 2023: Dysfluent

Ah, one of my favorite themes: failures of communication! This piece shows us a mundane day in the life of a person with a severe stuttering problem. I suppose it can be put in the same broad category as Depression Quest, down to the way it plays with links: it doesn’t gray them out the way DQ famously does, but any option that involves talking gets colored green, yellow, or red, depending on how difficult the player character anticipates it will be to get the words out.

It’s a good conceit, providing a general pattern for nicely concrete and informed choices. But I found I grew annoyed with the game very quickly, because of one thing: the use of timed pauses. I’m starting to regard this capability of Twine as a bug, like support for the BLINK tag in old browsers. But I’m not just being grumpy about something I generally dislike here: even if you don’t mind pauses in general, you’ll probably agree that, like any feature, it can be overused. By any standard, this game uses way, way too many pauses. It’s singularly determined to not let you just read the words fluently. But wait, isn’t that in keeping with the game’s themes? It’s all about the sensation of blockage in verbal communication. Maybe the impatience the player experiences with its text output is a deliberate effect.

But that doesn’t make it good. The game encourages replay to make different choices and try for Achievements, which strikes me as a particularly bad place to have pauses, making you wait to see text that you’ve largely already seen. But after my first playthrough, I discovered that you can disable the pauses — not in the game’s “Options” menu, where I’d be more inclined to look for such a feature, but under “Extras”. I strongly recommend turning it off from the get-go for the best experience, even if it isn’t the experience the author intended.

If the author reads this post, they’ll probably be disappointed about how it’s dominated by discussion of the text pauses. This is only fair: I was disappointed about how they dominated the experience of the game.

IFComp 2023: A Thing of Wretchedness

Apparently this shares a world with Ascension of Limbs by the same author (who also, I am surprised to discover, wrote Fat Fair), although the connection is only made clear in the ending. It’s much more of a conventional text adventure than Limbs — it’s practically a “My House” game with all the requisite implementation of mundane furnishings. Except for one thing: the entity sharing the house with you.

The interesting thing about this being is how indefinite it is. If you try to examine it, the player character simply refuses, unable to bear looking at it. Everything we know about it comes indirectly: it’s repeatedly described as wretched; it wanders the house as it pleases, but never goes outside; it dirties everything it touches; it eats from a dog food bowl in the kitchen; it’s strong enough to demolish the aforementioned scenery objects when it’s in the right frame of mind; the PC desperately wants to be rid of it, but doesn’t know how to kill it. Everything else is left to the imagination, and there’s a virtue to the vagueness. When I think about the advantages that text has over graphics in games, usually I think of text’s ability to go beyond the visual, to tell us more than pictures can. But it also has the power to tell us less, when that suits the author’s purposes.

The endings, too, leave a lot unsaid and a lot more implied. The creature’s arrival seems to be linked to a cursed artifact locked in the shed, left there by an absent husband who’s mentioned occasionally but never seen. Inevitably, you wonder: Is the wretched creature in fact the husband, transformed? Definite answers are not forthcoming. It would fit thematically with the author’s other works, though. Fat Fair gave us a bestial and dehumanized protagonist. Limbs gave us inhumanity as a goal. Wretchedness doesn’t dehumanize the player character, but presents us with someone else who’s become subhuman and asks us to deal with it somehow.

IFComp 2023: The Gift of What You Notice More

I feel like the word “surreal” gets overapplied in the IF world. I’m as guilty of this as anyone — heck, my very last post used the word when “nonsensical” or “whimsical” would have been more precisely descriptive. So I’m not going to describe The Gift of What You Notice More as surreal, even though the author’s blurb does. Instead let’s call it symbolic. The overstory is about the end of a relationship — the details are left vague, but you’re packing to leave when the curtain rises. But you can’t leave until you’ve done some soul-searching, which takes the form of inventory puzzles in dreamscapes based on important memories accessed through photographs. A party scene turns out to be set on a theater stage, a tiny elephant found in a crevice keeps growing bigger, that sort of thing.

There’s some nice patterning going on. There are three memories you can visit, but your first visit to each leaves a lot of game elements conspicuously unused, leaving me wondering if I had missed something when the narration declared I was finished and kicked me back to reality. It turns out that you visit each of the three memories three times, each time with a different perspective, trying to resolve a different question: first “Where did things go wrong?”, which is at best a starting point but definitely not an adequate resolution, then “What could I have done differently?”, and finally the most practical of questions, “What needs to happen now?” Notably, the difference in what results you can obtain is determined by what inventory items you bring into the memory with you. In the first iteration of the cycle, all you have is a bunch of sticks. The second time, you have stones as well. Sticks and stones! Tools that are proverbially ineffective! No wonder you can’t do anything but dwell on the past until you get something better.

Despite being made of room exploration and inventory puzzles, this is written in Twine. The inventory is constantly present on the screen, and items can be clicked on to reveal situational actions using that item, adding new hyperlinks to the bottom of the node’s text. Most items in most situations are useless, though, and do nothing when clicked. Now, I will admit that there were occasions where I had no idea what to do, and simply went around clicking on every inventory item in every place I could go, hoping something would happen. But when I did have an idea of what to do, it was fairly rewarding to see the new link come up, confirming that I was on the right track.

[Edit, 23 Oct] Come to think of it, sticks and stones aren’t proverbially ineffective, are they? It’s names that will never hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones! So possibly I’m reading too much into things there.

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